As Hills expanded in the 1990s and into the 20s it became apparent that the buildings that we occupied were big enough. So we decided to build an extension. At the time I wrote a justification and description of the building and you can read it’s by following this link.
The premises originally surrounded a water park with bridges over and found this playing. Unfortunately the filtration systems couldn’t cope with the water and it rapidly became an unpleasant shade of green. The concrete started to crack and eventually, we filled it in and made the lawns that you can see today. I had the bright idea of creating the five regular solids in aluminium is decorations for the courtyard area. I thought they looked rather cool.
The lifetime of the building can be divided into 4 sections the first would be from the construction which was from the year 2000 to 2001 when the premises were occupied by the accounts staff of Hills. There were four offices and a giant open plan area. The open plan area had a series of specially commissioned desks which had three people with three monitors all grouped around a central data point. The idea was that one group of staff would be involved in credit control, one would be involved in purchase and finally, one would be involved in wages. The building worked successfully until 2008 when SEC who who had taken over the business from myself decided that they no longer needed the administrative staff and made them redundant. I was left with some buildings behind the shed with no main road frontage in a less than desirable area of Walsall. I concluded the only thing to do was to let the building as serviced offices.
At that point we started to create separate offices and let them to businesses. It was really quite successful and the offices were full most of the time. So the second period of occupation started.
I was involved in a business which we called Bringing Enterprise to Life and a charity called Breathing Space. The charity was occupying some horrible premises in Central Hall and so we moved them into Green Lane. You can read more about the charity called Breathing Space here. You can also read more about Bringing Enterprise to Life here. Breathing Space left the premises and we found other tenants.
Air conditioning had been the cheapest way of heating the building in 2000 when the building was started. However, it was designed for large open-plan areas and when we started to divide the offices up it just didn’t work well. One office was freezing and another would be boiling and they’d both be controlled by a single unit. Worse in the winter the entire outside fan unit would be cased in ice. On a few occasions, I’d buy up car defrost sprays and spend hours spraying and chipping away at the ice.
One of the tenants was a care company. They always had their blinds pulled tight shut and it was always boiling in there. You can see how the papers reported their activities here.
By 2017 SEC how to quit the main building and that led to rumours amongst the tenants that we would be selling the offices as one unit. This meant that they all left and I was left again with empty premises. I settled down to refurb the offices again and we set off to let them which over time we achieved.
As part of the refurb I decided to install electric radiators which would solve all of the problems with the heating I was assured. I used the electrical company that I was a director of to do the work. The people treated the job terribly, an apprentice carried out the work when he had the time, and the job was poorly executed. The system was meant to give central control of the heating and didn’t. Worse they overcharged me. It was bizarre that I felt I had to put up with it.
The running of serviced offices sounds fairly simple you give people keys they occupy the offices and pay you monthly rent. However, there is far more to it than that. You have to make sure that the offices are safe which involves health and safety assessments and fire drills and fire assessments. The kitchen area is always an area of dispute with everybody blaming everybody else for not cleaning up after themselves and leaving food in the fridge to go rotten. The tenants try and use the corridors as office space and unused offices will rapidly become storage for the tenants if you let them get away with it. The toilets they all treated badly and people flushed unsuitable things down the toilets all of the time. Which meant an unpleasant job for somebody.
Getting the offices cleaned presented a challenge with the cleaners trying to cut corners and the tenants demanding unreasonable standards of cleanliness.
In 2022 energy prices shot up and we replaced the electrical heating systems with an LPG system to save money. Calor gas who supplied the gas were supposed to monitor the level in the tank and deliver just in time. In fact, they perpetually delivered way too late. This meant that the tenants dashed out and bought fan heaters. The fan heaters then ran continuously after that and going into any of the offices was going into a sauna. I was particularly annoyed when in some offices in winter they opened the windows to let out the hot air they were creating.
In January 2023 we saw an opportunity to sell the premises to the company called 5 Care. The transaction concluded amicably in May and after 35 years my ownership in Green Lane ceased. Thus began the 4th phase in the life of the building.
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