Report - Newcastle-under-Lyme Civic Offices - Autumn 2021

[OccasionalInterest]

The offices shown in the report photos on the first floor were much more rigid when the Civic was in use…

This is where the communications team sat on the 1st floor. HR and Payroll also took up much smaller offices off this corridor.

Human Resources… the Head of HR’s office was to the left of this photo off the main office.

Down on the ground floor, the offices had higher ceilings. Planning sat here for the last few years in the Civic having vacated their original site on the 1st floor, which was rented out to the NHS.

 

[OccasionalInterest]

The ground floor corridor led to the payment hall which is also shown in the report photos.

The entire area beyond those doors was occupied by revenues and benefits although the payment hall closed when services transferred to the Guildhall, long before the Civic was vacated.

The Benefits team occupied this space on the right of the corridor. This was originally the payment hall. The display at the end was used to show call centre performance for officers who were on the phones.

Same office, opposite direction. The Benefits Manager sat under the screen by the door.

this clock survived a long time!

In the last couple of years before leaving the Civic this area which retained some of the signage from the public revenues and benefits hall was used for cash payments. There weren’t many and eventually everything switched to bacs, leaving this as a noisy area for some old, but necessary printers!

 

[OccasionalInterest]

Until just before the Civic was abandoned, this room served as the councils data centre. It would have been full of servers on the left and network gear on the right. There was also a massive UPS in there.

DC was through the double doors to the left.

More of the ICT offices on the lower ground floor. These were in the corner of the building facing the old Sainsburys and Corporation Street.

ICTs other offices were on the other side of the corridor.

Just next to the plug socket on the right hand side is a small circular port. These were dotted throughout the building and were actually part of a centralised vacuum cleaning system. The cleaners would connect their hoses to the ports which were all sucked through to a massive “dust bag”. The plant room for this was down this corridor, through the door and to the left. The system was decommissioned years ago as it was fairly problematic. The pipes for it were about 2” wide and ran through the ceiling voids. In this corridor they were removed in around 2011 when the ceiling was cleared of asbestos. The same happened to the lower ground floor corridor on the opposite side of the building. It was occupied by customer services and environmental health until around 2011. The asbestos was cleared when the police moved in, but this wasn’t done anywhere else in the building.

The “dustbag” for the central vacuums was behind the loading bay door. The door to the left led to the ICT corridor with the front stairs to the ground floor to the left. The large windows on the first floor were on the Payment Hall corridor. The payment hall/benefits office was to the left by the scaffolding.

 

[raisinwing]

@OccasionalInterest many thanks for your posts above, really interesting!

 

[OccasionalInterest]

@OccasionalInterest many thanks for your posts above, really interesting!

Thanks. The photos you took were brilliant and it was really good to see it before the demo work took place. Sorry, I didn’t mean to hijack your report - I just had all these photos of the areas you’d captured so brilliantly, just before they were all abandoned and wanted to share.

The Emergency Centre in the basement that you were interested in, that was used as a storage area from the 90s but was largely cleared in the years before the civic closed. Up until around 2012, most of the air filtration was still in there. There was also a radio room for the Raynet system which apparently was used to track nuclear fall out. It looked like something out of Lost. There were bunks and kitchen equipment down there too. All the coldwar stuff was gone by the 00’s except the raynet kit and that didn’t work. The Council stopped getting the plant equipment serviced and it basically became a store room for planning files and elections kit. It did however have a massive metal door about 8 inches thick until the civic closed.

The generator that you took pictures of was a real pain. It was designed to be outside but by the time the supplier realised it was already encased in concrete. They had to install extra ventilation to keep it cooled and burning clean. There was also a big red light installed in the corridor you would have passed through by the door which illuminated when the generator was on as only a limited number of people could go down there.

Towards the end, only one of the boilers worked intermittently, so the last winter there was cold.

 

[Wally_urbex]

Absolutely spot on that