Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

On Wednesday (Sept 26) I formally switched on the new flat level fountain in Church Square. Pre-programmed jets rising to varied heights.

It is the first stage of the Church Square refurbishment which will include new seating to replace the broken down benches, clearing the plantings to open it out and new decorations for the surrounding buildings.

It will be a lovely eastern entrance to the Town Centre West redevelopment which had been approved two days earlier.

In my switch-on speech I pointed out that work on Castle Lane was proceeding rapidly and forecast that within a few years Bedford will be one of the most exciting towns in the south-east.

Of course, Bedford wouldn’t be Bedford without its miseries. Two complained it was a waste of money. I asked one if he wanted to live in a mean and miserable town. ‘It’ll just get vandalised’, he said. So we should leave our town to the vandals, should we?

The other, a woman, complained about her council tax. I pointed out that it was the county’s tax that was high; Bedford’s was below average. ‘Rubbish’, she said, as she walked off.

She probably enjoys being miserable in which case she is going to have plenty to please her over the next few years as we waken Bedford from its long sleep.

IN the end, support was unanimous. The Town Centre West development (which includes the bus station) received outline planning permission on Monday night.

Work can now start on detailed design and a new town centre exhibition planned for April will show the latest thinking.

Although several members spoke up for the Pilgrim’s Progress, in the end they all recognised the importance of the development and the fact that rejection of the application would be a disaster for Bedford.

The cupola of the Pilgrim’s Progress will be installed in the new development along with any other features deemed worthy of preservation.

IT is always a pleasure to leave the foetid atmosphere of the Town Hall to find a world in which good things are happening without the input of politicians.

A couple of weeks ago I was present at Bedfordia Biofuels for the visit of the Princess Royal. She came in by helicopter to see the biogas plant which has been set up near Yarls Wood.

Actually, she would have smelt it – possibly from several hundred feet up - because a blocked valve meant that the installation niffed more than a bit. The princess is a farmer and is used to farmyard smells and she was fascinated by the installation. Apparently it wouldn’t suit her farm but she said she would pass on the word to Big Brother Charles’ Duchy estates. I hear she was as good as her word because Bedfordia got a call from the Duchy wanting to know more.

If Bedfordia manages to sell its know-how to the Duchy of Cornwall it’ll be evidence yet again that where there’s muck there’s money.

ON Friday I had a rare pleasure, that of naming a train. I shared the duty with the Burgermeister of Bamberg Werner Hippelius. It was a Silverlink two unit diesel on the Bedford Bletchley line and we named it Bedford – Bamberg 30 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of our twinning.

At a buffet lunch in the Harpur Suite we were each presented with a replica nameplate. It was so heavy it needed two people to hold it up. Goodness knows what the Bamberg one did for the luggage limit on Werner’s return.

I am not sure where we will put ours; probably in the Town Hall reception.

SATURDAY saw me in London kissing a gorilla at the start of the Great Gorilla Run to raise funds to preserve the 700 gorillas left in the wild from extinction.

Inside the gorilla was my daughter Naomi, former pupil at Pilgrim School, now a solicitor in London, who raised £900 sponsorship.

There will be curses in the media that nobody got a picture of the Mayor of Bedford snogging a gorilla. A front pager if ever I heard of one.

I had a mistype in my recent blog about the date the planning application for Town Centre West would come before the planning committee. I said September 14; it should be Sept 24. Thanks to Jacquie for pointing it out.

Incidentally, there will be a town centre exhibition incorporating all the latest ideas about the town centre in the Harpur Suite in April next year.

THE next few weeks will be momentous ones for Bedford. If all goes well the borough will be on course for rapid changes and improvements to its prospects.

If any go badly a feeling of pessimism will blanket the borough with many people asking themselves if Bedford has a death wish.

The first of these will be on September 24 when the outline planning application for Bedford Town Centre West will be decided by the planning committee. This used to be called the bus station redevelopment, but it is much more than that, encompassing a swathe of dreary 1960s development from the multi-storey flats on the north of the site to the junction of Midland Road/River Street/Greyfriars on the south. In its course the dreadful Allhallows car park and the grim bus station will all disappear. The residential, the bus station, the police station and the car parking will all be replaced and there will be a food store, a department store, a cinema and much else,

It’s a £200 million scheme, the biggest that has ever taken place in Bedford.

The one area of controversy is the Pilgrim’s Progress at the junction of River Street and Midland Road. It’s a strategic point and many people want to save it. I do, but not at the expense of a £200million development the town seriously needs.

The problem lies in the need to get north/south traffic through River Street and the new Greyfriars to the west of the present one. If the road were to pass in front of the Pilgrim’s Progress the department store, one of the anchors of the development, would be lost. If it goes behind the store, it will result in two right-angled dog legs which are likely to cause serious traffic problems and be refused by the Highways Authority.

Anyway, if that solution were to be accepted, Pilgrim’s Progress would stick out like a sore thumb. Its north and east facades – which is what everybody likes - would be retained but the south and west facades would be blank brick walls. It would look awful.

Both developers and Progress supporters are digging their heels in over this. The developers say the loss of the anchor store would make the scheme non-viable with a clear inference that they would walk away.

