'I ran for my life' - Six years on from New Ferry blast

On March 25, 2017, hours before Mother’s Day, the area was bustling. People were out for a bite to eat at Lan’s Chinese Restaurant or having a pint at the Cleveland Arms.

At 9:15pm, the Homes in Style store in the middle of the town exploded, destroying or damaging 63 buildings in the surrounding area and injuring 81 people, including two seriously. A dance studio in the same building had finished a class just a few hours earlier.

Remarkably, despite the colossal scale of the damage, no one was killed though 21-year-old Lewis Jones suffered serious brain damage as he had been waiting at the bus stop just outside the store.

Pascal Blasio was later jailed for 20 years having been found guilty of causing an explosion likely to endanger life. Blasio had opened a gas valve and left an electric fire on in an insurance job gone wrong. 

Over 200 buildings in total suffered various degrees of damage, with the impact felt across 1.5km of the town. Bricks from the building rained down several hundreds metres away on the other side of the railway line.

Locals in New Ferry still vividly remember that night.

Karen Parkinson-Ward said she was still haunted by what happened. On the day of the explosion she and her husband had decided to close up their florist business early. 

At 9:05pm, they grabbed a takeaway from the restaurant opposite the furniture store and had just got home when they heard the explosion.

She said: “It had a massive impact, borderline depression even, because we’d built up our business for so long but also I was thinking about what could have been.

“That’s what haunted me the most. Amelia (her daughter) was at home and she was only 15. She would have been at home waiting for Mum and Dad and Mum and Dad would have been injured. That haunted me and it still does.”

Christopher Lee-Power was at his home in Port Sunlight on March 25, 2017 when his windows suddenly caved in from the huge blast. He said: “I ran for my life, my legs were like jelly. However when I heard a group of people screaming and shouting, I ran back around.”

He grabbed his phone and coat and went out onto the street. He said: “It looked like a war zone, there were cars overturned. I walked up the road and collapsed out of sheer exhaustion.”

Cllr Janette Williamson had just settled down to watch a Scandi Noir drama on BBC 4 in her old house on Boundary Road.

She said: “The whole house just moved and as far-fetched as it sounds, I actually thought we’d been bombed. The explosion was so loud, I thought someone had dropped a bomb.

“I ran out and you could just see all the debris coming up the road and people were running, it was pandemonium.”

She said everyone started running after emergency services were concerned about a second explosion.

Mark Craig, chair of the New Ferry Residents Association, said when he got to the scene he remembers seeing a woman “in complete shock” with a cut on her leg and 20 ambulances at the scene. Years later, he can still remember it all vividly. 

Since then, Mr Craig said the town has struggled to get back on its feet, adding: “The explosion hastened the collapse of the precinct in New Ferry. There were 10 businesses wiped out overnight that were completely destroyed.”

Today the area where the store once was has been flattened as are the houses directly opposite to the blast though Wirral Council hopes to get regeneration projects on two sites off the ground over the summer.

As the demolished buildings were privately owned, Wirral Council spent £1.3m buying the land and a further £900,000 on the old Co-op supermarket nearby. It is hoped the different projects will contribute to the redevelopment of the area.

Mr Craig said: “The most common complaint among people in the area is why has nothing happened. People will not believe it unless they see it.” He added that he does understand the difficulties the council had in buying the land.

A Wirral Council spokesperson said they were expecting planning permission from development partner Regenda Group to be decided very soon and if it gets the greenlight, “work can begin on the first phase of the regeneration plan at the earliest opportunity.”

The spokesperson said: “This first phase would see 34 new apartments built on two sites on Bebington Road in New Ferry, one of which is the explosion site and the other – opposite – on land where properties had to be demolished due to the impact of the blast..”

“The third site for redevelopment will incorporate part of the council-owned Woodhead Street car park, plus a stretch of run-down retail properties fronting onto New Chester Road. The council recently invested a further £900,000 to acquire the former Co-op supermarket next to these properties and this site will also be incorporated into a larger redevelopment of this area. 

“The handful of properties on New Chester Road yet to be acquired are now the subject of Compulsory Purchase Orders to remove them as barriers to the redevelopment.”

On top of the developments, Wirral Council received Future High Streets funding from the government to improve the high street with new benches, address traffic issues in the area, and new planters.

Six years on, the explosion continues to have a lasting impact on the town. For weeks and months after, businesses couldn’t return as the area was closed off for safety reasons. Some couldn’t return to their homes.

New Ferry has also recently seen a rise in antisocial behaviour which people have linked to the town’s decline post-explosion. Buses and shops have been targeted as well as reports of people being harassed in the area by groups of young people.

Despite promises from then-Prime Minister Theresa May, Wirral MPs and councillors criticised a lack of government support in the months after the disaster though a 2020 Wirral Council report also found serious failings in the local authority’s disaster response.

Mr Craig was especially critical of the government given the impact on trade in the town. He said: “What did New Ferry’s traders get? Absolutely nouch. 

“We got nothing compared to other places that went through comparable disasters. That is the bad aftertaste following that explosion and the worst example of the north and south divide as it is left still neglected six years later.”

He said the community rallied afterwards, adding: “It showed that deep down that in that part of the community held together and helped each other out. People were so willing to help. The donations that flooded in, we ended up with so many clothes to give to people that it was far more than we could distribute.”

Alison McGovern, Labour MP for Wirral South, said:  “I’ve no doubt that the rebuilding would have gone faster if the Tories had kept the funding promise they made to me in Prime Minister’s Question Time shortly after the explosion but we didn’t give in. 

“We applied for competitive funding and won the bid. Now I’m looking forward to the new houses, the residents who will be moving in and the revamped shopping area. New Ferry is a great place to live – with some fantastic retailers and a beautiful riverfront – and we won’t give up until the town is rebuilt.”

The disaster has also had a long last impact on people too.

Christopher Lee-Power said he often gets flashbacks and in the months after, he said: “I would think as I’m entering a shop is this going to blow up?”

Mrs Parkinson-Ward said: “I’m sick of people saying we don’t come up here anymore, that there’s nothing here. There is, there’s loads of us here still. There’s loads of people still here but people look at the closed shops and think there’s nothing.

“Thankfully we’re still here but it is a struggle. I do believe it could be good again but it’s one of those situations. How long have we heard they’re going to do something to New Ferry? 

“I’ve been here 35 years and that’s all we’ve heard every year. Nothing’s been done. Six years and look at it.”