Board Witless.

Dear Neighbourhood Partnerships Business Support Team

You've been asking Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces (FoSOS) what's happening about the community notice board you generously paid for.   You know the sort of thing......  nothing fancy, but good enough to do the job.

Yes, it seems unbelievable that a year has passed since everything was in place, ready to go.  During those same months, the Arena has moved on apace, the South Bristol Link has been turned from green belt meadows into a sea of mud ready to link up with the emerging Ashton Vale to Temple Meads metrobus. The BearPit is being transformed . Bristol is certainly looking different.

But Stockwood - apart from a fire in a tattoo parlour - looks exactly the same.  

If all had gone well, you'd now be seeing our notice board in the middle of this picture, and FoSOS and a load of other local organisations, not least the Neighbourhood Partnership itself, would be putting it to good use.  You might even see a council candidate or two posing in front of it.

The empty space is not the fault of FoSOS. Sure, it was FoSOS that researched and drafted the bid after a couple of the council's 'arms length' partners had promised, then failed, to do it, and FoSOS who got endorsements from a load of other community groups who'll benefit - while our councillors sat on their hands. It was FoSOS that agreed to act as fundholders. That, in spite of the last time FoSOS 'fund held ' on behalf of a community project, the council managed not only to lose the cheque returning the unspent money, but to suggested that FoSOS had misappropriated it. Remember?

Anyway, we finally got there, cash in hand, and on the point of placing the order for the board. Just one problem..... it turned out that the city council are the only people permitted to embed it in the pavement, and they're much too busy with the big vanity projects to bother with a piddling little notice board to tell people what's happening in our not-very-important neck of the woods.

Once that little snag became clear, FoSOS took up a request to organise the work itself, using other council-approved contractors. But they weren't interested in the job..

So we came up with another scheme. Abandoning the preferred plan for a conventional post-mounted notice board, we opted for second best. Another kind of board could be bolted to the masonry walls of the raised flowerbeds alongside the original site. Fixing this one would be no problem – local people would volunteer their skills and labour for free (just as well, because a more expensive board would have to be bought). We were given the OK to go ahead.

After a bit of negotiation with the suppliers – they'd wanted the cash up front, but we preferred half now, half on delivery – the order was finally placed and our cheque for half the cost was sent off. Yippee.

BUT – then we got the message from the council. We mustn't install it ourselves. The flowerbeds are, it turns out, the property, and responsibility, of the Highways department. They, and only they, can fix the notice boards. And only when they have the time, and are paid the money.

So the order, and the manufacture of the boards, has had to go on hold yet again. There's not enough money left to pay the Highways dept charge for doing the job.

So there's still – three years after being 'officially' proposed – no public notice board in Stockwood.

Thank you BCC. Your monitoring form is being be returned, completed as requested.

Note:  Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces has NOT been asked to endorse this post!

The Dark Side of the Shops

It would easily top any poll for the title of the ugliest part of Stockwood. The uncared for facade and brutalist concrete stairways along the back of the Hollway Road shops border a potholed, badly drained patch of tarmac that provides a hub for the ward's antisocial activities.

Everyone agrees that something must be done about it - but that's the easy bit. Clearly, the recent (and very welcome) wall-painting doesn't quite do the whole job!

BUT this little patch is prized by shopkeepers and residents alike. It provides an informal and unofficial car park, ideal not just for the shops but as a drop-off for Waycroft Academy, the highly rated primary school a few steps away.

The whole shopping area started as a single property, but ownership is now fragmented, and bits like this rundown back yard find speculative buyers in remote investment markets, “site unseen”.

In 2012, it was in the portfolio of a London investor, who got planning permission to build 4 detached houses within the site, in spite of strong local opposition including the ward councillors and several shopkeepers. [One protesting voice stood out, with a theatrical and emotional personal plea to the planning committee for the survival of his business and livelihood, threatened with extinction by the loss of the essential access he and his customers must have to the back of his shop. The reality was that it had been boarded up for years!]

That planning permission has now lapsed, and a new owner is trying his luck. This time the scheme packs in four semis and no less than five two-bedroomed flats. Full marks for ambition!

Something Must indeed Be Done – and here's a new Something for a planning committee to decide.

Predictably, it's attracting much the same objections as the last one, most of them centred on an alleged loss of parking, and its impact on the economic viability of the shops. The assumption is, clearly, that this local shopping centre, away from the main arterial routes, can't survive unless customers can be guaranteed a parking place within a few steps of the shops, while the parents, from wherever, can drop and pick up their offspring with minimum exposure to the elements.