As my demands for quality architecture and building have already made the scheme more marginal than leaving the developers to their own devices, this may not be a bluff. Hence I say that I want to preserve the pub if it can be done but not at the expense of the whole scheme.

In October, Riverside Square will come back to the committee. Complaints that the building is too big have resulted in a floor being taken off, with a loss to the council’s funds of £1million. This has not mollified some of its opponents whose complaint about height are a cover for their real objections which is that they don’t like the classical style. They don’t want to say that because many people do like the design, probably more than dislike it, so they look for other arguments including that it doesn’t have enough affordable housing. This ignores the fact that the developers were to have given £1million towards affordable housing elsewhere in the town centre and that the building was recommended for approval by the planners who are very strict about affordability.

So far the objectors have made all the public running but those who support the scheme – and it has many supporters – must now make themselves heard. If it is rejected again the developers will almost certainly pull out, writing off £750,000 worth of design work. The shockwaves will be felt throughout the development industry and word will go out not to try to do anything in Bedford because it is impossible to predict what the planning committee will do.

Shortly before writing this I listened to a presentation by consultants commissioned to prepare a marketing plan for Bedford. It wasn’t the council which commissioned it but I was intrigued to hear them say that not enough is made of Bedford’s river. I agree and that is precisely the problem that Riverside Square is intended to address, bringing quality dining, residential and shops to the riverside with a foot and cycle bridge across to St Mary’s Gardens to link it up with the south side of the river.

Also in October another developer will be bringing in a £20million scheme to demolish the dismal parade of shops in Church Lane and replace it with an attractive shopping and leisure area which will include an Aldi Supermarket. This alone will be a blessing to people of the area who do not have cars.

Finally, on October 19 the Nirah outline planning application will be heard by the county council’s planning committee. I don’t suppose I have to repeat the story of the battle to keep Nirah in the area and the massive support it has had.

At £400 million it is the biggest scheme ever to come before the county planning committee and if passed it will have a galvanising effect on the whole local economy, as well as pointing the way to productive use of derelict brickfields.

Every one of these schemes is fundamental to Bedford’s future prospects. They need your support. The deadline for official comments has passed but letters of support in the media or direct to the council will still be noted.

I have not got involved with the Center Parcs argument because it is not in the borough and so I am strictly neutral over rthe result except where it touches on wider issues.

One of these has to be what the decision of local government secretary Hazel Blears to allow it does to the concept of the Green Belt.

Green Belt land is supposed to be sacrosanct unless there is an overwhelming reason to allow development but it is difficult to see what this overwhelming reason might be in this case. Blears quoted employment as a reason but unemployment in Mid Beds is among the lowest in the country.

There won’t be much trickle-down benefit to the community because Center Parcs ‘guests’ are not encouraged to get out and about. The company wants them to spend their money inside the perimeter and their spend will be repatriated to the company’s owners, an American venture capitalist.

The other thing I find curious is the way people like Mid Beds MP Nadine Dorries and former county director of planning and development Tim Malynn were vociferous supports of Center Parcs and equally determined to scupper Nirah even though Nirah is a brownfield scheme which never opposed Center Parcs.

Will the Center Parcs opposition group appeal Hazel Blears decision? From a planning point of view the Green Belt policy has had a coach and horses driven through it and some clarification is now needed.

I’m back from clean, well-ordered Switzerland to Bedfordshire, and the contrast isn’t only in the landscape.

What, for instance, are we to make of this farce of a debate on the county’s judicial review where the county leadership put up two fingers to democracy? Enough councillors wanted to examine the decision allegedly made by Andrea Hill to go to the HIgh Courts. Andrea (who likes it prononced ONdrea) is the chief executive of the county council and her job is supposed to be carrying out the policies of the members.

But at the county meeting on Wednesday the elected members were not allowed to question Ms Hill. They were limited to making statements to which council leader Madeline Russell responded,

Aneurin Bevan was once cross-examining some wretched junior minister in the House of Commons when the PM entered. Bevan switched his attack: ‘Why bother with the monkey when the organ grinder’s in the House”.

At County Hall the question is now which is the organ grinder and which the monkey?

Deputy leader Richard Stay was seen twisting the arms of those Conservative members who were also members of Bedford Borough telling them if they didn’t oppose the motion to stop the judicial review they would lose the Conservative whip. As Cllr Peter Hand has Parliamentary ambitions this was a serious threat. In the end, four out of the six abstained. The two who didn’t were Tom Wootton, son of former county councillor Tesco Ted, and Lyn Faulkner, deputy chairman of the council. I suppose I should be surprised at Faulkner but I’m not. When she first got on to the county she was given the leisure portfolio but it was taken away from her before she had got used to the seat. Now she is deputy chairman. I wonder how long that will last.

Even with the whipped vote, the result was hardly overwhelming: with 13 votes against, six abstentions and two people absenting themselves before the vote took place 19 people did not support the judicial review. Of course, one is enough but demonstrated that there are many people uneasy about the course the council is taking.

There is now the opportunity for another judicial review, on whether members should have been allowed to question Hill. My view is that it is nonsense to say that officers who take far reaching decisions should be protected from the members in this way. It wouldn’t happen in the borough.