Story: Douglas Johnson
Photo: Lesley Boulton
After two years of road works and floods, the Wicker improvements are now mostly finished. For Burngreave residents it’s definitely worth stopping on the way in to town. This issue we feature the Wicker Café.
Wicker traders are coming together in a new forum to promote the area. The second meeting of the new Wicker Community Forum, on 20th January 2009, was hosted at the SYAC business centre and chaired by its operations director, Raymond Walton.
Traders had been generally disappointed by the pre-Christmas event to “re-launch” the Wicker – an event featuring singer Richard Hawley. Traders had been told of a festive lighting-up of the Wicker Arches, but this didn’t happen. Council planners at the meeting said there is a new plan to install permanent lighting on the main arch and one trader confirmed that drilling of holes had already started.
Network Rail is reported to have a fullscale clean and refurbishment of twentytwo of the arches in the viaduct over the next 18 months.
Traders also talked about the likely impact of the Tesco development at Spital Hill. The next meeting is on Tuesday 24th February at 4.30pm at SYAC.