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10th November 2008 - Amber Valley Draft Development Brief
So I’ve finally read the planning brief and associated documents, if you want to read it go to the Amber Valley Site and be prepared to spend a geed few hours just reading. Although I find much of it to be perfectly acceptable, I have a number of reservations. The biggest is very simple; yet another site that used to and still could provide employment in manufacturing will be turned into offices, shops and homes.
If this goes ahead as it stands, The Vanessa Millar School of Dancing and all the other existing small businesses in the Derwent Street area will just be driven out by the larger businesses that want to move in. The compulsory purchase of the dance school building would possibly not provide enough cash to buy a new location and build a suitable building and certainly not on this site. Provision should be made to accommodate the existing businesses without penalty.
All this is of course against a background where the roads and public transport cannot cope with the current level of commuting in and out of the town. Small commercial units would bring employment and reduce transport problems but they don’t make big profits for the developers or make Amber Valley look good.
From the point of view of the shop keepers of Belper what could be worse than Tesco opening a big new store. Well let’s try adding to the store eight or ten medium sized retail outlets and Woolworths, Boots and New Look would if given the chance move off King Street, McDonalds would move from the Orangery. In would come Argos and a couple of clothes retailers. What would that combination do to King St and Bridge St?
The brief seems to have been written to support just this sort of development, it looks better than a supermarket on it’s own but just think it through.
Further, the current credit crunch has killed the market for the sort of flats and houses the plan appears to include. So if they were ever built the chances are that many of them would remain empty for a period of time or possibly have to be sold of cheap further depressing the local house prices.
I still think Tesco will come, probably must come but so must the chance for Belper town centre to survive and to achieve that the Tesco to Town Centre link must be very strong and extra shops must not throw the balance from King Street to Meadows Edge.
Finally, the brief is so wide that you could ride a coach and horses through it and not risk knocking down those stood on the pavement and that’s more than you can say about Bridge Street!
20th August - Land between the A6 and the River Derwent, Belper
If you want to hide something change it’s name well we have had "The Thorntons Site", "Derwent Street", "Meadows Edge" and now "The Land between the A6 and the River Derwent, Belper" what next. If you are interested in the Tesco proposals closely watch this location on the Amber Valley Site. The development brief documents should be out some time soon.
PS - Sorry I’ve a bit quiet but not a lot has visibly happened during the summer. It should all kick off soon!
25th January 2008
Congratulation to Amber Valley the planning section of the wen site is much improved and the comments we made before Christmas have been resolved - well done and thank you.
24th January - Morrison application granted!
Morrison granted permission to increase store size by 20%..
21st Dec 2007 - Amber Valley Planning WEB Site
Amber Valley are going to simplify the planning department site. In the very near future all the documents will presented as such and not as a long list of individual pages. So although it will take longer to download a document once you have you will have the full document, not one page from it. Further, they say they will shuffle the layout to make it more logical.
Good, thank you, I hope all the other changes are as helpfull.
Another View
10th November 2007 – The Belper Civic Forum have some nicely laid out and thought out leaflets that show some of the background on this subject. I'm not quite sure of the tenure of this body but they are a member of the Civic Trust. Judging by there output they clearly have access to official information and have funds to produce well produced leaflets.
It’s one of those leaflets that is of great interest in this case as I believe it distills the probable official position into something digestible. Have a read of The ‘Meadows Edge’ Category and dig down to the Belper at the Crossroads Leaflet, if you have not seen this yet it is well worth closer inspection and is not that far from my conclusions when I started this "My original ideas and opinions".
Remember the planning department even if they don’t like an application can only apply the rules as set out by government. Therefore, outlets like this one are very useful in the long term as they help us form an informed view.
Update
21st October 2007 - Update added pictures and made a few changes to other parts of the page. Some time soon I will update with a few pictures of the top end by the Triangle and try to show you how I think the road layout could be made simple in that area. This is getting too big to be one page so I will also look to break it down into several pages allowing more detail to be added to the individual sections.
BATS and the Labour Party
27th October - Update
I almost took this as a joke it is so bad but one arrived through my front door today and they seem to be delivering one to everybody in Belper. Personaly I think it is - bad, very bad and so amature, clearly biased and what has which partly you support got to do with the question? Come on Labour party why and what are you up to? Give me an answer and if I can I will publish it.
14th October 2007
Hu! I don’t know who is worse the Labour Party for the original survey or BATS for there "balanced considered" reply. At least I think the BATS response was largely "tongue in cheek", any way, go have a look and form your own opinion. Sorry, because of the way the BATS site is structured you many need to hunt for the posting. If so simply do a search for "A VERY IMPORTANT SURVEY".
PS I thought politicians were meant to reflect local opinion, which is clearly spit, and be neutral until they can clearly do so or am I just a little nieve?
So it has started
Update: This a picture of part of the lower end of Derwent Street the right hand half of the picture is the Ice-cream Factory and it has been cleaned up and boarded up since the publicity resulting from the Labour party "survey". Update: the ice-cream factory has now been demolished and is just a concrete platform with some loose bricks lying about.
12th October 2007
Tescos have applied to have part of the old Thorntons site demolished and cleared. Sadly unless you are very patient and can be bothered to hunt hard you will miss it. Try the following list of steps, sorry but I have not found an easier way
- Go to the Planning Application Register page of the Amber Valley Web Site
- Enter "AVA/2007/1232" into the Application Number field
- Click on the Lookup button (Don’t hit return/enter that just reloads the current page)
- Scroll down until you see the entry and click on the Orange reference number
- The supporting document can be found via the menu below the "Return to List" Button.
So this is, to my knowledge, the first application quietly hidden behind the Thorntons name. Although I don’t think anybody can object to this building being demolished it saddens me that it is hidden behind the Thorntons name and not publicised as being on behalf of Tesco.
I am sorry but despite all the Open Government promises it is difficult to find and access the documents on Government web sites at any level. It must cost a fortune as many government employees are expected to use these sites but even they cannot find the documents, sometimes even knowing the document title does not help.