Local Health Care Centre Plans Fall Through

Vacant Daniels store will stay boarded up

Eric Leach From West Ealing Neighbours writes:

WEN has been reliably informed that on 10th June 2010 the NHS will announce that its plans for a new health care centre on the Daniels site at 96-122 Uxbridge Road West Ealing have fallen through.

This collapse is yet another sad milestone in the conversion of Daniels historic Department Store site into a residential block. Walter James Daniel first rented 96 Uxbridge Road West Ealing to sell drapery and fashions in 1901. The Daniels family obtained planning permission to demolish its old Department Store and replace it with a new one on 22 September 2003. As part of the permission they were also allowed to build 137 flats in a tower block immediately above the new store.

The 137 flats were built in 2006/7 but the ground and first floor 'Department Store' was boarded up in 2007 and remains boarded up to this day. Rumours trickled out in 2007 that the Daniels family never had any intentions of building, occupying or running a new Department Store on the site. In fact in 2006 just down the road to the west they took out a 25 year lease on a much smaller shop and have run a very cut down version of the original Daniels there ever since.

In April 2008 the NHS boldly announced that they had been in discussion with Daniels for years about building a health care centre in the Department Store space. The April 2008 NHS plans stated that the new health care centre would be completed in July 2009!

Even as recently as February 2010, the NHS published a status report on the health care centre plans at Daniels. In it the NHS stated it was '...still committed to this development.'

What will happen now to the boarded up monstrosity is anybody's guess.

Eric Leach
9th June, 2010

June 10, 2010