A view from here

It’s beginning to look increasingly likely that Bath is going to take steps to substantially reduce the number of lorries going through the town by slapping an 18-tonne limit on Cleveland Bridge (just before the Fire Station), effectively stopping lorries from connecting between the A36 and A46 via the City centre & London Road. (See Bath Chronicle story from 24 February here.)

Pressure is building once again to make this happen, with local residents urging that support be given to Wiltshire Council to effect roadworks to the A350 in order to accommodate the extra traffic. Not surprisingly, local residents’ groups in Bath do not appear to be unduly concerned about the impact the changes they seek would have on local communities in Wiltshire.

This has to be of particular concern to the residents of Limpley Stoke, as well as Bradford on Avon. We’ve been here before, time and again, over the past 20 years. We may have to ramp up the rhetoric again to ensure that BoA and neighbouring villages do not attract more wayward HGVs… And the answer is NOT a Bradford on Avon bypass – it’s not practical, affordable, pragmatic or realistic. A complete dead end that skirts round the issues.

But this must be a topic of greater concern than one or other individual community. We need Wiltshire and BANES to work together to resolve this festering sore!! We need some joined-up thinking about how to facilitate the movement of goods without simply shifting the pain from one community to another…

I shall raise the issue at next week’s Board meeting of the Mid Wilts Economic Partnership…

Have finally got around to reading ‘Notwithstanding’ by Louis de Berniéres, a charming selection of tales from a rural community on the Surrey-Sussex border. It’s based on memories of the village in which the author lived as a child…

I grew up in rural Sussex at about the same time. Ours was called a linear village – it had evolved long and thin along a main road. But when my parents moved there in 1952 (just 50 miles from London) there was perhaps just one car an hour going past the house.

There are lots of elements in the stories that strike a chord … such as the character who keeps popping up doing his job of clearing the ditches and cutting the verges. No-one seems to know who he works for or who pays him… I well remember watching these people wielding their sickles. They demonstrated considerable skill – as well as an innate understanding of the land they were managing – occasionally keeping a willow whip and planting it in a way that would in time add to the landscape and also take water from the ditches.

The life described by de Berniéres is not some Arcadian idyll, it’s rooted in the memory of many of us. So where did it go? Clearly the rise in power of the supermarkets has much to do with it. As does the dominance of the financial services industry. The massive increase in the price of land has had a pernicious effect. So much government and vested interest energy has gone into promoting cities as the most effective working and living environment, yet a massive majority of city dwellers would apparently prefer to live in the country.

The way England has turned its back on Europe and has wed itself to all things American (from policing to culture), has also had a massive impact. Nothing new in saying that England has lost (if it ever had it) a sense of its own identity. But it has been losing its roots. That’s one reason why it’s so important to revive our small towns. The boom in technology has demonstrated not only that there is thirst for community, but also that our existing smaller communities can be revived thanks to that same technology.

The Localism Bill has plenty in it to make us wary. But it may also offer an opportunity for small towns to reassert their identity, to reclaim the power to decide. Some of the small towns around here have had charters for a thousand years. The past 60 years of obsession with hyper-consumerism and non-productive financial engineering is but a blip given that timeframe. It’s worth reading Louis de Berniéres with more than the usual pleasure. His gentle tales in ‘Notwithstanding’ have much to tell us about who we are today, who we have been and who we might be again.

Another link from Rachel Botsman’s book…

“Streetcar has cars parked in a dense network of dedicated spaces across London and several other UK cities, typically within a few minutes walk of your home or work. You can use one for as little as 30 minutes or as long as 6 months. They are reserved online or by phone, and can be collected and returned 24/7 using one of our high-tech smartcards. Our fleet is made up of brand new Volkswagen Golfs, Polo BlueMotions and BMWs (new in 2010). We also have vans if you need to move bulkier items, and 7-seaters when you need a few more seats. The cost of your usage is based on how long you have the car and how far you drive but unless you’re a heavy car user, the annual cost of Streetcar will be dramatically less than owning a car and with lots of the hassle of car ownership removed.”

There are seven sights currently in Bristol… and hiring costs from just £4.95 an hour!

Quoting from a wonderful website: www.letsdoitworld.org, which I came across in Rachel Botsman’s book ‘What’s Mine is Yours’ (see link to right).

“Let’s do it! initiative was born in a tiny country of Estonia, situated in northern Europe at the autumn of 2007. The idea was born in a conversation between few friends who realized that the roots of the massive illegal dumping habit lie in the lack of responsibility on every level. Things needed to get turned around for the better.

“There and then the ‘one day, one country’ concept was born. Instead of dividing the efforts over an extended period of time, it was time to act now and act together! Co-operation throughout the whole society – involving the state, NGO-s, private enterprises and vast number of active citizens, united the nation and on 3rd of May 2008 more than 50,000 people and hundreds of organizations together cleaned more than 10,000 tons of illegal garbage from the territory of Estonia.

