Sunday 6 September 2015

mass development plans

A leaflet about planning appeared on the doormat this morning.  It must have been delivered on foot, since I was around all the time and never heard a car, but I never saw anybody.  It's a slightly unsettling thought that somebody walked up the drive, left something in our hall and departed, pausing to shut the rabbit gate behind them, and neither of us noticed.

MASS DEVELOPMENT PLANS IN AND AROUND GREAT BROMLEY said the headline.  You didn't have to read the rest of the leaflet to know that it would be against the idea of housebuilding in Great Bromley rather than setting out ways in which mass development in Great Bromley could be made a creative response to the UK housing crisis.  As you drive through the local villages you can spot where housing developments are planned by the protest signs in the front gardens.  I don't know where the parents and grandparents live of all the people who can't afford to buy a house, or even rent more than a room in a shared house, but they can't live around here.  Nobody ever wants housebuilding, it seems.

Tendring is on the back foot when it comes to proposals for new housing, because it failed to adopt a local plan, and in some way that I don't fully grasp this has created open season in the district for housebuilders.  A new plan is underway, which is a revised version of the previous plan that failed to get adopted.  I did start reading it online, but found it so stunningly dull that I gave up at the point where I learnt that our village was regarded as unsustainable and unsuitable for more than very limited housebuilding.  Unsustainability in planning terms means that having no railway station, no school, no shops, virtually no jobs and a tiny village hall with parking space for no more than four vehicles constitutes a barrier to expansion.  It doesn't actually mean that the place is about to fall into the sea.

However there is now a proposal afoot for something called Tendring Central Garden Village, which would fill in the rectangle of land between the Clacton road, the A120 and the Manningtree road with two and a half thousand houses, and stick a new industrial area the other side of the link from the Clacton road up to the A120.  That's Option 3 out of four, the others being new developments at Weeley, north West Clacton, or increasing urban density.  The deadline for comments to the planning department is 13th October.

I was left scratching my head as to quite who had drawn up the list of options.  Did it emanate from the council, or were they merely summarising the proposals they'd had from private sector developers during the current Local Plan hiatus?  The leaflet didn't really explain, since its central message was that Great Bromley were against it, along with Clacton and Weeley.  Option 3 was in a non sustainable location because there was no infrastructure, no rail link, and it would result in a major loss of grade 1 and grade 2 agricultural land.  And be horrid for the people already living in what was currently a semi rural location, only the leaflet didn't say that.

I sympathise with them on the latter point, if it goes ahead.  Looking at the map I could see the triangle of land currently occupied by a beekeeper I know, living with his mother in the house his grandfather built back in the 1930s.  And it's a tricky thing, building on good agricultural land. Once it's gone, it's gone.

But there would be a good road link, and residents would be able to access the A12 and A14 without going through Colchester.  As for rail, there is no station at Frating Green or Great Bromley, but there is at Weeley.  Where, as the Systems Administrator said, there would be room to expand the car park and turn it into what is in train parlance called a Parkway.  Upgrade the through service to London, and as well as serving the new development you could take pressure off the traffic to Wivenhoe and Colchester stations.  As for schools, GP surgeries, community centres and the rest of it, I presume you build them when you are building that many new houses.

It's very difficult.  If Tendring Central Garden Village were going to be next to us I'd be horrified. I'd protest to the planning department and sign petitions and everything on purely selfish grounds (though there wouldn't be a lot of point in putting up posters because nobody except the postman and the odd delivery driver would see them.  And the dustmen).  But the suggested site is as far from us as Wivenhoe, and Wivenhoe doesn't bother us.  And people need to live somewhere.  We're OK in that we already own a house.  It was put up sixty years ago in a thoroughly unsustainable location that leaves us dependent on car travel, and we like the big garden and the rural location very much, thank you.  Is it right for us to protest against other people being given the chance to buy or rent their own houses with gardens?

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