IT won't be long, now, before we can strike one more name from the list of uninviting parcels of real estate which blight Worcester's landscape - Tallow Hill.

The sad decline of one of the Faithful City's most vibrant back-street community pubs, The Beehive, was the first jarring manifestation of the transformation of this neglected corner.

Of course, the area's demise from a vibrant, bustling industrial quarter, whose heart beat with a steady rhythm through Victorian times, to a scruffy, unloved bombsite began years before that.

If you study the Page 3 picture of the area in its heyday, you'll see how much it has changed, as the rest of the city has.

Soon, there'll be a new £16m development of shops and offices in its place, a latter-day version of its former glory.

We're not sure that the scale of the project has really imprinted itself in the minds of Worcester citizens who've become used to seeing a car park, and little else, in recent years. But it will be huge.

Perhaps the biggest step in the transformation was also among the smallest, physically. It happened yesterday.

The bridge which spanned the canal since 1936 was a landmark most noted for the steep rise and fall of its hump-back - and the vicious left-hand turn up Tallow Hill.

Few drivers will be sad to see that piece of heart-stopping brick and concrete wiped off their journey from A to B.

But it was part of the fabric of Worcester, a quirky constant with a place in many a story. If you have a heart, please mourn its passing.