Cllr O'Boyle showcases part of old Smithford Street - Video and audio transcripts

Cllr O’Boyle: “Hello, just a quick update again today. I’ve got to tell you, look what we found here. It's the actual original cobbled street of what was Smithford Street. They were just digging up the other day and they found it, quite a few feet below the level of the precinct. Now, what are we going to do about it? Because I thought can we incorporate into the new precinct? I'm afraid we can't but what we're going to do, we're going to actually save it, we're going to dig it up, we're going to put it in a safe place. It's going to be incorporated in some parts of the city and a timely place to be decided in the future. Here's the point though, when I say to people ‘the best of the old with the best of new’ I am not joking. Remember we're trying to update our precinct to protect the best of the 1950s, the post war precinct. As we go along, as we know, we're finding bits of what was pre-precinct that was buried. Sometimes when they built the precinct, they didn't understand maybe what was there before we're trying to do that now and so that's what we're going to do. So, the old Smithford Street, there were trams that used to come down here. Let's see what we can do and let's protect a bit of that for the future. So it's just a quick update today just to say we found something that dates from the 1850s right up to the early 20th century so really good news that we've found this, let's protect it and let's get on with the work we're doing now.