Category: Uncategorized

It’s nice to see that the BBC can still be quick off the mark and first with the news. Over a month after it was reported in the Adver and commented on here, the Beeb has finally caught up on the work being done by Wiltshire Wildlife Trust to improve access to the River Ray and modify the local environment for the benefit of riverside wildlife. The work started yesterday, but the news release from a month ago is unchanged. Some of Jo Sayers’ comments from that news release which the Beeb quotes now have a certain irony to them now that they didn’t have a month ago when quoted by the Adver.

At the moment, in some places the river is so overgrown that people can’t even see it.

Recently, some would say we’ve been seeing rather too much of the river.

I have been reading the draft Community Strategy for Swindon which is currently open for consultation. It is produced by the Swindon Strategic Partnership (a government decreed body that oversees the strategy-document-heavy, consultation-rich, activities of the Swindon Local Area Agreement Partnership). It is called ‘A Shared Vision for Swindon 2008–2030’ but reads more like a socialist vision for Swindon.

These community leaders focus on the future and work in partnership to make decisions which deliver real benefits to the whole community. They don’t work in isolation, though: local people are passionate about the quality of their neighbourhoods and are involved in their development and improvement. Most importantly, those local people are happy to invest their time and energy to keep their neighbourhoods safe, clean and attractive….
This goal is achieved by public-sector organisations, voluntary groups and local people all working closely to promote healthy living and create caring, cohesive neighbourhoods….
By 2030, local communities are working with public organisations – like the police, the borough council and a wide range of voluntary groups, at neighbourhood level – to reduce crime, keep people safe and develop a sense of community and belonging.

Apparently, the private sector has no role in Swindon in 2030, except for providing jobs and paying taxes.

Whilst I may have concerns about the developments on the Front Garden (not least the possible need for occupants to travel by boat rather than car), for the Swindon Front Garden Action Group to claim that there was

between 1ft and 1.5ft of water covering many areas where houses are set to be built and where roads into the site have already been created.

is only half true. Some of the main roads on the site were flooded. The areas where the houses will be built were not. Even just a quick look at the plans shows that all the housing, retail and industrial developments are on higher land. As the man from the developers said

All residential development on Wichelstowe will be outside the predicted flood plain and will be built with ground floors at least 600mm above the predicted worst case flood level to give an added degree of certainty that it will not suffer in times of flood.

However, he wouldn’t be a developer if he could resist the urge to indulge in a little spinning.

Similarly all of the distributor roads serving the residential areas are designed to be above the flood level so that the communities are not cut off.

I guess the road I photographed must be serving something other than residential areas… a water park, perhaps?

’Twas the first day of the new recycling regime in this part of Swindon today. As I walked to work this morning, the clear plastic bags for plastic bottles that had been put out for collection were very revealing in two respects. Firstly, the large number of people that put bags out filled with a relatively small number of unsquashed bottles, despite the council’s advice and the cost of the bags. Secondly, being a person who is quite content to drink tap water, the number of water bottles in many of the sacks was a surprise. Some households clearly spend more on bottled water than I spend on food. A masterpiece of marketing over common-sense.

Another day, another government announcement, this time a white paper on the railways. Lets see how many times they can contradict themselves or write total rubbish in one page. Lets try page seven of the summary booklet.

The Government will encourage progress by funding research and will write environmental objectives into passenger franchises. But the Government will not subsidise train operators to undertake efficiency measures that pay for themselves via reduced fuel bills. Train operators must take responsibility themselves.

Err… if environmental objectives are written into franchises and potential operators put in higher bids as a result, we the government ends up subsidising them, no?

Over £10 billion will be invested in enhancing capacity between 2009 and 2014, with overall Government support for the railway totalling £15 billion. The total investment in rail improvements will be greater than in 2004–09…. Having paid the bills in the difficult years when costs rose and under-investment needed to be tackled, we can now ease back the burden on the taxpayer.

If the spending investment will be higher between 2009 and 2014 than between 2004 and 2009, then surely that’s increasing the burden on the taxpayer rather than easing back, yes? (It is made clear elsewhere in the white paper that the figures quoted here are government expenditure and don’t include expenditure funded commercially, i.e. from fares.)

