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Closure that sparked a planning wrangle
One of my first jobs as the Echo's new business writer was to mark the fifth anniversary of the closure of the Vaux brewery.
The saga of the loss of Britain's biggest independent brewer – and the ensuing fight over the site – had been a long and sorry one.
The fact that the land was still standing empty five years after the plant closed seemed incredible.
Yet today, another five years on, the huge site next to the Wear is still desolate and windswept, while owner Tesco and regeneration agency Sunderland arc squabble over its future.
It is a decade since Vaux closed, yet we seem no nearer to resolving the fate of what remains an absolutely prime city centre site.
Vaux fell victim to its own success – the brewery's Swallow Hotels division grew like Topsy and Vaux went from being a brewing business that ran hotels to a hotel chain that happened to brew beer.
Vaux became the Swallow Group, and the Swallow Group decided it no longer needed a brewery.
A team led by managing director Frank Nicholson launched a management buy-out bid, but the board preferred to strip down the brewery and flog off the land, and more than 600 people suddenly found they had lost what had once seemed to be a job for life.
The loss of Vaux coincided with the closure of Cole's Cranes, and regeneration agency Sunderland arc was set up to help the city recover from the double blow.
By the time the arc was up and running, however, it was too late to gets its hands on the Vaux site. Whitbread had sold the land to Tesco.
The supermarket giant wants to develop the site for retail and business use. Sunderland arc says the site – one of the main gateways into the city centre – is too important for that and has its own ambitious mixed-use scheme.
Tesco has rejected the offer of an alternative location in the city – in the so-called "Holmeside triangle"– but is on course to open a store on the Roker Retail Park site, just the other side of Wearmouth Bridge.
If that scheme gets the thumbs-up, the firm may finally be willing to give way on the Vaux site.
The economic downturn may also have its part to play. For a long time, Tesco was happy to bide its time on Vaux, confident that even if its plans came to nothing, the site was growing in value every day.
But with commercial property prices dropping, the value of Tesco's investment is depreciating and the firm may feel the time has come to offload its asset.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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