Stockwood Pete did a couple of spot checks (pre-11am and post-4pm) on a wet Monday in August. On both visits, there were plenty of public parking spots outside this 'private' space, though some might require a fifty yard walk to the furthest shop. 

There's also on-road parking in front of the shops, and that really is in high demand (your reporter was bawled at by one of three drivers who moved off from double-yellow lines as soon as they saw his camera). Available shoppers parking was reduced, too, by the 17 cars that had taken day-long occupation of key spots close to the shops. Shop staff, maybe? Or commuters, avoiding the problems of driving and parking in the city? I think we should be told.

The site won't be everyone's idea of a dream home, or even of a starter home – backing on to the shops loading area isn't a strong selling point - but marketing it is a problem for developers, not planners.

It's true that there would be some losses if building goes ahead here. 

• The shops will lose some ease of access to their rear doors (it will become gated, and narrower, and will need careful management).
• There will be a net loss of parking if these 'unofficial' spots are lost to housing (though it could be recovered if those spots fronting the shops were to be time-limited instead of being lost to permanent occupation.)

Weighed against those losses are:

• nine new units of housing at a time of housing shortage, using a brownfield site very well served by local amenities and close by a good school.
• An area far less likely to attract antisocial behaviour (better oversight and better defended access to the back of most shops)
• Improvement and screening for Stockwood's biggest eyesore.

For Stockwood Pete, the scales tip heavily toward granting permission.

Application papers here

Project (mis)Management

This is Hollway Road, Stockwood, as it appears on Google's Streetview. Inevitably, it's not quite up-to-the minute, in fact it must be all of a couple of years old. It still shows Langton Court, the council's sheltered flat complex that has since been demolished.

A lot happened in those two years. With Cabinet agreement secured, the tenants were found alternative places to live, the buildings were razed, and in their place Housing 21 have built this VSH (very sheltered housing) complex. It's called Bluebell Gardens, and the first occupants are already in. Not bad going, in a recession!

This is Hollway Road from the same place today:

Spanning the same period, there was another, much smaller scale, bid to improve things for Stockwood's less athletic community. It didn't need anyone to be rehoused, no new buildings, no land transfers, no legal work, no planning permissions. Just a couple of simple benches like this.

They were to be placed beside the hillside path that provides the main pedestrian link between the lower and upper parts of Stockwood; just the job for people going up to the shops and library, or down to the school. Fairly steep, though; and the only way to take a breather is to get down on the grass. 

Here's what the path looked like while Langton Court was still up and running in 2010.

And here's what it looks like now.

No change there, then.

The bench project quickly became mired in a Neighbourhood Partnership process that isn't fit for purpose. There's no problem in principle, everyone agrees that these benches would be just the job; a few hundred quid very well spent, and ticking all the right boxes. We might have had them now if we'd let them stay in the 'wellbeing' lists' – after all, if Tory councillors can gift an over-55's group a Christmas meal and, later, a coach trip at public expense, anything is possible. But instead we played fair, switching the benches to be judged alongside other possible open space improvements, and now they can't escape that long, long process. Requests to get the Partnership to give them priority are rebuffed, even after the NPs own Environmental Panel recommended it; the question cannot even be put on the Agenda. 

The situation is ludicrous – but NP managers seem totally disinterested.

Meanwhile, locals will still have to struggle non-stop up the hill, or use a car. Or buy into the spanking new Bluebell Gardens, which somehow got built without local authority red tape getting in the way.

Stockwood and Hengrove's next NP meeting, the first since June, is on Wednesday 17^th October at Counterslip Church on Wells Road. Starts 6.30, business from 7pm. Observers welcome, but participation will, on past records, be strictly controlled!

Hollway Road shops – the Adam Smith factor

The Planning Committee's decision to approve construction of four detached houses in the yard behind Hollway Road shops was tricky. Two members wanted to wait till there was more information available. When their bid failed, it left the six members evenly divided.

We heard impassioned pleas from Tory ward councillors and traders, plus a battery of formal written objections and a petition of 1701 names, all opposed the housebuilding. It would, they said, drive more school run mums to park in front of local homes, shop deliveries would get difficult, customers would desert the precinct if they had to park somewhere else, and the whole place will be boarded up before Mr Pickles can roll in to the rescue. Every dark scenario was based on the continuing and growing reliance on the private car. And all of them were set against one solitary comment in support. You can guess where that came from.

[Even so, there should have been one good outcome. One shopkeeper had graphically described to the Planning Committee how the lifeblood of his furniture and flowers business depends on his customers being able to load their cars 'out the back' with such purchases as compost. That interested me – right now, I'd love a local source of good seed compost. So I went to his shop next morning to get some – only to be told they don't sell it!  A bit naughty, that.   Doesn't say much for witness credibility.]

