SOME GOOD NEWS – South Worcestershire Joint Core Strategy Scrapped

Please see – www.swjcs.org

BUT the threat of speculative development continues.

THE EMPEROR OF EXMOOR AS A REMINDER OF HERNE THE HUNTER

The shooting of the Emperor of Exmoor, a red deer thought to have been the largest wild animal in Britain, for his prized antlers is a reminder of the importance of “The Horned God” – or Herne – to our Isles. Herne is regarded by many who follow Pagan Paths as one of the Great Spirits of these lands, and is a said to remind us of his presence during times of national peril. He is particularly associated with forestry – that is real trees rather than the artificial kind mentioned in my previous post – and may wish to draw our attention to the proposed sale of Britain’s forests, and perhaps other national nature reserves, headlined in last Sunday’s Telegraph. As Herne the Hunter, he is also Master of the Beasts, and Patron of the Sacred Hunt, and would surely have wished  the antlers of the Emperor of Exmoor to remain near the stag’s old rutting grounds as a memorial for his many local friends, like Johnny Kingdom.

M5 Junctions 6 & 7 – From “Project Stirling” To Proposal For Giant Pear Tree

“Project Stirling” was for some time the code name for the proposed re-location of Worcester Bosch and associated development to a site east of  M5 Junction 7.

My recent post on a possible proposal from an anonymous party to relocate “Project Stirling” – or parts thereof – to land near Junction 7 expressed concern about what can only be described as “Speculation, Speculation, Speculation” by would-be developers of Worcester’s environs.

Today’s “Worcester News” now informs us that “a group of mystery business men” propose to construct “a giant pear tree taller than the Angel of the North” and that “a local farmer has already said the structure can be put on one of his fields off junction six or junction 7”.

“Visitors will be able  to stop and admire it using a car park containing between 50 and 100 spaces” the paper adds, so I would suggest that the most obvious place for this structure is next to Worcester Rugby Club, with its existing park and ride facility.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to embark on my own mysterious project for the Worcester area, so secret that it doesn’t even have a code name, and I’ll also be maintaining the anonymity of my associates . Sounds speculative ?

NATIONAL SECURITY ENVIRONMENT & THE THREAT OF FLOODS

This image from Wikipedia Commons shows flooding of the River Severn in 2007.

Given the shortness of political memories – something shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson noted today in response to George Osborne’s speech on the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) –  I’ve decided that a reminder of the 2007 floods is called for.

As it happens, I also had chance encounter with the security services whilst cycling along the towpath near Worcester Cathedral this afternoon: the reason for their presence being a visit by the Duke of Gloucester to areas affected by the 2007 floods.

Now the threat to national security of flooding – some will remember the great concern for GCHQ in Cheltenham during July 2007 – was highlighted only yesterday, in the context of changes to UK defence spending.

However, it is not clear how the new CSR will affect spending on flood defences, as part of wider planning for development, infrastructure and conservation.

So let me remind all policy makers, and especially those not too concerned about sustainability, that  planning for environmental conservation in the Severn corridor is one of the best ways to reduce flood risk and thereby protect national security.

Laying To Rest The Ghost Of “Old Nick”* Ridley In A New Worcester Green Belt

*Sometimes used as a nickname for the devil

As we approach Halloween, the most important festival in the Wiccan calendar for writer Gerina Dunwich, it is time to remember those who have passed away, to celebrate the legacy of some, and to rectify the work of others.

Nicholas Ridley, Secretaries of State for Transport and then for the Environment during the 1980s is included in a recent book by Quentin Letts as one of the “Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain”.

Born into an aristocratic family, as the second son Ridley did not inherit his ancestral estate : “maybe that made him determined to bugger up the Shires….for everyone else”, Letts suggests.

For in the hierarchy of CHAVs (please see previous post), Ridley belonged not to the lower order, nor to the nouveau riche class of CHAV of which Tony Blair and his  lady wife are now established members, but to the older and greater order of CHAV: the Countryside Heritage Vandal !

Unfortunately – but not unsurprisingly – in South Worcestershire “Old Nick” found considerable support in land owners and local authorities alike, many of whose number still regard the 1980s glut of countryside construction as the good old days.

Others, including  Quentin Letts – who I believe comes from Herefordshire – remember these as the bad old days from which some places have never fully recovered. Planning blight in the Worcester environs is a particular problem.

So where might lie the remedy ? Like Letts, the independent MEP for the West Midlands Nikki Sinclaire is something of a radical traditionalist, and also a strong supporter of green belts. It is precisely a green belt around Worcester that we need to rectify the legacy of “Old Nick”.

