Lord Heseltine visits city to check out its vision for future

11:19am Saturday 17th May 2008

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LORD Heseltine had a walk around Worcester yesterday to see how the city is regenerating itself.

Lord Heseltine, the former Deputy Prime Minister, asked questions about issues to do with flooding and listened carefully to city council planning officers who talked about how Diglis is being transformed from an industrial site into a residential area with leisure facilities.

The former secretary of state for the environment who is now leading the Conservative party's cities taskforce which is looking at regeneration, said it was important places such as Worcester keep moving forward.

"The idea is to combine both history with modern money, getting rid of the dereliction of the past and bringing in new facilities," he said. "But at the same time you have to cater for things like barges, which are an important part of British history, in this mixture of today, yesterday and indeed tomorrow."

Lord Heseltine also visited Castle Street to see how the work on the University of Worcester's new campus is coming on.

He said he thought Worcester would be a key seat in the next general election.

"I think this is now obviously a very important seat for the Conservatives," he said. "The local results here the other day were fairly good and I look at Robin Walker (parliamentary candidate for the Conservatives for Worcester) and I see an impressive young candidate so I have very high hopes."