Free Parking

The tireless and extremely patient John Urquhart, founder member of Save Newcastle Wildlife and now posting as Cities 4 People sent this a few days ago:

"The following Focus newsletter item was picked up in an anti-litter drive on Armistice Day:

Row Over Park's Trust Appointments

Newcastle Lib Dems have raised serious concerns after several people with direct business interests in parks were appointed to the new Trust which will run the City's Parks - including a senior executive from an organisation which not only runs projects in our parks already but which also employs the Labour Councillor in charge of parks.  The Trust's rules will allow organisations in which Trustees have a personal interest to enter into contracts with the Trust, provided these interests are duly declared.

Local Lib Dem campaigner Ciaran Morrissey said "Many people will be concerned by this news.  While we understand that the Cabinet member recused herself from the panel which appointed her employer, several of the new Trustees have close connections with the Council.  The lack of park users, volunteers or community representatives on the board is really disappointing."

Following the board appointments, the Council is now struggling to recruit a Chief Executive.  Initial applicants were deemed to be unsuitable for the role.  "The Trust is lurching from crisis to crisis before it has even got started," added Ciaran.  "We truly fear for the future of our Parks under this pointless vanity project."


You read that correctly: Our 'Labour' local council is going to give public parks to business people to have and to hold on long leases. What could possibly go wrong? Well, I suppose compared to losing a Grade II Listed building to arson, it is no big thing ...

Meanwhile, Battlefield embraces autumn, finally. Recently I came upon a reference to the name Shieldfield Green attached to this piece of non-public space. That would make an excellent name for park, don't you think?

Link to photographic album here (off site link).

Fireworks

A few images of the just past firework display over Battlefield (a.k.a. City Stadium).

Large crowds, all young-ish and well behaved. So were drivers of numerous cars looking for parking or passing through.

In other news, Save Newcastle Wildlife reports that plans to concrete over Newcastle's Green Belt have been modified. A fence has been removed or moved. I cannot get worked up about this to be frank. That sector of the Green Belt – 'The Great Park' – is done for. The usual suspects are knocking up wooden sheds with a brick skim as fast as possible and thousands of new tenants are being placed away from shops, schools, doctors and hospitals that can only be reached by motor transport. Great planning it's not. Meanwhile the student flats mania around the inner city continues, possibly the biggest building scheme in Newcastle since T. Dan Smith got busy smashing up the west end with a wreckers ball.

Those of us who care about the environment, both natural and built, have to be more imaginative. I shall be developing my ideas with examples in future posts.

The Way We Live Now: Student Village Revisited

Increasingly an occasional blog post. Partly this is because the threat level that once hung over the green space I call 'Battlefield' has diminished, partly due to my other commitments. But my interest has never flagged.

I created this blog because Newcastle City Council appears only too happy to give up the large expanse of publicly accessible open green space to someone else to exploit. Indeed my concern stemmed directly from their decision to approve a large office complex on the old paint factory site using the adjacent City Stadium open air running track for a thousand plus car park. The city still has plentiful unused or never used office space owned by tax dodging investors.

This was no small issue. Around and about the area are families who haven't the means to fly away to the sun; it remains the case that casual use by lots of families with young children have a safe place to go to on a sunny day or weekend. With rise and rise of student numbers in Sandyford and Shieldfield the summer months see lots of use. Initially troubled by the construction of the cycle way I have to admit this has worked well and also makes the question of developing the space beyond a leisure and wildlife resource much more of a challenge for the City's planners. There is increasingly also great concern about air quality in the city. These green lungs are our lungs. I really do think the threat has faded if not entirely disappeared.

Why not adopt the area as a public park? Lower Ouseburn Park as a certain ring about it. That designation would secure the future of what has become a rounded and attractive space when I think back to how it was when I first saw it forty years ago.


Another look at the changes – some good some not so good – around Shieldfield and the swiftly changing street scene. Just enough of the inconsequential and surviving structures helps. But the sense is of one large dormitory too. Corporate investors build corporate spaces and the balance between interesting, eccentric survivals, and the bland business park feel now has tipped a long way towards the latter. It's all a bit new. See what you think:

Off site photographic album here.

Shieldfield to City Road 2018.

Timber!

Hands up all those who recall the Core One Strategy? Core One Strategy .... ? No? Expensively produced Master Plan (c.f. Great Leap Forward, Soviet era Five Year Plans, Cultural Revolution ...?). I seem to remember details outlined at length in this fanatasy planning document for safeguarding Newcastle's ecology ... Once again Newcastle City Council's preening P.R. machine is exposed for the high priced tosh it is.

The unvarnished saw dust truth is out there! Link here.

