Care home to be named after legendary Hanley nightspot The Place

27/04/13

Safe Harbour Chairman Bill Morris and wife Susan are naming their new residential home after the famous Hanley nightspot which Bill ran in the 60s and 70s.

Above is a picture of Bill Morris and his son Philip Morris taken outside The Place

Pictures of the club and other Stoke-on-Trent locations, along with hit songs from the past, will feature prominently in the home, which will focus on dementia care. Bill believes that filling the home with the sights and sounds of The Place's 1960s
heyday, as well as earlier periods, will greatly assist in the care of residents.

The Place Up Hanley, as the centre will be officially called, will bring the former council-run Mary Bourne Residential Home, in Bucknall, back into use. It will be the sixth care home in North Staffordshire and Shropshire opened by Bill and his wife
Susan Klonin.

Residential care became the main family business after Bill sold The Place and left the nightclub trade in 1980.Bill, aged 75, who now lives in Manchester, said: "I do miss the nightclub business but it was a 24-hour job, and there's no way I could
keep up with that these days. Residential care was a very different business to go into, but it reflects the fact that I'm getting old."When we were talking about what to call the new home, it reminded me of how we were sat around a table in 1963
discussing what we would call 'the place'. That was what we called it in the end, and so we've done the same thing with the home."Something we've started to do in our other homes is use reminiscence as a way of helping residents. We'll be doing a lot more of that at The Place. We'll have old pictures of Stoke-on-Trent lining the corridors, as well as playing music from the 1950s and 60s."

Mary Bourne care home, in Wooliscroft Road, was closed down by Stoke-on-Trent City Council in 2008, and is now in a derelict state.

Bill and Susan's company Safe Harbor is investing heavily in the refurbishment. Once the home is open next year it will have 44 rooms with some being en-suite, a sensory garden, reminiscence area and its own minibus. Bill's son Philip Morris, a
director of Safe Harbor, added: "Each corridor will be named after a different place in Stoke-on-Trent that the residents will be able to remember. "Research has demonstrated the benefits of reminiscence for people with dementia. We're hoping
The Place will become a centre of excellence for this kind of care." The Place, in Bryan Street, was opened by Bill and his partner Kevin Donovan in 1963. It was the first discotheque in Stoke-on-Trent.

Read more: http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/Care-home-named-legendary-Hanley-nightspot-Place/story-18822059-detail/story.html#ixzz2S7ZIRRIU