Farraline Park (Temporary) Police Station Inverness (1975) : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Farraline Park (Temporary) Police Station Inverness (1975) / conner395
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示 2.1 |
|---|---|
| 説明 | FARRALINE PARK POLICE STATION – These photographs were taken in February 1975, a few weeks before the Inverness Constabulary relocated to their long-awaited new building at Old Perth Road. ------------------Control Room - well part of it. Beyond the sliding door was the Control Room proper, where 999 calls and radio traffic was handled. In this "back office" the Telephonist Cathy Munro answered all the "routine" calls coming in to the non-emergency telepnone number 36111. She had her work cut out because the three large machines on the right, one being operated by Control Room Assistant George Leith, were teleprinters ("telex machines") which made a fearful din when sending/receiving. They were rarely at peace as messages would come chattering in, printing loudly on to the rolls of paper while the machine also cut a paper tape to enable the message to be recalled/edited/re-retransmitted. Three machines working simultaneously was a nightmare and the whole office shook. The need for so many machines was because Inverness acted as "hub" for the police forces of the Highlands & Islands, retransmitting National messages to such locations as Dingwall and Fort William.-----------------The former Bell’s School building at Farraline Park was taken over (in part) by the Inverness Burgh Police as a ”temporary” police c.1960 when their own HQ at Castle Wynd opposite the Town Hall was scheduled for demolition as part of the Bridge Street redevelopment. The plan was that in due course a new building would be found but this never happened. It is likely that the Scottish Office – whose budget plans for new police stations seemed to be extremely long-term – was not prepared to shell out considerable amounts of finance when a merger was being insisted upon. For many years the powers-that had been desperate for Inverness Burgh Police and Inverness-shire Constabulary to merge. Quite why that should have any bearing on expenditure for the Burgh Force is unclear, as there was still a need for a Town Police Station, irrespective of what the force‘s situation was. Fact is that Inverness-shire were seeking to build a new HQ themselves, as The Castle (North Tower) was no longer capable of housing all the force’s requirements, and parking at the Castle then as now was extremely limited.. In due course authority was given to build on a green-field site at Drakies on the eastern edge of Inverness. The wheels of government grind slow however, especially when other parts of Scotland had more pressing needing needs for new police buildings, and the requirements of Inverness were prioritised lower. That building – at (Old) Perth Road - was not however ready for occupation until 1975, by which time the Burgh and County forces had been merged for seven years, and indeed were preparing to merge again with the other Highlands & Islands forces to form the Northern Constabulary. The building had been designed as a County (combined Burgh Police Station and County HQ) Headquarters and by the time it was ready it was already undersized for purpose, let alone its additional requirements as base for the Regional Force HQ too. A measure of contingency planning had been allowed for, in that it was built with a flat roof, to allow for upwards expansion – but by the time finance finally became available again for such enlargement the foundations had settled (and the roof was problematic anyhow) to an extent that an additional storey was not possible. Hence a demotion and rebuild on the site.So for some 15 years, the policing of Inverness Burgh (and from November 1968 the Inverness Rural area too) was controlled from the temporary police station at Farraline Park. Because it WAS a temporary location, the Burgh of Inverness (and latterly the Joint Burgh/County Police Committee) were reluctant to spend more than an absolute minimum on Farraline Park. A Cell Block had been created as a “building within a building”, but that apart the classroom nature of the building remained, albeit some larger rooms were divided into several smaller offices. For once in police buildings, space was not an issue - but functionality certainly was. The Muster Room, where the Sergeant briefed his shift before starting duty, was right beside the kitchen, with only a glass partition between. The lingering “aroma” on coming in for briefing on early turn at 0530 for (0545) hours, when an officer on the night shift had cooked kippers for her shift a few hours earlier is something that I will never forget. (Briefings tended to take a while but, given the stale pong of cooked fish, Sergeant Sandy Allan ensured that one was particularly brief!).These photographs were taken in February 1975, a few weeks before the Inverness force relocated to the new building at Old Perth Road. All operational and administrative functions (apart from a couple of small units which had to remain at the Castle as the new building was already too small!) were thus conducted from Old Perth Road. In time, more and more HQ purposes appeared, and the already-too-small HQ building was soon bursting at the seams, and as ever operational requirements bore the brunt. This also meant that the Town Centre of Inverness was then without a police station, which was less than satisfactory. A few years later such absence was addressed by first renting a small shop (and later a larger one) in Inverness Victorian Market, and then latterly utilising parts of a building in Queensgate, until a new Operational Police Station was opened in 1999 at Burnett Road in Longman Industrial Estate, on the outskirts of the Town (now City) Centre – and only a few hundred yards (as the crow flies) from Farraline Park. This separation of Operational from Administrative saw the extremely sensible solution of TWO new Police buildings created in Inverness. A new, larger, HQ building was erected at Old Perth Road behind the already-worn-out 1970s structure, which was then flattened to create a larger car park. The Operations Building at Burnett road – on the site of the former GPO Workshops and Offices – saw the call provision relocated there and substantially increased, along with a wealth of other facilities sadly lacking in the old HQ. Burnett Road thus saw all operational staff in respect of the Inverness area – plus its supporting administrative functions – all located finally under the same roof, sufficiently close to the Town Centre. The Old Perth Road building was therefore to exclusively take on the role of Force Headquarters appropriately separate from the local Operational side of “the job”. At merger into Police Service of Scotland on 1st April 2013, the HQ building became the Divisional HQ in respect of Highlands & Islands Division (effectively Northern Constabulary area, as was). |
| 撮影日 | 1975-02-01 00:00:00 |
| 撮影者 | conner395 , Inverness, Scotland |
| タグ | |
| 撮影地 | Inverness, Scotland, United Kingdom 地図 |