PLANS for the new version of Bangor Central will see a ‘prairiestyle’ single storey building with space for around 650 pupils.
The relocated primary school will entirely be on the ground floor level, with 22 spacious classrooms across three wings of the building. It will also boast extensive hard and soft play areas, as well as a large car park directly outside the school’s doors – something the current site hasn’t got the space to provide. Official plans for the new school were lodged over the summer, and have now been released by planning authorities.
Design documents show that the main traffic route into and out of Central’s new home will be on Balloo Road, though there will also be a separate pedestrian and cycle entrance on the same road with another pedestrian access close to the edge of Bangor Rugby Club’s grounds.. The documents state that the design of the building has been influenced by the lay of the land, as ‘the open flat site lends itself to a long single-storey prairie style’ school with an ‘emphasis on the horizontal rather than the vertical’. Designers add that the development’s overall layout has been ‘influenced by movement routes around the site, [including] pedestrian routes and the Balloo Road linking the town centre and the surrounding residential developments’.
The documents maintain that the development will ‘remove unsightly and inaccessible vacant lands’ while having a positive impact on education in Bangor, as well as boosting ‘the health of the local community through the provision of a modern and usable primary school building’. The project isn’t without its controversies, however, not least as the move to Bloomfield will mean that Bangor city centre no longer has any primary schools in it at all. Many local people worry about the impact removing a whole level of education will have on future generations and the Bangor community, concerns that led to social media campaign group ‘keep Bangor Central central’ being set up.
With the move now inevitable, there have been calls to lay on new bus routes for city centre children to get to Central’s new location in the southeast of Bangor. There are also questions over what will happen to two large neighbouring plots of city centre land owned by education chiefs, the current Central site and the disused car park of nowdemolished Bangor Castle Leisure Centre. Several years ago, the leisure centre car park was sold to the old South Eastern Education Board specifically so that a new home for Central Primary could be built on it.
The board’s successors in the Education Authority have never fully explained why that plan was ditched in favour of relocating the school, though it’s understood that the car park site may be slightly too small for the single-storey design in mind for the new Central building. But it means the Education Authority now has a substantial amount of land in the centre of Bangor in its property portfolio – and the body has previously confirmed to this newspaper that if it can’t dream up new uses for either of them, it might sell them on the open market.