“From there, neighbouring countries Latvia and Lithuania decided to join in and since then, more and more brave and inspired people from different countries have decided to make it happen for themselves and their people.”

There are now variations of this being brought together in a number of countries worldwide – including Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia,  Portugal, India, Ukraine, Brazil and the Netherlands. What a brilliant way of bringing people together – gives a whole new perspective on crowdsourcing!

I attended my first meeting on Monday as chairman of a new national policy forum called Small Towns for Tomorrow. This was originally set up four years ago but has only really got going in the past year, after one of its originators, Action for Market Towns, was awarded National Lottery funding for a number of projects.

One of the core issues we are dealing with is a problem highlighted by the Commission for Rural Communities: that towns are the ‘missing link’ in England’s spatial geography. Simply put, official statistics do not have a category for small towns. Those with a small population are placed in the rural category, while larger small towns are included in the general urban category. Small towns are diverse, generally with long histories, and arguably the backbone of the country. But the current status means that research and policies that affect about 1,600 communities – home to 11 million people (more than 21% of the English population) – are not defined according to the needs and specific attributes of these communities.

We need to change that approach, not least because, in my view, small towns have an unprecedented opportunity to flourish, thanks to three elements – the Localism agenda (which is being designed to allow communities to take the lead in planning and shaping the future of the places where they live), the opportunities arising out of the requirements of the Climate Change Act (reduction of 34% in emissions by 2020), and the availability (in theory!) of information and communication technologies. If we are going to move towards a low carbon economy, with a greater dependence on local produce and employment, then small towns offer an ideal solution.

The challenge is significant. A couple of days ago a lady from Eye, in Suffolk, wrote this to the Telegraph:

“SIR – Is there anyone out there who can help us? Eye is a small town. The council has taken away our youth club, is closing our recycling site and wants to close our library. The old people’s home is for sale, and our pub and public loo are closed. In exchange, we are offered a huge incinerator plant and new roads for all the lorries that will need to keep it full of toxic waste. Those in their glass tower in Ipswich, counting their golden perks, don’t seem to care for the small people. We pay taxes, break no laws, volunteer to decorate the town hall, litter pick, raise funds for churches and support our local schools. Life just does not seem fair.”

Small towns need to be at the heart of our future. A great opportunity, but much to be done!

Lurking in the stores of the Bristol Industrial Museum are bits and pieces of magnificent Victorian ironwork. Put together, they make an important piece of national industrial heritage – the first calender to be built in the UK under order from Stephen Moulton, who brought rubber processing technology to England in 1849 when he set up in business in Bradford on Avon.

A calender is a series of hard pressure rollers used to form or smooth a sheet of material. This particular model is 2.6m long, 1.8m deep and 2.5m high. Its weight is measured in tons, not pounds! (see photo). For the past few decades, this magnificent pioneering piece of machinery has been lingering, in pieces, in Bristol. Now they want to return it to us, but first we have to see how much it will cost… one estimate is that it could be as much as £250,000! A meeting takes place of interested parties tomorrow evening, so we’ll see what happens. It would be a significant piece of urban art/heritage/archeology in the heart of the town. So let’s hope an answer can be found that is practical and, somehow, affordable. Watch this space.

Just received copy of the 2nd edition of Corporate Social Responsibility: the Corporate Governance of the 21st Century, published by the International Bar Association (‘the global voice of the legal profession’) and Wolters Kluwer – and edited by senior international lawyer Ramon Mullerat… 600 pages of wisdom described in the foreword as “a thoughtful and provocative work as well as a multi-faceted and professional tool for all those interested in keeping pace with today’s evolving business climate”.

I was invited to contribute chapter four: ‘The soul of the corporation’.  Sample paragraph: “For too long, business leaders have hidden behind the carapace of process and function. Happy to adopt common sense solutions at home, they have forgotten how to trust their common sense at work. They have ignored or forgotten one of the most fundamental of human values – do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. Thankfully however, there are business leaders who recognize that, if for no other reason than self-interest, they must move out of the usual tramlines of thought. They are learning to listen to their intuition, seeking to understand their role in a world that we must all share.”

Serious and intensive amount of material within its pages… yours from Amazon for £167.20, discounted from the publisher’s price of £176!!

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Spent today at a first-rate conference on community planning and the Localism agenda, organised by Creating Excellence (of which I am director)… Illuminating contributions from specialists at the Tipperary Institute with their own experiences of community planning within Ireland… Showed the great value of Creating Excellence in providing knowledge and know-how for people involved in regeneration and sustainable communities – including Design South West and the South West Design Review Panel. Most funding has been lost due to the abolition of the RDAs etc, but everyone involved is determined to keep the organisation going. Watch this space.

