Weds 28th August 2024
Ex WBG member, Mike Taylor, is a chartered surveyor with a long history of plying his trade in and around Ashford. He now works at Sibley Pares in Ashford, having sold his company Taylor Riley to them in 2016. The agreement to carry on working for three years after the sale seems to have been extended somewhat! But Mike is not one to spend all his days on the golf course, restricting it to a mere 3 days per week.
Mike qualified as a chartered surveyor at the then East London Poly in the mid 1970s, and started his career at an estate agents in Tonbridge. After a year he moved to Ashford, and has remained in/around there ever since. The 1976 heatwave was particularly difficult in the Ashford office, and Mike took himself off to erect and remove the agency’s signs rather than swelter indoors.
He remembers Ashford being a vibrant town in the 70s, with the railway works and market being particularly important. The building of Charter House added significant commercial space to the town centre. However, the new ring road placed something of a limit on any outward expansion of retail units.
Mike points out that it’s now 50 years since he started working in Ashford, and the pace of change is comparable to that between the 1870s to the 1920s when traffic changed from horse-drawn to motorised (amongst other significant changes). He sees a bright future for Ashford, with significant commercial investment (Netflix studio, Brompton factory & visitor centre, etc) and an increase of residential use in and around the town centre. Bring on the next 50 years!