Angela comes home to open university's new showpiece

ANGELA Rippon has praised the £33 million redevelopment of Plymouth's "tatty" railway station tower block, and has stressed how proud she is of her home city.

- WILLIAM TELFORD

The 79-year-old broadcaster, fresh from her 10-week stint on the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing, said the revamped InterCity Place skyscraper - and its "halo of light" - was just what the city needed.

She said she was fed up with looking at the "near-derelict" building every time she caught the train from London to visit her Plymouth "bolt hole". Rippon said the "tombstone" gave a dreadful impression of the city to visitors, but was delighted the University of Plymouth has spruced it up and created a health campus the city can be proud of.

Unveiling a plaque to mark the regeneration, Rippon said: "I got fed up with coming out of that tunnel and seeing a grey, increasingly tatty, scruffy, near-derelict building, which I was ashamed of. For people coming to Plymouth this was the first thing they saw, this crumbling, tatty building."