Gloucester’s Longsmith Street car park closed 'out of caution'
Council bosses insist the building is not unsafe.
Gloucester’s Longsmith Street multi-storey car park was closed “out of caution” and council bosses say the building is not unsafe.
The 300-space Gloucester City Council-owned car park closed on Friday after a visit by a structural engineer.
Council leader Richard Cook says they were advised to restrict the maximum load until a full survey is done - and they hopes to re-open the car park as soon as possible once a structural survey has been done.
He said: "We had a structural engineer go in there. That was as a result of something which had been planned for several months, it just happened to be on Friday.
“He said it needs to have a full structural survey to be sure and until then, maximum load would be every other space. Well, of course, you can’t police every other space.
“So we just thought out of an abundance of caution we will close it. That report we got on Friday did not declare the building as unsafe.
“I know Cllr Alastair Chambers (I, Matson, Robinswood and White City) has been saying its unsafe but the report did not say that. We just did not want to take the chance.”
Cllr Cook said the authority hopes to reopen the car park as soon as possible once the structural survey is complete and it says it is safe to do so.
“I don’t think for a minute that the building is about to fall down,” he said.
“Otherwise with the number of cars using it, it would have already fallen down if there was any risk of that happening. It’s just, the advice is to reduce the load in there. He would not be advising us to do that if it was unsafe.
“But you can’t have someone there telling people to make sure they park two spaces from anybody else.
“We had to take the decision to close all together to make sure people don’t all decide to park on the second floor and overload it
“We hope we will be able to reopen as soon as we’ve got that full structural survey and that it is safe to do so.”
A spokesperson for the council said the council began the process of the refurbishment of Longsmith Street Car Park in March with the view to undertaking work to repair and upgrade it.
“Following a pre-planned inspection of the car park by a surveyor on Thursday it was agreed that the car park would close so that further investigations could take place,” they said.
“The council takes the safety of its buildings very seriously and regularly monitors and inspects its premises to ensure this.”