Land in between two new housing developments on Green Lane in Eccles has gone on the market for the princely sum of £1 million.
The 1.65-acre spot is sandwiched between the James Naysmyth Business Park and the M602 motorway bridge, on a popular commuter cut-through between Eccles, Patricroft, Monton and Winton.
It’s currently being used as a vehicle depot/storage yard, but given what’s going on around it it would seem more housing may be on the way.
Over the last five years interest has bubbled up around these large, flat, well-connected pieces of former industrial or vacant land.
On the other side of the Bridgewater Canal is the Monton Mill gardens development.
Just down the way on Worsley Road in Winton Bellway Homes have thrown up 93 new-build units at ‘Bridgewater Village’.
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Two large ex-industrial plots on Green Lane have been snapped up by housebuilders, adding 242 homes along this small, though picturesque and historic little corner of Eccles.
British engineering pedigree was born here with the likes of James Naysmyth, and the firms that sprung up around his famous works.
After a franky disastrous campaign to site an ‘Eco Park’ (read – anerobic disgestion plant/incinerator) on the former 1908 Mitchell Shakleton Engineering Works, the landowners Sky Properties/Chester Developments switched tack, and now groundworks are underway for 140 homes.
Bellway Homes applied for the planning permission but Olympia Homes will be doing the building after buying up the land in September 2015.
The much-neglected former Royal Ordnance munitions Factory (ROF) at Green Lane Technology Centre has been demolished and an estate of 142 Countryside Homes properties swiftly erected in its place.
Sadly, by the end, the mostly vacant ‘business park’ was being used to grow £200,000-worth of cannabis.
The large development to replace it didn’t come without its problems – with hindsight they even look easy for the housebuilders to have seen coming.
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After the workers left, it was always hard to equate the shell of what remained on the ROF site – just one brick wall standing – with a busy and important munitions factory.
But although that history may have disappeared, with plans in the book to widen Green Lane for Olympia’s development, and the demolition of the technology centre’s crumbling brick wall, there’s a much better view of the historic Bridgewater Canal.
WT Gunston is marketing the plot at offers in the region of £1 million.
Any owner would have to go through the normal planning permissions.
Surely it’s only a matter of time before another housebuilder steps in to snap up this land?