I’ve just been reading a fascinating little tome called The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford, who is both an academic and the owner of a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia (US). It’s a lament at the decline of what the Americans call ‘shop class’ – means training in things like woodworking, auto repair and metalworking – and the wider issue of how we have been systematically deprived of the need to think.

He quotes Frederick Winslow Taylor, who wrote The Principles of Scientific Management exactly 100 years ago. In the interests of scientific efficiency and cost, Taylor said that “All possible brainwork should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning or lay-out department.” Crawford also quotes Taylor as writing the the “full possibilities” of his system would not be “realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller calibre and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system”.

You realize how, despite what are frankly little more than cosmetic fripperies for today’s employees, the principle remains. Crawford notes that some Mercedes cars no longer have an oil dipstick. In one way it’s made life easier for the driver – an electronic message tells him ‘Service required’ and he outsources the labour of checking oil levels to others. But, more worryingly, it removes any sense of responsibility or interest between the driver and his machine. Instead it becomes the concern of the dealership who employs the service mechanic, “of Daimler AG, who hold the service plan warranty on their balance sheet; and finally Mercedes shareholders, who collectively dissipate the financial risk of your engine running low on oil. There are now layers of collectivized, absentee interest in your motor’s oil level, and no single person is responsible for it. If we understand this under the rubric of ‘globalization’, we see that the tentacles of that wondrous animal reach down into things that were once unambiguously our own: the amount of oil in a man’s crankcase”. The lack of a dipstick is not down to some new technical wizardry – running low on oil will still damage the engine. “The facts of physics have not changed,”, concludes Crawford. “What has changed is the place of those facts in our consciousness, and therewith the basic character of material culture”. It’s the difference between “active engagement and distracted consumption”.

Crawford concludes this appeal for a rethink… “We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power, with such devices as the separation of legislative, executive and judicial functions. But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible… The consolation we seek in shopping serves only to narcotize us against a recognition of these facts… Too often, the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men. Having a few around requires an economy in which the virtue of independence is cultivated, and a diversity of human types can find work to which they are suited.”

Heady stuff – mixing tales of forensic wrenching of cylinder heads and intake manifolds with references to Heidegger, who, as of course you know (!) was celebrated for his “existential and phenomenological explorations of the question of Being“. But he does provide a demanding perspective on the way that work has evolved in the century since Frederick Winslow Taylor penned his monograph. Well worth the read and well worth thinking through the consequences of his argument…

Great story in today’s Observer that, as they say, reflects the early originality of the Internet… It’s by John Naughton. It includes the following:

“… A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. “Like many people”, they blogged, “we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”

“They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet.

“What’s exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, before the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of innovation is needed. The way in which the Mubarak regime was able to shut down the net provided a sobering reminder of the power of governments that are prepared to take extreme measures. As the country disappeared from cyberspace I was suddenly struck by the thought that if PCs still came with steam-age built-in dial-up modems, Egyptians could have logged on to servers abroad and stayed connected. The only way of stopping that would be to shut down the entire phone system. And even Mubarak might have balked at that.”

Good news for the town… the Kingston Mills scheme won the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) 2010 Planning Award for Local Regeneration and Renewal, announced yesterday at a ceremony in London. Congrats to architects Nash Partnership, who submitted the entry. The judges comments read:

“The development will enhance the physical environment of this long-derelict site in the heart of historic Bradford on Avon, adding to the quality of the local townscape and increasing the attractiveness of the town centre for residents and visitors. The flood protection and energy generation proposals respond to climate change. In redeveloping a brownfield site and providing residential and business accommodation in the heart of the town, the development addresses important sustainable development issues. The approach to site planning and design is excellent, being both sensitive and creative in its response to the constraints of the site and its surroundings.”

This is an important endorsement for the site, which should generate additional interest, particularly in the commercial side of the scheme. It’s also an endorsement of the considerable work put in by the community over many, many years – going back to the closure of the site in 1994! I’ve been privileged to have led the community process since 2003, when the BoA Development Trust (which I was chairing at the time) obtained the help of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in breaking the deadlock that had arisen between the town and the site’s then owners, Taylor Woodrow. (And none of that work could have been done without the massive help and support of Colin Johns, who co-instigated the Development Trust back in 2000 and who is one of the greatest unsung heroes of the town.)

In 2004, The Prince’s Foundation led an Enquiry by Design, at which agreement was found over a masterplan. A series of Stakeholder Meetings was agreed in order to provide a forum for discussion over progress for the site – and we have been meeting regularly ever since, with the most recent Stakeholder Meeting taking place just a couple of weeks ago. Linden acquired the site from Taylor Woodrow in 2007 and we have had an excellent relationship with them as the scheme has moved towards completion.

Of course, what we’ve ended up with has had to be a compromise. But now the scheme is making progress towards completion – and has received this accolade – we need to embrace it, make it our own and make it work.