Blink and you’ll miss the final throes of this piece of the Shire’s past.
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The old Midco Smallgoods factory, which opened around 1912 as the Butter Factory, will soon be just a memory.
After 35 years of dereliction, site owner Tim Erskine-Smith is finally in the position to bring the edifice down and pave the way for new development on the site.
“We really tried to do something with it [the old building], we originally wanted to use it for the purposes of our [dental technologies and imports] business, but we faced strong opposition from the community about extending the industrial application of the building,” he said.
“And we were thinking of doing a Bellingen Butter Factory-like design and have it as the base for local markets. We tried but failed because noone put up their hand to take it on – there wasn’t any support from the community.
“After so many years of it being derelict and vandalised, the building’s used-by date was well-and-truly up.”
Tim estimates that it will take around three to four weeks for the building demolition to be finalised.
“I’m hopeful that it’ll be a couple of weeks, but it’s hard to tell with old buildings,” he said.
Once the building is levelled, work will start on creating the 19 residential allotments which will take its place.
But Tim says there is still a lot work to do on filling in the old site, including the space where the old dam used to reside.
The rubble from the old building will be recycled as fill for raising the site up to the ‘one in 100’ regulation height – meaning the site will sit above 100-year flood levels.
“Once the site is greenfielded [made as-new], we’ll probably look to market some of the blocks off the site with a local agent at Nambucca Valley Real Estate,” Tim said.
“There’ll be some nice blocks fronting the river and also the playing fields. It’ll be a positive thing for the area to have some more residential land available so close to town.”
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