Anyway, it went through on the casting vote of the Chair. No-one seemed entirely happy with it, but their hands are largely tied. It had to be allowed; there were no robust grounds for refusal.
................................

 I wonder if our Tory councillors thought to apply their Adam Smith credo to all this? Here was a model test of Smith's 'hidden hand' that should somehow bring a public good from all the self-interested actions of the players in this little local market.

We're talking about a privately owned parade of shops that was, from the start, the property of absentee landlords making a development investment. Over the years, bits of freehold and leasehold have been sold off piecemeal, so now its a dog's breakfast of different owners and occupiers and interests, with a web of legal agreements that should protect against anyone abusing their position.

Crucially, the 'back yard' delivery area, left neglected for many years while providing 'windfall' free parking and opportunities for vandalism, fell into the hands of yet another absentee owner who perceived a development opportunity for the financially unproductive eyesore he'd acquired. And that led – after long negotiations with the planners – to this building application.

It provides four detached homes, it ticks the planning boxes, and it appears to allow for continued access for shop deliveries. But the consensus (if the councillors and traders are to be believed) is that it's a Bad Thing.

Isn't that exactly how the system is supposed to work? Lots of enterprising players acting in their own interests, free of the red tape that might risk stifling innovation? Exactly what we had here. A public good, produced by the 'hidden hand' of ambition and competition. Except that, according to the councillors, it will lead to the loss of Stockwood's shopping centre.

In public, the Tories are quick enough to capitalise on any local dissent and make their voices heard. But back in the Council House as in Parliament, they vote routinely for policies and dogma that have everything to do with swelling private profit and inequality at the expense of the public good.

And of course, they won't learn from the lesson of Hollway Road shops.

Confrontation at the Hollway Road shops

It's time for a Town Brown application at Stockwood shops. 

Here we are, accustomed since the year dot to park our cars, collect the kids, do the shopping, dodge the delivery vehicles and the potholes, and set fire to the waste bins behind the shops, and what happens?   Some developer fellow from London comes along and wants to build all over it!  Turns out that he actually owns it.

You really wouldn't credit it!  Thank heavens our councillors are there defending the motorists and the juggernauts against the landowners.  

Lets face it....  if the speculators get away with this, Tesco may decide there's not enough access to go ahead with their (rumoured) takeover of the Post Office.  And the school-run mums will spread like a plague throughout the neighbourhood, as they fight for the nearest alternative parking that will keep them free of any obligation to walk the kids to school.

Planning Application
Evening Post article
HandS ON forum topic

New homes - or the school run?

Behind Stockwood's Hollway Road shops, there's a grim, uncared for area that finds use by shoppers and by parents on the Waycroft School run. It's in private ownership. The owner's just applied to put three detached four-bedroomed homes on it.

You can take a look at the plans, and comment, on line at the council's planning portal. The application number is 10/04539/F and you can go direct to the application documents here. I'd recommend a look at the 'proposed perspective views' for starters.

No-one would pretend that the present frontage (or backage?) has anything to commend it - but these proposals will raise many questions...

How on earth will service vehicles navigate their way to the shops' rear entrances? Will the same service road become a 'dark alley' out of hours, out of sight, a no-go zone for anyone other than the residents who must use it for access?

Will we see a mass protest march (or, more likely, convoy) launched by the schoolrunner mums? Will the developers actually be able to build at a price that attracts buyers to this... er... rather different kind of a site?

Stockwood - Bristol's newest shopping destination!

Things have been happening at Hollway Road shops, the parade of two dozen units plus library at the heart of Stockwood. Cycling City is on the job of turning it into the destination retail centre of choice for the cyclists of South Bristol.


Until now, we've had to make do with just three bike stands at the shops.


Now, two have been added at the library


.....plus two at the Co-op


.....plus three at the post office


.....plus two at the chippy


.....plus two at the offie.


Sadly, the recently refurbished playground at Cottle Road Park, with its own little shopping parade, remains without any provision for bikes.


As do the shops on Sturminster Road.

Clearly, there's a plan behind all this. If only we knew what it was.
........................


Meanwhile, the other side of the one-time tracks, the Parks people are consulting about the future of the few acres of open space between the Whitchurch Railway Path and the Saltwell Viaduct on the A37. Apparently it's a Site of Nature Conservation Interest, (which makes it pretty safe from being sold off to provide park-keepers in Knowle). But isn't this the place where Cycling City want to provide a new off-road link route under the viaduct and up into Whitchurch? They don't seem to have told the Parks planners.....