NEWPORT Street – or Cheap Street as I like to call it – is an inconvenient conundrum for Bolton and even more so for Bolton Council, whose bosses are desperately trying to drag the town’s High Street up from the doldrums.

Cheap Street is the epitome of everything that is bad about Bolton – lowlifes hang out there, hidden in plain sight among the rest of us law-abiding citizens.

It used to be known as shoe shop alley but these days the street peppered with pawn shops, bookmakers, discount stores and charity shops.

It is so downmarket that even Poundland moved from there to Victoria Square.

And so, in an attempt to reinvent this rather ugly part of the town centre, the council hopes to transform it into a “European-style boulevard” – their words, not mine – with a bit of a paint job and some fresh paving among other changes.

The elephants and the benches will go and the charity canopy has already been controversially removed – with do-gooders being shipped off to Bolton’s outdoor market instead, where they get fewer customers and so less income.

The latest move as part of the planned £3 million transformation has been to rip up the trees on the street, as reported in The Bolton News this week.

A council spokesman told us that £2 million will be invested on improving shop frontages and £1 million will be spent on completely repaving the street.

The repaving work is due to start in the summer and in preparation for that, five Plane trees have been axed.

The council says it will replace them – once the work is done – with trees “better suited to an urban environment” ... whatever that means.

Even though the trees will be replaced, it seems unenvironmental (apparently this isn’t a word) and counter-intuitive to chop down a healthy tree.

A better plan for Newport Street would be to bulldoze the whole street and have some green space in the town – a small park between the planned new bus station and the town centre.

One of the positives of the plan for more student digs behind Le Mans Crescent is that the sketches include a nice looking green in the quadrangle.

There are enough empty units in the town centre for shops on Newport Street to relocate – because the town centre has expanded too much in the last 50 years – so a town centre park would also provide a big boost for the rest of the High Street.

Clearly these plans are now well under way – so I’m not expecting this suggestion to happen anytime soon.

But maybe, in another 20 years, when council bosses are again wondering how to improve Newport Street, they may stumble across this column on Google and give it a whirl.