Eyesore Developer says flats can bring life back to long-vacant site

ONE of Gloucester Road's last remaining empty eyesore landmarks could finally be knocked down - with a plan for new flats and a new shop.

- Tristan CORK [e-mail]

349 Gloucester Road has been vacant for almost 20 years, with plans to turn it into a Wetherspoon pub never materialising

(Pic: Google)

The building is currently more of a landmark for the huge mural of a slice of watermelon painted on the front, but has been boarded up, covered over and empty for almost 20 years.

At the start of the 2000s, number 349 Gloucester Road, on the Ashley Down side of the road near the Coop, was a locally famous store called Nooze ‘n’ Booze mini-supermarket, but that closed and by 2008 it was boarded up completely.

For a time in the early 2010s, the building became a reclamation shop restoring and selling secondhand furniture, but by 2014 that shopfront had also closed down, and JD Wetherspoon took on the site, with plans to open a new pub there.