Finally, if you’re feeling optimistic about the improvement in services to Swindon that the reported expansion of Reading station will bring, don’t be. The statement about this in the appendix to the white paper is quite guarded (paragraph A16).

The Secretary of State also wants to see works undertaken at Reading station to deliver the increased capacity required in CP4 and to meet other longer term passenger and freight movement requirements. Network Rail is to undertake further development work to confirm the full scope and timing for delivery of this scheme, which the Secretary of State expects to be delivered within a maximum CP4 expenditure of £425 million. The Secretary of State expects a regulatory protocol to be established with Network Rail that sets out governance arrangements for delivery of this programme. The Secretary of State believes that delivery of the works is achievable within the statement of funds available.

Which roughly translates as they haven’t worked out what they’re going to do yet nor when they’re going to do it, but the woman at the top has plucked a figure and a time out of the air and expects them to stick to it.

I’m not sure whether the developers of Swindon’s front garden are intending to offer dinghies with their houses, but perhaps they should. In the plans, most of the area in the first photograph below is going to be a lake. The other photographs show what, in the plans, will be the main river access road to West Wichel.

The lake

The main access road

Not all at the same time, I hasten to add. I took a day-trip to Looe in South East Cornwall yesterday and very enjoyable it was too. Excellent food and beautiful weather.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of the journey home. When I boarded the 16:41 Virgin Trains service from Liskeard, I noticed that the seats in half the carriage I had entered were taped-off. A little later the customer service manager came and told us the reason was that on the way down to Newquay there had been some passengers who were ‘a bunch of animals’ and had been ‘sick all over the place’. He apologised for the smell (which was hardly noticeable) and said if we wanted to move to another carriage, we could (an offer not repeated later in the journey when the train was fuller). A little inspection showed that a fair amount of vomit (and other rubbish) remained. Once home, a quick look at the timetable* showed that the train had spent most of the day (five hours) sat at Newquay. Apparently not enough time to clean the carriage — what little smell there was coming from the taped-off area was definitely of vomit without a hint of disinfectant. I appreciate that facilities at Newquay station are limited, but were a mop, brush and disinfectant not available?

It has recently been announced that Virgin Trains have lost the cross-country rail franchise to Arriva. With service like this, I doubt that many of the travelling public will be disappointed.

* Links are to pdf documents.

Whilst it is clearly bad news for the 400 people that may be made redundant by Pork Farms in Trowbridge, as a long standing addict of Melton Mowbray Pork Pies I am sure that it is in the long term interest of the quality and sales of genuine Melton Pies that their production is restricted to the area around said town. Trowbridge pies just do not taste like proper Melton Mowbray pies.

If the chief executive of the New Swindon Company is to be believed, Swindon being the home of one of nine BBC Big Screens will have a miraculous effect on the town’s standing.

Hosting the only screen in the South will propel Swindon’s image to a national level. This new development will start to create that lively bustle that has been absent for so long.

Really? I wasn’t aware of the locations of the eight existing screens. (Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Rotherham and Derby, according to the press release — it seems the New Swindon Company cannot count.) I don’t recall any of those towns having their image propelled anywhere by the presence of am oversized TV. And in what way does people gawping at a big screen create ‘bustle’? Some of the other claims are just as far-fetched.

Wharf Green will also provide Swindon with a focal point for 2012 lead up activities, and events, that are planned once London takes over the mantle of Olympic City

I thought the intention was to use the Olympics to encourage people to participate in sport. It seems the aim in Swindon will be to create a community of full-on couch potatoes.

After two months and three ’phone calls the council have finally collected the two green bags of garden waste I put out for collection. Reasons for non-collection explored during the ’phone calls included the bags not being green enough (tho’ they are clearly sufficiently green for the dustmen doing the non-recyclables collection to leave them behind) and that perhaps they were not visible from the road. (There’s a wall between my front forecourt and the road; council instructions are not to put bags in the road or on the pavement. So what do they want me to do, build a wall-high pedestal to put my green bags on?) Lets hope they’re rather more efficient when the full programme of recycling starts in September.