Muttering about Millbank

The traffic lights have just disappeared again, after a few days of reducing the road to a single lane while a firm called Daniel did something with the water pipes. There were muttered complaints from some people on Broad Street because this meant there was nowhere for them to park while the work was going on, and they were blaming the house builders on what used to be Underhills Garage, and is now called Millbank. There was a mill there before the garage, which makes it a logical choice of name - an old lady who was interviewed for the local history book "...Nobody Had Heard of Hay" remembered falling in the mill pond once when she was a little girl, and having to be rescued.
Even worse, yesterday motorists were passing the traffic lights, and immediately meeting the tree surgeons down Newport Street, where their little lorry was parked, with the wood chipper, while they cleared trees from the bit of waste ground along the road there. This was once the site of the Boat Inn, which was a coaching inn at one time, though it must have been a fairly titchy coaching inn with stables somewhere else, because there isn't a lot of room there.
Today, though, everything is back to what passes for normality in Hay. The first four of the new Millbank houses now have their roofs on, and the second block of four are getting to that stage - and they don't look as bad as some people thought they might. At any rate, they're an improvement on the tin sheds that the garage had there for years.