THE changing face of Great Lever is soon to receive a negative shot in the arm with the closure of one of the few remaining older traditional garages in town - that on the corner of Bradford Road and Parkfield Road, across from the former library.

It has been there as long as I can remember and my father before me never went anywhere else. Until the end of July they will continue to tackle any job with the kind of personal service that is slowly but surely disappearing.

That personal service, workmanship, and attention to detail will cause many locals to lament its passing when forced to take their cars to the larger and more expensive concerns elsewhere and further from home.

Practically next door, a traditional English fish and chip shop is under threat of conversion to offices, and while Great Lever is fairly well blessed with "chippies", folk have their own none-too-obscure reasons for making the Melville Street shop so popular. Places like that are part of the social fabric of Northern towns and it will be another blow if it too closes, like the garage, against the will of those that run them and their customers.

And what is next door to the "chippy"?

Perhaps the most valuable service of the three in terms of a lack of alternatives outside the town centre; a one-man cobblers shop, tucked discreetly away, but offering a service second to none and for identical reasons to the garage.

Enter it and close the door on the modern world outside; exchange it for friendly, unhurried service where there's always time for a word.

The corner shop atmosphere is alive, but not so well now, in Great Lever as these much-valued businesses seem poised to tread the same road to obscurity that those corner shops and ironmongers have already gone down.

What price progress?

Great Leverite

(name and address supplied)