Local businesses have called for action after a single disused building on Manchester Road in Altrincham suffered NINE arson attacks in just 16 months.
The building, formerly occupied by pharmaceuticals company Bayer UK and close to Trafford College, has been vacant for several years and increasingly the target of vandalism.
After being boarded up due to window damage, the building is now attracting regular small, deliberate fires that have increasingly disfigured its appearance.
And representatives of nearby businesses, who say the arson attacks remain a problem and usually happen at night, have called for something to be done.
One business owner, who did not want to be named, said: “Apart from it being an eyesore on one of the main roads between Altrincham and Manchester, there’s a real danger the whole place could just go up in smoke one of these days.
“Something can surely be done to stop the fires and whoever owns the building needs to take responsibility for it.”
Below: The Manchester Road building
A spokesperson for the Altrincham station of Greater Manchester Fire confirmed that firefighters had been called out to “small fires” at the site a total of nine times between August 2013 and December 2014.
A spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police, meanwhile, could not confirm the number of reported crimes on the site but said that both youths and adults had been involved.
He added that there were no plans in place to take any more proactive measures to prevent future incidents.
A sign outside the site claims it is secured privately by security firm Libra Site Solutions, but that Altrincham-based company no longer exists – it called in the liquidators in July 2014.
We’ve been unable to clarify who actually owns the site. Trafford Council confirmed that they don’t, with a spokesperson adding that its planning department “have had discussions with the owners in the past but nothing has ever come of these”.
A Google Street View image of the building, thought to be at least three years old, includes a ‘to let’ board suggesting the site was owned by Bluemantle Group, but the Alderley Edge-based developers told us they no longer owned it.
Below: An old image of the site (from Google Street View), plus images of the site as it is today