Meanwhile, Save Newcastle Wildlife have been doing much more than merely complaining. They managed to get broadcaster and all round good bloke Chris Packham to visit Havannah Nature Reserve on his 2018 national tour. Red Squirrel woodland habitat that is threatened by ever more 'development'. Link here.

Flaming June – No, Really!

In Blighty we have been promised a 'barbecue summer' so often it has ceased to be even funny to our usual maudlin sense of humour; global warming was something that happened to other people. This year though is turning out to be a cracker as we say.

My solitary reader will perhaps recall how miffed I was with the construction of the cycleway. especially because so many trees were sawn down to make way for it. I am willing to say I was too easily persuaded that this was an unnecessary intrusion and threat: I had visions of mad cyclists whipping down the new cycle track at speed. Few do I am glad to report. The Missing trees have not as yet been completely replicated in new plantings – several of these were vandalised. That's not the fault of anyone but the vandals. Then something happened.

Council workers turned up one day and laid turfs all along the central reservation that marks the pedestrian side from the cyclists side. Wild flower turf. The results have been madly spectacular for two years in a row. True and couple of places have been trodden down – that could easily have been anticipated in the design stage; people tend to walk in straight lines not where planners wish to direct them. You can see examples all over new estates, etc.

What we have now is yet another argument for a new Public Park. It's well used, mostly well used by considerate people and gives access to green space to families and increasingly students. Why not Lower Ouseburn Park?

Slideshow here. (Off site link.)

Bridging loan

Building on the Green Belt. What could go wrong? Lots of new homes (that few can afford) and more income for our local councils struggling with Austerity. Must be a good idea.

What about the negatives? Don't ask.

Newcastle has been asked to review its decision to allow a huge development beside the Havannah Reserve. "Has this been thought through?" What is there to think about? These developments make a fortune for their backers. What more is there to say?

Work on widening the Metro bridge on Killingworth Road South Gosforth is delayed again.

This from The Newcastle Chronicle, that's what. I presume the developers are paying for a new bridge that is essential to the massive increase of motor traffic into Hadricks Mill stemming from their money spinning activities? I mean, if you want a pint of milk or a newspaper (old stuff for oldies I know) you will have to hit the road to get them. Surely, Newcastle Council Tax payers are not stumping up for this as they did the infamous Ouseburn barrage?

Details here: link.

Meanwhile Save Newcastle Wildlife is clebrating (rather too early I feel) a 'victory'. But good luck anyway.


Don’t Hem in Havannah

Newcastle City Council has resolved to take the planning application for 1,200 houses adjacent to Havannah Nature Reserve back to committee, following our proposed legal challenge.

This is a rare victory which required a lot of hard work and perseverance.

Officers were clearly concerned by the threat of legal action, otherwise they would not have backed down so quickly.

Even if we had fought and won judicial review, the application would still have gone back to the council for redetermination.

We have been advised the application will not be considered until after 1stJune.

In the meantime, we are encouraging further objections and will be submitting an enforcement complaint regarding landscaping issues in Newcastle Great Park.


A Greener Future for Newcastle?

A member of Save Newcastle Wildlife will be standing in the city council elections.


Rachel Elizabeth Locke is standing as an independent candidate in Castle Ward and will be calling for:
Greater protection for green space and Green Belt, including parks, nature reserves and allotments
Affordable housing on brownfield sites instead of executive homes on green fields
Better walking and cycling routes and an integrated public transport system to encourage people to leave cars at home to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution
A commitment from builders to actively conserve wildlife and biodiversity in all new development
More green infrastructure, such as wildflower areas, living walls, green roofs, trees and hedgerows to mitigate for air pollution, climate change and support wildlife
More bins, recycling facilities and incentives to reduce littering and waste
Commitment from local businesses to reduce waste, particularly single-use plastics

Planning Policy Peril

Local Wildlife Sites, as well as aged and veteran trees outside of woodland, are not protected under revised proposals for the National Planning Policy Framework.

We are encouraging people to respond to the consultation to demand better protection for wildlife sites and veteran trees.


The Wildlife Trusts' ‘Act Swiftly’ campaign provides more detail, while the Woodland Trust is encouraging people to support stronger planning policy for ancient woodland.

You can respond directly to the NPPF consultation here or email your comments to planningpolicyconsultation@communities.gsi.gov.uk

The deadline is 10th May 2018.

Byker from the back

Shields Road runs up through Byker. According to reports in the local media last year it was voted as 'the worst shopping street in the ..." U.K. or England. I can't say I remember or care. I like it.

