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River Spodden

Rivers of Greater ManchesterRivers of LancashireRivers of the Metropolitan Borough of RochdaleRoch catchmentUse British English from May 2019
Whitworth4
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The River Spodden is a watercourse in North West England, one of two major tributaries of the River Roch. It rises in the Lancashire South Pennine hills north of Whitworth and flows south through what is now known as the Whitworth Valley to Rochdale, Greater Manchester, where the river merges with the River Roch. Nestled within the picturesque wooded valley is Healey Dell Nature Reserve.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article River Spodden (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

River Spodden
Fenwick Street,

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Latitude Longitude
N 53.615397222222 ° E -2.166625 °
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Fenwick Street
OL12 6XE , Spotland Bridge
England, United Kingdom
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Spodden Valley asbestos controversy

The Spodden Valley asbestos controversy arose in May 2004 when approximately 72 acres (290,000 m2) of land in Spodden Valley in Rochdale, England, formerly used by Turner Brothers Asbestos Company (later known as Turner & Newall), and the site of the world's largest asbestos textile factory, was sold to MMC Estates, a property developer. The developer subsequently submitted a planning application to Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council in December 2004 to build an "urban village" consisting of 650 homes, a children's daycare centre and a business park on the site. The planning application summary claimed: "of particular note is the absence of any asbestos contamination". However, asbestos containing materials were abundantly visible on the ground, and local residents claimed that there were numerous asbestos dumping sites across the area, and that the woodland there had been heavily contaminated with asbestos dust. Site clearance work had begun as early as May 2004, prior to the submission of the application, including tree felling and soil disturbance, and some waste had been removed on flatbed trailers and open trucks. In September 2005 MMC admitted that the woods were significantly contaminated with asbestos.A campaign group, Save Spodden Valley, was formed to oppose the development, claiming disturbance of the site in a contaminated state posed too great a risk to public health. Greater Manchester Association of Trade Unions Councils said: "The planners must do their public duty and deem the site permanently unsafe for urban development and formulate a plan to seal all possible sources of asbestos dust as an urgent priority."The initial planning application was placed on hold in 2005, and Richard Butler, Principal Planning Officer for Rochdale Borough Council said in October 2008: "The application has not yet been determined and is suspended whilst the applicants and their consultants, together with our own contamination experts, assess a number of issues, the most important being the asbestos risk and the remediation required as part of the redevelopment." In December 2009, despite no decontamination work having been carried out, the council earmarked the site for 568 houses, based on a housing density of 30 dwellings per hectare, in a draft allocation of future brownfield land targets. In January 2010, however, the council deleted references to the redevelopment of the site. Rochdale parliamentary candidate Simon Danczuk warned that the council believe a housing development on the site is an inevitability and iterated that they are "sleepwalking into a catastrophic mistake." MMC have stated that "there is no viable alternative to development led remediation of the site." A National Health and Safety Commissioner who was formerly a Health and Safety Manager at the factory has said that the felling of trees and disturbing of soil on the site is "sheer madness... With the potential amount of asbestos on that site, no development should be built on this land." Hilda Palmer of the Greater Manchester Hazards Centre has said: "Asbestos is a carcinogen and it causes lung diseases. When asbestos gets into the air and can be inhaled by people it can cause those diseases 10, 20, 50 years down the line. So if there is any development on that site there is a potential for serious lung diseases, cancers and death from that development." Spokesman Jason Addy of Save Spodden Valley, stated: "The key issue is contamination. Asbestos from this site has killed far too many people already."The planning application was finally officially rejected by Rochdale Council in January 2011. MMC Estates put the land back up for sale in August 2011. As of December 2018, the land was owned by Renshaw Properties, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Rochdale Town Hall
Rochdale Town Hall

Rochdale Town Hall is a Victorian-era municipal building in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. It is "widely recognised as being one of the finest municipal buildings in the country", and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. The Town Hall functions as the ceremonial headquarters of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council and houses local government departments, including the borough's civil registration office. Built in the Gothic Revival style at a cost of £160,000 (£15.9 million in 2024), it was inaugurated for the governance of the Municipal Borough of Rochdale on 27 September 1871. The architect, William Henry Crossland, was the winner of a competition held in 1864 to design a new Town Hall. It had a 240-foot (73 m) clock tower topped by a wooden spire with a gilded statue of Saint George and the Dragon, both of which were destroyed by fire on 10 April 1883, leaving the building without a spire for four years. A new 190-foot (58 m) stone clock tower and spire in the style of Manchester Town Hall was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, and erected in 1887. Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described the building as possessing a "rare picturesque beauty". Its stained-glass windows are credited as "the finest modern examples of their kind".The building came to the attention of Adolf Hitler, who was said to have admired it so much that he wished to ship the building, brick-by-brick, to Nazi Germany had the United Kingdom been defeated in the Second World War.