Friday 17 June 2011

Tesco, Thanet District Council and The Isle of Thanet Gazette a view from the unaccredited media

Being part of the unaccredited media and feeling vaguely like the oppressed press, I duly went out and bought a copy of the Soaraway Isle of Thanet Gazette as our local soaraway councillor calls it.

The papers website has gone totally bananas, all their Thanet feeds seem to have died and their Thanet articles now appear in different places with no links to earlier articles about the same subject. I sometimes wonder if large organisations can make a sensible decision at all.

As you will all know, I, being unaccredited, no longer get the council press releases and as my computer seems to have a similar problems to the even bigger one at Goggle, to which my one is but “shallow thought” and not worthy to……., I don’t seem to be getting all the council’s press releases via RSS.


 Anyway my understanding is that the council have passed the plans for the Tesco at Arlington House by their usual majority 1, see http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Arlington-House-plans-met-anger/story-12788690-detail/story.html and http://www.thanet.gov.uk/news/latest_press_releases/arlington_planning_decision.aspx

Then things get really confusing as according to the Gazette there is already anew Tesco in Margate with traffic problems, see


The story starts:

“MOTORISTS illegally parking on zigzag lines outside a new Tesco were caught red-handed after a tip-off to the Isle of Thanet Gazette.”

Then goes on to say:

In just 45 minutes PCSO supervisor Andy Howe, 43, caught nine motorists parking illegally outside the store in Hereson Road, Margate.”

I think someone here may need breathalysing, perhaps me, as I thought Hereson Road is in Ramsgate.

Then it goes on to say:

He [PCSO supervisor Andy Howe] said: "I've spoken to management at Tesco and we are trying to figure out a long-term fix. My suggestion is Tesco pay for the removal of the zebra crossing and put in a traffic island to make a safe place to cross and slow traffic down. Hereson school is not here any more."


Is this just me again or wasn’t the School site, at the other end of Cecilia Road to the traffic lights, bought by St Ethelberts Infants and Junior School, perhaps the police see younger children as needing a zebra crossing even less, being. What? Expendable.

The pictures are courtesy of Thanet district Council and relate to a time before I was blacklisted.

10 comments:

  1. And of course access to the Montefiore surgery.

    Clowns and planning (or lack of) come to mind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Go on to Google Street View. Most of Ramsgate is classed as Margate on there !!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michael,

    I guess you mean the old Hereson 'Primary', at the top end of Lillian road, which became St Gertrude's Nursery and Infants (part of St Ethelberts Primary School).

    [The main Hereson secondary school building on the right hand side of the road was demolished and redeveloped for housing.]

    I suspect parents taking their children to St. Gertrude's might also want to use the zebra crossing at the end of Lillian Road !

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tesco builds a store and, all of a sudden, we have to redesign our town to fit around the store. It should never have been given planning permission in the first place. It's too big for the location and traffic problems were bound to ensue. Another useless decision by our useless Councillors.

    ReplyDelete
  5. 10.10 I don’t think that Tesco would have required planning permission to turn a shop into a shop and I don’t think that the council could have reasonably reused planning permission to change the sign outside from Busy S’s to Tesco’s.

    ReplyDelete
  6. They may not need planning permission to convert the shop but they do need planning permission for changes to the front of the building, signage and the installation of an ATM machine. They would also have required a licence to sell alcohol.

    There were plenty of opportunities in the process for local Councillors to make it clear that this wasn't the right development in the right place and to raise concerns about parking and the proximity of the zebra crossing. Is this not the sort of detail we expect Councillors to raise?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous 15.57,

    The various planning applications need to be consider on their own merits however - not on the basis of other unrelated issues.

    The changes to the shop front need to be considered on the basis of whether the change to the *appearance* of the building is approved.

    The delegated report notes the public objections to the changes to the shopfront on the basis of road safety, and notes that the proposed sliding doors at the front of the building do not open onto the pavement and therefore do not adversely affect road safety.

    Refusal of planning permission does need to be done on some justifiable basis, otherwise it is subject to be overturned on appeal.

    .

    ReplyDelete
  8. Re: The Hereson Road, Margate, cock-up. The Gazette is these days sub-edited in Chelmsford, so an Essex-based sub would not have the local knowledge to pick up that error. Though one wonders how the mistake crept into the copy in the first place...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Stop the clocks, close the curtains,lock up your hopes and dreams for Margate for she will soon be dead.
    Tesco will in one fair swoop sound the death bell for all retailers in Margate when they open their new shiny store....every little hurts.

    Where is the logic,support,creativity in giving in to Tesco and their total stranglehold on Thanet. Second only to the ambitions of Travelodge to have an outlet on every corner, we have to ask what exactly are this council trying to achieve with this ill advised and widely opposed development.
    Could it be that once again the people of Thanet have been ignored by those at Cecil Sq. Shame on you TDC, yet again you have sold us and Margate short.... for what ?

    It appears that Kcc have already carried out their initial traffic survey and are committed to the installation of traffic lights at the rail station roundabout, remember the last time we had lights on the seafront...
    Regeneration...no,not in a million years. Good old fashioned favouritism.... certainly looks that way.

    ReplyDelete
  10. (1) According to the Gazette, it's estimated that Tesco will bring back 30% of the shoppers from WC, but at the cost of taking 10% of business away from existing Margate traders. So (as presumably many of these people will be using cafes, hairdressers, etc), I don't think that's such a bad trade-off.

    (2) Traffic lights are far safer for cyclists than roundabouts. So as a non-driver & cyclist they're always welcomed by me.

    (3) No-one else seems to be offering a realistic solution to the Arlington House area.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.