Despite the fact that Byker was once a integrated community it was the subject of the kind of social experiment that became very popular among planners in the 60s and 70s, now the Empire had too few natives to expend their energies upon, an experiment that carved a dual carriageway through the centre of the district that ends up accomplishing little, but gave a fashionable architect (who made sure he didn't live there) a chance to win multiple international prizes for his 'Wall' (I presume a cynical play on Hadrian's Wall built alongside 1900 years earlier) and dislocate (de-house) thousands of people from basically sound homes that might easily (and have been) renovated to a modern standard for less money.

So then: Byker.

It intrigues me to wander about and note the incoherence that accident and neglect have brought that planning, detailed and much admired (by sociologists) sociological research could never achieve. A sense of place. The back ways, the unsuspected enclaves and pathways between settled estates with a hedge here and there and lichen covered trees. The back ways of comings and goings, small cafés (caffs) that the smooth operators would shun thankfully. And then, suddenly a glimpse of a near copy of a highland railway line complete with rocky outcrops and fir trees.

Byker photographs here (off site link)

News Feed

Garden birds: No more scoffing now

Last century someone had an idea to help a membership drive and raise useful funds. The idea was to get people to count birds in their gardens. It wasn't meant to be serious; more a fun way to enage with an audience. It turns out the audience was vast and increasingly this fun piece of public relations took on a new and perhaps deadly serious purpose. Out national bird populations were in steep decline.

Studies of farmland birds were turning into obituaries. Small birds were vanishing. Species that no one had much bothered with since there were so 'ubiquitous' had numbers dropping like stones into a gulf. Suddenly the amateurs with their notebooks and peanut feeders across the realm were promoted like some birdwatching Dad's Army into the front line of British ornithology. Bird counts taken in overwhelmingly urban and suburban gardens were vital. It also turned out to be tens of thousands of all ages and types of people who could also be counted on. No one was patronisingly smiling on granny and grandad's gnomes and bird table any more.

Birds are shifting into the suburbs as never before. Birds that never used bird feeders such as the brightly coloured Goldfinch turn up mob handed and breed increasingly across cities; a pair nested in a street tree outside HMV in Newcastle's teeming Northumberland Street three years ago. The nest was still there recently.

Switching direction very slightly, another fact intrigued me.

There is no more competitive and ruthless business than general and household retail selling on the British High Street. Large companies that get their business wrong go under – fast. It is not sentimental, nothing like Open All Hours. So why does Wilko's Byker sell so much bird food and bird food dispensers?

Typical: Wilko's sellers of quality bird food

Byker's Shield's Road was described by some journalist as possibly the worst shopping street in the country. It has about nine feet by over six feet (in old money) of shelf space devoted to many kinds of bird food and bird feeders, plain and workmanlike to fancy and ornamental. A cashier told me she had no idea there were 'so many kinds of bird food'. Does it sell well? "Oh, yes. Lots."

So why is 'possibly the nation's worse High Street' buying so much bird food? Because they care. In a tough place to live through Austerity 02, people yet have a thought (and cash) to put out bird food in this somewhat benighted and severely under rated inner city district*.

I am more and more persuaded that if protecting 'nature', as the valiant Save Newcastle's Wildlife group are attempting to do, means anything it must include more of this overlooked group, the bird lovers of the inner city. I also believe that the term nature conservation should itself be broadened to include more of the what some of the more serious minded would consider inconsequential to its purpose: The transient nature most of us meet with everyday. The rapidly diminishing Green Belt isn't all of it. Not by a long way.



*Photographic essay on Byker coming soon!

Bubble or froth?

A Fallen Angel? From the article cited below.
It is a scene familiar to anyone who has walked around
Newcastle and Shieldfield in the past few years

Oh, dear! The news about the wave, tidal wave even, of speculative student dwelling construction, financed by off shore investor's and others, is not good.

More here;

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/13/buyer-funded-development-scandal

The amount of such building in Newcastle in the last few years has been staggering. The need for social housing has not even been glanced at leave alone addressed. Instead, more and more schemes to build aspirational homes, frequently also bought by investor's continues. A salutary lesson in what happens when investment (sic) does just what it fancies.

27th February 2018.

Hanging on

February is the month that paces up and down like an expectant father. Spring has not arrived; it puts in fleeting hints on the edges of days only now showing signs of lengthening, albeit, very slowly and some days hardly any movement by the clock. Winter hangs on. It snaps back on days of wind, sleet and rain. "I'm not finished with you yet." We may see more snow.

A portrait then of the Battlefield on top of the Lower Ouseburn here. (off site link)

I began by snapping the slower progress of the new independent cinema, the Star and Shadow's replacement on Warwick Street. A faithful band of volunteers and a small grant are beginning to make a difference. The opening  date – never a fixed objective – has had to retreat. Maybe later this year the lights will go on and the doors open. I hope so.

