Wiltshire Council, stop the chop!

WE’VE all been taking more notice of nature during the lockdown, as we’ve wandered the lanes and fields close to home.

And we can see how daft it is for Wiltshire Council to be spending OUR money on chopping down lovely, bee-and-bug-friendly roadside flowers in the name of tidiness.

Walking the dog today I came across a very pleasant council contractor in Middle Street, Harnham, strimming all the flowering heads off the plants on the verge and reducing the grass to the equivalent of a military No.1 haircut.

He told me they have to do this every single month.

This is on a minor suburban lane, a through route to nowhere, with no visibility problems whatsoever. It runs alongside a meadow managed particularly well, I think, by the city council and a team of volunteers for the benefit of wild creatures, especially butterflies, as well as junior footballers.

What a pointless and destructive exercise at a time when we’re all being exhorted to encourage wildlife and in particular, bees and other rapidly declining insect populations, by planting wildflower seeds and leaving wild areas unmown in our gardens.

Tomorrow (this Tuesday) Wiltshire Council’s cabinet is due to receive a report warning of a £50million impact on its finances from the coronavirus pandemic. In a worst case scenario, its reserves could be exhausted by next April.

Capital spending on projects such as the Maltings regeneration is having to be deferred. Radical rethinking is required.

Unless something turns up in the way of extra help, the forecast is “a threat to the current form and function of the council”.

Maybe the Guildhall Gang could get on to Trowbridge and ask them to show some sense, environmentally and financially. Goodness knows what this mowing contract costs. Much of it completely unnecessary. Who gave it the OK in the first place?

For all I know, there may be legal constraints that prevent Wiltshire renegotiating it straight away. And I'm darned sure they've got more pressing problems on their minds right now. But they should certainly announce that they will do so at the earliest opportunity.

Save money and save the planet! It's a no-brainer.

'City's poor housing stock deters big spenders'

AN interesting analysis by Jonathan Meades, a provocative but authoritative writer on, among other things, architecture, culture and food.

Our High Street is not as opulent as those of Winchester, Taunton, Chichester or other towns of similar size, because our housing stock is “rather poor”, he says.

People with money who might support more upmarket shops choose to live in the villages of the Woodford Valley or the New Forest.

The number of desirable houses “from a yuppy point of view” is slight, he declares.

So we need to ‘think demographics” when we think about how to restore our city’s fortunes.

Turning the spaces above shops into housing is one answer, he says. “The best customer is the one who is just around the corner.”

He’s also pretty scathing about Salisbury’s restaurants, declaring that they’ve been “disastrous" for years.

Meades, who grew up in East Harnham, was one of the panel in Wiltshire Creative's online debate about how to rescue our High Street.

He recalls a feeling of "snugness and cosiness" about the city in his childhood and bemoans the municipal "vandalism" that destroyed historic buildings to create the Old George Mall.

He now lives in France, and says restaurants there will recover better from the current crisis than ours will, because they are family businesses, and the rules in France and Spain are biased towards small shops.

“In Britain, all governments take notice of is big business. There isn’t the will to help small businesses.”

Of course, the Covid crisis may force a reappraisal of national priorities. Let’s hope so.

 

 

'Celebrate the city's charity shops'

SALISBURY needs to reinvent its city centre.

That’s the message that came across loud and clear from Saturday’s online debate staged by Wiltshire Creative.

Local traders need to sell online and on social media, and offer click and collect. Relying on walk-in custom won’t be enough.

Their big selling point needs to be their ethical, sustainable ethos, their role at the heart of a community, because, as Casa Fina’s Susi Mason put it: “People want to feel they belong.”

That means putting on tastings, workshops and demos. It means providing more central housing to encourage young people.

We need to celebrate our charity shops, said architect and regeneration expert George Ferguson. Hear, hear! They’re about recycling and reusing. Their presence shouldn’t be regarded as a sign of commercial failure. Customers should be proud of using them.

“A sharing economy has a great future. There should be libraries for sharing things, not just books,” he added.

We should be promoting regional food, not just in some posh Sunday market but every day. And back that up with stuff like street theatre.

“Be anarchic,” he advised, “and be prepared to experiment.”

Anywhere less anarchic than Salisbury I find hard to imagine. But you never know.

And customers? They need to stop spending their money online, and help support local jobs, declared teenage market stalwart Becca.

“What would Salisbury be without the shops?”

You can’t argue with that.

Thoughts on how to revitalise our High Street

THESE lockdown webinars are great. You don’t even have to get off your sofa to learn new stuff.

On Saturday I logged in to a panel talking about the future of our High Street and city centre shops.

There was independent retailer Susi Mason from Casa Fina, a teenage market trader called Becca, former architect and mayor of Bristol George Ferguson – an authority on  urban regeneration - and Jonathan Meades, who writes and makes films about all sorts of stuff including architecture and strikes me as an all-round stirrer.

They gave us so much to think about, but pedestrianisation was one thing I’d like to focus on, since more of it is proposed by the city council.

It isn’t necessarily the best answer for Salisbury, they suggested. The city centre is a tight fit. Where would people park? The park and ride sites are “way out”, and this is “a place where people are very car-dependent”.

To expect everyone to walk and cycle shows “a degree of Utopianism”,  especially with so many old people living here.

