Billionaire-owned excessive road near ‘UK’s finest chippy’ is now a ghost city | UK | News | EUROtoday

A city centre owned by a billionaire is now a shadow of its former self, with half the retailers closed down. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK authorities drafted proposals for a sequence of recent cities to alleviate a significant housing scarcity. One of the primary of those was Aycliffe New Town, now often known as Newton Aycliffe.

But it is now a wasteland. Its excessive road, Beveridge Way, as soon as dwelling to “big beasts” of retail similar to Woolworths and British Home Stores, has 45 retailers. Twenty-three of these stand empty – 4 instances the nationwide common.

“Most of these units are closed. It’s quite sad to see actually,” says YouTuber NorthernFella on a video tour of the city. “The pawnbrokers is open – I don’t know what that tells you.”

He provides: “Every place has got a vape and I’ve seen some nail bars as well. Of course there’s a Greggs – where would we be without Greggs?”

But whereas restaurant choices are pretty restricted within the city itself, the folks of Newton Aycliffe can console themselves with the information that they’re only some miles from the perfect fish and chips within the nation.

Just six miles up the highway, in Darlington, is the award-winning Yarm Road Fish and Chip store. Voted the UK’s finest fish and chip takeaway in 2025 the Yarm Road chippy is okay instance of a correct impartial takeaway.

Independent retailers are skinny on the bottom in Newton Aycliffe, as they’re in lots of the UK’s small cities.

The entire of Aycliffe’s excessive road is owned by property tycoon Benzion Freshwater. The 77-year-old multi-billionaire’s firm, Daejan Holdings, owns properties on either side of the Atlantic, and the £3.2m funding in Aycliffe represents only a tiny proportion of its portfolio.

Daejan Holdings was as soon as stated to be London’s largest personal business landlord, says the Guardian, however the agency is shrouded in secrecy, declining to make any touch upon the state of its properties.

North Durham MP Luke Akehurst is pushing for a change within the regulation which might hand councils further powers over premises left empty for lengthy durations. He says there are too many empty items owned by “absentee landlords with no stake in the community”.

Diane Young, who regularly shops in the area, said the high street started turning into a ghost town with the closure of the local Woolworths in 2009. She explained: “We used to have a weekly market – the town centre was heaving on Tuesdays, market day. You couldn’t move for people. It’s massively gone downhill.”

Local Janet Mills said the heart had been sucked out of the town. She explainede: “To get anything decent you have to go to a retail park and if you don’t have a car you’re done for. I just hate this town centre – it’s absolutely useless.”

The decline of the Great British High Street is not only disappointing for shoppers, says the government’s security minister Dan Jarvis, it’s also launched a worrying new trend in crime.

He warned that short-term leases of retail premises were being used as fronts for money laundering, and worse. He said: “Criminals are using these dodgy shops as fronts for serious organised crime, money laundering and illegal working, risking the future of the British high street.”

Reform boss Nigel Farage has additionally spoken concerning the “absolute racket” of cash-only companies that appear to have few, if any clients however nonetheless by some means handle to have “a Lamborghini out the back.”

Late final yr, the National Crime Agency (NCA) launched Operation Machinize 2, to crack down on these shady companies. Rachael Herbert, Director of the National Economic Crime Centre on the NCA, stated: “Operation Machinize targets businesses on our high street that are being used as cover for a wide range of criminality, making our communities less safe and less prosperous.

“Hundreds of thousands of harmful and illegal products have been taken off our streets, and over £10m in cash, frozen in bank accounts and criminal assets seized. Depriving criminals of their source of income has a real impact, limiting the amount of funds they can reinvest in further offending and deterring them from taking spaces on our high street that could be used by legitimate businesses.”