St Peters, County Durham, UK Built by the Roman Catholic Church in 1900, St Peters Community Home was an orphanage to house around 300 boys. Later becoming an approved school for young offenders, it closed in 1984. It stands next to the A67 and is currently unoccupied. Note how the windows have been boarded up but painted to look as if they still have glass and frames. This rather foreboding building situated on the A67 in the small village of Gainford in County Durham, is not at all what you might expect. In 1937 as a result of the Spanish Civil War Saint Peters took in 120 orphaned Basque children whos families had been torn apart by the fighting. In 1940, shortly after the start of the Second World War, the orphanage had a change of purpose and became an approved school - better known as a Borstal in the language of the time - continuing in that role until 1984. After closing its doors in 1984 the building was sold on the private market and for a period of a little over ten years it was used as a care home for the elderly. It is the poignant relics of that time which still litter the building in abundance today. Just short of one hundred years of occupation and at almost the year 2000, the care home wound down and closed. Initially the building was not particularly well secured and several arson attempts were made upon the site, not least in the gymnasium building at the back which is quite badly damaged by smoke. Two housing companies - Blackthorn Homes and Kebbell Homes - own Saint Peters in a consortium, and they have received a great deal of very bad publicity as a result of their reluctance to spend money on properly securing the building after their planning application for the conversion of Saint Peters to a residential development was turned down. An increasing number of petty vandalism attacks upon the building ever since has caused it to rapidly become an eyesore, and the fact that the interior is crumbling from the actions of water ingress has created a severe risk to local children who by their very nature will inevitably explore old buildings such as this. The police have refused to set aside man power to watch the building and so eventually the owners were pressured into boarding up all the potential points of entry at ground floor level, and on the front and sides of the building they have painted false windows on the boarding they have applied in order to create some degree of aesthetics.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 21:00:00 +0000
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