A better answer would be to “tame the streets”, lowering the speed limit to 10mph, and having a car-free day every Sunday.

The problem about that, everyone agreed, was the frustrating bureaucracy involved in making traffic orders, etc. It made it so hard to experiment and try out new ideas to liven the place up.

Other suggestions: Let talented local makers sell their wares in the High Street; have more street food; turn the Odeon (if we get a new multiplex at the Maltings) into an artisan market with food stalls; let shops spill out onto the pavements to sell their wares.

Can you imagine the fun Health & Safety will have with that one?

Wiltshire Creative organised this event as part of the Salisbury 2020 Big Weekend. Congratulations. I’ll try to cover more of it another day.

Danger in the park

INEVITABLY, it seems, Salisbury's parks are filling up with rubbish as the hot weather draws the crowds. (Distancing doesn't come into it.)

But why should this mess be inevitable?

In Harnham, the closure of the Old Mill during the pandemic seems to have worsened the problem as instead of buying drinks in the pub, picnickers cart their own bottles from home down to the riverside and abandon the empties by the overflowing bins.

Result: Mounds of unsavoury detritus piling up along the water's edge and creating a health hazard to children and dogs who just want to splash around and cool down.

One dog walker I bumped into there this morning had brought a carrier bag with him to fill with empty glass bottles - some of them broken, with jagged edges which could slice open a paddling kiddie's ankle or a dog's paw, as well as injure wildlife - and he then carted them back to his own home to dispose of safely. Amazingly public-spirited, but he shouldn't have to do it. Another waded into the water to pull out a plastic garden chair.

If people can carry a bottle to the park, why can't they carry it home again and put it in their own bin? After all, it will be considerably lighter on the return journey once they've quaffed the contents.

Answer: They are too lazy, and they think 'the council' will come and clear up after them.

Trouble is, 'the council' has limited manpower at present, with staff off sick or self-isolating, like any other employer, as one elected member I nagged about it later told me.

He's promised to raise the issue at the Guildhall tomorrow, and I hope some good will come of it. 

But it's not just a problem during the pandemic, actually. It happens every time we have a sunny spell. The city council needs to have a system in place that allows its bin-emptying service to respond more speedily to changes in demand.

FOOTNOTE: After I raised this yesterday the city council litter team came out within half an hour and cleared 26 bags of rubbish from Harnham cricket field. Well done, and thanks to Cllr Simon Jackson.

Proceed with caution on parking ban

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back into town …

Along comes news that, for some, will make it a whole lot more difficult.

Whether this is the right time to press ahead with more pedestrianisation and ban on-street parking for shoppers is debatable.

In the long run, it has to be desirable to encourage walking and cycling. It’s an absolute no-brainer. If you are young enough and fit enough, that is.

More bus use, too, if there were enough regular, reliable buses with fares lower than car park charges. And that’s a big if.

But cutting back on taxi spaces? With a rapidly increasing elderly population? Surely if anything, you’d need more, not fewer?

How will it affect the market? Have the traders been consulted? Even for the not-so-elderly (me!), if you’re lugging bags of heavy fruit and veg, it can feel like a long way to the nearest car park. If you have a car.

At the same time, you’re making it harder for people to bring their own vehicles in anyway.

That’s a huge deterrent to the kind of people who might well use on-street parking briefly to pick up a heavy purchase or drop off a charity shop donation. Has anyone actually asked Oxfam, Mencap, our Hospice and the rest what they think about this?

What about the taxi drivers, incidentally? Haven’t we got enough unemployment right now?

Theirs isn’t an easy living anyway, and it’s going to get a whole lot tougher, with the city centre’s diminishing retail offering and with our entertainment venues and restaurants still closed.

I don’t really buy into the argument that this is about enabling pedestrians and cyclists to keep a safer distance from each other.

I can see why some councillors might have thought it was a good idea to use the coronavirus disruption as an opportunity to push ahead with their long-held ambition to bring in environmental improvements, not least to our air quality.

Half of me is with them on this. Make a fresh start!

The other half wonders whether this is the right time to risk measures that might well, in the short term at least, deter some shoppers and hurry along more job losses.

It sounds as though there’s some doubt about whether all of these ideas can be funded at once.

And maybe that’s a good thing. A gradual approach to these changes, with wide public consultation, might be wise.

Welcome back!

HELLO and welcome to any of my former Journal readers who've decided to follow me here.

If there's one good thing that's come out of coronavirus and the lockdown it's a long overdue renewal of our sense of community, and I hope that by resuming this blog I can also help to promote that, although I can't guarantee that local and national politics won't intrude!

For now, though, in our little cul-de-sac one of the highlights of the week is our Sunday lunchtime gathering, wine glasses or coffee mugs in hand, to chat across a two-metre divide.

Despite the appalling example set by our so-called leaders we are still trying to be socially responsible!

With so many musically talented residents, we've even had a couple of concerts, passing the hat round online and raising more than £200 for Salisbury Hospital ArtCare in the process.

Now this week's get-together has sparked a little history project dreamed up by one of my neighbours.

Since our road seems to have been developed in dribs and drabs, we're collating dates from conveyancing paperwork and the accompanying plans to draw up a timeline, and gathering as much information as we can from online sources about previous occupants to create a shared record.

It promises to be a fascinating exercise and maybe it will inspire others to follow suit .........