Around the fringes of the Battlefield more student housing has gone up. More rapidly to consume the speculative money on offer while the going is good and the students are still rolling in to the universities. It  could have been worse; it could also have been a lot more interesting.

Droit du seigneur

Article on the B.B.C. about the Nunsmoor Allotments (deceased). Photograph above shows happier times. (Hat Tip: Greening Wingrove.)


The (unaccountable) Freemen have been given carte blanche by the ever compliant City Council (partners in the Great Leazes Park Scandal together with John Hall's United Sporting Club) to do what they want with the bulldozed allotments. After the 'dozers departed the field glinted with broken glass. I seriously doubt the top soil being spread now will prevent injury to grazing cattle if that is what is planned.

Allotments at Leazes Park and next to Fenham Hall Drive have been removed previously. What do the Freemen have in mind? Who knows. They don't say nor can they be compelled to say and the Council isn't asking in any case.

"The Freemen, which has grazing rights on the land, has not commented, but Newcastle Council said it could do what it "deemed fit" with the land."

Meanwhile an upperty serf objects!

"A tradition established in the 13th Century to allow Freemen to graze cows has now become so irrelevant in the 21st century that there needs to be a rethink."

Something Feudal still about this town ...

No Harm in Trying

Save Newcastle Wildlife ©  2018 Re-printed by kind permission.

Petition update

Urgent Action Required

Save Newcastle Wildlife

Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

12 Jan 2018 — Newcastle City Council today voted 10:1 in favour of plans for 1,200 houses adjacent to Havannah Nature Reserve.

Banks, Newcastle International Airport and Save Newcastle Wildlife spoke against the plans, which contravene local and national planning policy and will see inappropriate development in the Green Belt.

More here

Save Newcastle Wildlife website here


Anton Deque adds:

Planning permission was always going to be granted. But defeat is no shame if more people can be recruited to the cause. The if is because like most conservation groups S.N.W. needs to shift the axis of attack against all such developments away from the formal arena of planning appeals that are rigged in favour of developers towards a more popular kinds of action close to where people live and build as broad a base of supporters of open space and wildlife as possible against the day when the tide will turn in nature conservation's favour. Contrariwise perhaps to a nature conservation outlook, we should also develop an alternative house building strategy, one based on pressing need not greed.

Write a Letter to Sajid ...

Re-posted from Save Newcastle Wildlife © 2018. Re-printed by kind permission.

 Red Squirrel. England's last urban population is under threat. Image © S.N.W. 2018

"Last month we wrote to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Sajid Javid, asking him to call in the planning application for 1,200 houses adjacent to Havannah Nature Reserve.

We are still awaiting a response.

In the meantime, we are urging people to contact the Secretary of State, requesting he calls in the application for his own determination.

We have put together a template letter (below), which can be sent to sajid.javid@communities.gsi.gov.uk with an open copy to npcu@communities.gsi.gov.uk

Please add your own words and remember to include your name.

The more we highlight the illegalities of the proposals to central government, the greater the likelihood of getting the plans overturned.

It is important to act quickly, as the application is due to be considered by Newcastle City Council on Friday 12th January."



________________________________________________________

Dear Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP,

Re: Newcastle City Council – Planning Application 2017/0666/01/OUT Newcastle Great Park

I am writing to you in your capacity as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to request call-in of the above major planning application, which conflicts with national policy on Green Belts, as set out in Section 9 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

Section 38 (6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act (2004) requires planning applications to be determined in accordance with the local development plan, unless material considerations indicate otherwise.

This application contravenes Newcastle and Gateshead Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan and the Master Plan for development in Newcastle Great Park. There are no material considerations to outweigh the development plan allocation and the clear harm caused by the proposals. Furthermore, there are no very special circumstances to justify inappropriate development in the Green Belt, and the proposals would result in substantial harm to the Green Belt and biodiversity.

Newcastle City Council has also misinterpreted Paragraph 74 of the NPPF and the extant development plan policy for open space protection. Such misinterpretation of local and national policy could set a dangerous precedent for the inappropriate change of use of parkland elsewhere, which would prohibit public access to the detriment of local communities.

I therefore request you call in this application for your own determination.

Yours sincerely,

{INSERT NAME}

Anton Deque adds:

This won't do more than let the world know there were objections. Jarvid will nod this through – though there may just be a few more sops to the 'conservationists'. I am deeply cynical about attempting to use legislation drawn up with developers in mind to head off concrete. But as someone said to me long ago, 'It keeps them out of the pub' at least for an hour or two.

DO copy and paste this text adding your own words as you wish (but stay polite please!), then sign and send an e-mail  to sajid.javid@communities.gsi.gov.uk if you can.