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Simon Bewsher
Associate Director, Knutsford Office
Earlier this year Bell Ingram’s Knutsford office
was selected to undertake the estate management
of Shell UK’s Carrington Estate. The Carrington
Estate totals around 3,500 acres and lies on the
southern edge of Manchester between the towns of
Urmston, Partington and Altrincham.
This is a key account for the Knutsford office
and we relished the challenge of managing an
estate that combined commercial, industrial,
agricultural and residential tenancies.
Carrington has been an industrial site for
decades and was a key centre for employment
within the plastics industry. More recently the
levels of activity on-site have subsided
dramatically leaving large areas and buildings
available for commercial letting.
As such we are now involved with the demolition
and decontamination of the industrial sites and
then the negotiation and renewal of various
business tenancies along with their own
particular foibles.
Over the years various parts of the estate have
been released or let to some very well known
tenants, not least those belonging to the
sporting fraternity: Both Manchester United and
Manchester City football clubs have their
training grounds on ex Shell property as do Sale
RFC. We are currently in discussions with both
Manchester United and Sale over additional land
requirements
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and whenever I visit my vehicle certainly stands
out in their respective car parks as the oldest,
dirtiest and by far the cheapest one there!
With such high powered tenants and neighbours it
would be excusable to assume that they were the
ones who commanded the majority of the time
spent managing the estate, however, you would be
wrong, it’s the horses. Owing to the presence of
horse owners, the Estate is overrun with horses
which are put on any and every enclosed area of
land for grazing having first breached the
security fences. These relatively small, but
illegal tenants take up a disproportionately
large amount of management time and there
appears to be a permanent state of conflict with
the horse’s owners; in getting them to remain
off the land in question.
The other major drain on resources are bottle
diggers. As the site has been used by various
businesses in the past they have all created
their own small refuse dumps. These dumps act
like a magnet to bottle diggers who excavate
large areas over the weekends looking for
unusual bottles or crockery to sell on. The
diggers tend to start along the edge of a
footpath and once down to a depth where they
start to find artefacts will undermine the
surrounding ground to save taking the top soil
off. In turn this eventually causes the ground
to collapse and as such blocks footpaths and
roads.
Whoever said the life of a Chartered Surveyor
was glamorous?
As previously mentioned these minor problems
tend to take up the majority of the time and as
such the management of the estate becomes an art
form of time management, tact and diplomacy.
However we must be doing something right as 2
weeks ago Shell asked us to manage their Stanlow
estate on the Wirral as well. |
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