URBAN PLANNING & THE TRUE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS

Some readers of this blog may infer that I aspire to be the nemesis of estate agents and local councillors, to which I respond that this slot is already taken by the Chav Towns website – www.chavtowns.co.uk – for whose patent lack of political correctness I can only apologise. Moreover, I had thought hitherto that “CHAVS”  refered to the “Country House and Vacuous Set”, of which the County of Worcestershire seems to have a good many. Indeed, it was this sort of “Chav” I believed to comprise the main client base of Knight Frank, to whose Manchester office I referred in my previous post, and whose Worcester office  I shall now visit.

The Knight Frank Worcester office occupies the ground floor of a prominently ugly building – the upper floors are currently available for lease if anyone is interested – just across an equally ugly road system from Worcester’s old, beautiful and great Cathedral, a rather ghostly nocturnal apparition of which is shown here. Well I did suggest some Halloween hocus pocus might be on the cards yesterday !

Reference to the spirits of the dead – for some are no doubt turning in their relocated graves – is also particularly apposite in the Worcester urban planning context, because the 1960s construction complex which now accommodates Knight Frank replaced some of the city’s most important historic buildings, including the last surviving Cathedral “lich gate” in England: “lich” meaning a corpse.

Had the earlier heritage survived, as it surely would have done in pretty much any comparable European city, Worcester would have retained a built legacy similar to York or Chester. As it is, this legacy is now mostly confined to nearby Friar Street, although even here a multi-storey car park has to take pride of place. This “parking lot” always reminds me of the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” and its haunting refrain “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

The song also has a “tree museum” for the landscape lost to the “urban countryside” of many parts of North America, which brings me to what I believe to be the true clash of civilisations of the present time, the battle – for it is nothing less – between European Urbanism, I shall call it, and the advancing urban sprawl and over-development of cities characterised by planning in most other places, and increasingly in Southern England.

It was precisely this battle that was played out during the Examination of the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy Phase 2 Revision in Wolverhampton last year, and it will be this battle that unfolds around much of the country, in places like Worcester, through the local planning process.

Now it may seem to some that I have set up an almost Manichean struggle between the forces of darkness and light in the above account, so I want to offer an olive branch to prospective developers of the “tree museum” around Worcester. For those who seek the attributes of English New Towns, including many within the City Council and the South Worcestershire local authorities it seems, might I suggest that Telford has the kind of sites well suited to some of the development proposed for this area, and you might want to relocate yourselves there.

However, the more important challenge for the “English sub-national spatial area” – now it is no longer politically correct to speak of “regions” – I would advocate, in the very strongest terms, is the continued renaissance of major cities such as Manchester and Birmingham, both in the two regions – my sincerest apologies for the use of “that word” – with the highest levels of “brownfield” land in England. 

Finally, to return to the Manchester office of Knight Frank and their deeply disingenuous letter on behalf of the anonymous client whose purpose seems to be not only to concrete over Wood Hall farm but also adjoining green field areas, I shall recommend, again in the strongest possible terms, that alternative development sites are pursued, preferably brownfield and in the major urban areas of the Midlands or North of England.

Unedifying Scramble for Speculative Development Sites Around Worcester Continues

Last year’s Panel Report on the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy Phase 2 Revision referred to an “unedifying” – I seem to remember – squabble amongst promoters of speculative Regional Logistics Sites, of which the area adjoining Junction 7 of the M5 was one, partly due to Worcester’s status as a “Settlement of Significant Development”.

It fact, it would be more accurate to describe Worcester and environs as a collection of speculative development sites promoted through the South Worcestershire Joint Core Strategy, a process which continues notwithstanding the Government’s abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies.

The latest unedifying scramble, as I shall call it,  for speculative development takes the form of a letter from the Manchester Office of property consultants Knight Frank on behalf of an anonymous client and refers to land of important historic landscape value near M5 Junction 7, identified as “Site 54”.

“Site 54” is actually Wood Hall farm, but acquired its numerical title during the development of proposals for the relocation of Worcester Bosch and the creation of a new regional technology park, for which an area near M5 Junction 6 has been identified and a planning application submitted earlier this year.

It is unclear whether the Knight Frank letter is an attempt to relocate the above proposals to “Site 54” or whether their client simply wishes to preserve some of the potential allocation of employment land for other purposes, such as a Regional Logistics Site.

What is clear is that the scramble for speculative development sites encouraged by the earlier regional spatial strategy revision has been given added momentum by the local core strategy process, and that “The Evil Principle” referred to in my previous post very much continues to haunt planners and surveyors.

Time for some Halloween Hocus Pocus perhaps !