Car park chaos!
Winding back in time a little...
For quite some time now Network Rail have been working on the viaduct behind the flats. I'm not entirely sure what they're doing - it seems to involve hacking out chunks of brickwork from the arches, which somehow hasn't resulted in the whole thing collapsing, though then again it's Victorian engineering and so'll be massively overengineered for the load it carries - but anyway, as part of this they rather need to be able to get at the roof of the arches. So on Tuesday when I returned home I discovered this in front of me...
That made parking a little interesting on Tuesday when I entered to discover all this. Since reversing out of the leftmost archway space (being the only space remaining) is awkward, I decided to reverse into it. That was rather tricky - Alfa's are not designed for small-space manoeuvring - though not as bad as it might have been, as the hatchback design means the rear of the MiTo doesn't stick out at all (which shows how pointless kerb-to-kerb turning circles are - on paper I have about the same turning circle as The Gnu does in his 159, but in practice I can fit in a smaller area as the MiTo is quite a bit shorter!). It still took me a couple of goes to get lined up enough to slide in to the space.
One of the other tenants must have bent the ear of the site foreman over this, as on Wednesday when I left for work one of the workers came up and said rather apologetically "We do try to leave it tidy here". I suggested they also tuck the cherry picker in better so that Trevail House can fit one of their cars in next to it, which they've done (and also lifted the bucket out of the way) and today the scissor lift underneath the arches has disappeared as well so overall we're only down one space.
For quite some time now Network Rail have been working on the viaduct behind the flats. I'm not entirely sure what they're doing - it seems to involve hacking out chunks of brickwork from the arches, which somehow hasn't resulted in the whole thing collapsing, though then again it's Victorian engineering and so'll be massively overengineered for the load it carries - but anyway, as part of this they rather need to be able to get at the roof of the arches. So on Tuesday when I returned home I discovered this in front of me...
That made parking a little interesting on Tuesday when I entered to discover all this. Since reversing out of the leftmost archway space (being the only space remaining) is awkward, I decided to reverse into it. That was rather tricky - Alfa's are not designed for small-space manoeuvring - though not as bad as it might have been, as the hatchback design means the rear of the MiTo doesn't stick out at all (which shows how pointless kerb-to-kerb turning circles are - on paper I have about the same turning circle as The Gnu does in his 159, but in practice I can fit in a smaller area as the MiTo is quite a bit shorter!). It still took me a couple of goes to get lined up enough to slide in to the space.
One of the other tenants must have bent the ear of the site foreman over this, as on Wednesday when I left for work one of the workers came up and said rather apologetically "We do try to leave it tidy here". I suggested they also tuck the cherry picker in better so that Trevail House can fit one of their cars in next to it, which they've done (and also lifted the bucket out of the way) and today the scissor lift underneath the arches has disappeared as well so overall we're only down one space.