Great Western Coffee Shop

Good to see the new Transport for New Homes (https://www.transportfornewhomes.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/garden-village-visions.pdf) report making the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-53050801?).

The Melksham Neighbourhood Plan (http://www.melkshamneighbourhoodplan.org) is online and Melksham Town Council and Melksham Without Parish Council are consulting on a draft of it for a period of 6 weeks between Monday 1st June - Monday 13th July 2020.   I am posting up here in the TransWilts line board as there is much to be learned from the Transport for New Homes report for Melksham, and I am delighted to see many of the lessons reported by TfNH have arisen in the plan.   Also interesting to see how similar their bus and rail integration logo is to the one that Lisa came up with to represent Option 24/7 (http://option247.uk) a few years ago.

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/tfnho24720200616.jpg)

From the report:


For Melksham:

"Garden Communities are envisaged as sociable, green communities, each with a centre that is easily walked to and a transport system built for sustainability." 

So many of the elements exist and are proposed for plugging together in the neighbourhood plan ... yet we currently have a disjoint public transport system with links and common information missing, and cycling and walking routes that are good in parts but then come to an end spilling major cycling flows onto "A" class roads between barriers, and with waymarking is some key places notable by its absence.

The neighbourhood plan is full of good intent. But the pictures in the TfNH report illustrating how it really should not be look exactly as if they could have been taken in certain Melksham locations built invert recent years.  We need to make sure that the neighbourhood plan prevails - the irony being that if it does, it will be for the good of the developers making for very much more saleable houses with excellent links to the town on cycle and foot, and an integrated public transport network fit for the health, climate and future.

Melksham might be in a minority. Long Marston doesn't exactly get rave reviews. Grazeley Garden Village also doesn't appear to come up smelling of roses. Grazeley was marked in the map as Basingstoke Hampshire, which I imagine could offend some politics.

Didcot is a 'Garden Town', and we have had lots of fancy brochures and promises.

But the only thing either delivered or planned are 1000's of houses, I have seen no plans (as in planning permission applied for) for any of the promised infrastucture improvements.

There is apparently a pot of money set aside for some of these infrastucture improvements but this money wasn't automatic as it had to be applied for even though we are still getting the 1000's of houses, and I am not convinced we will ever see it.

As far as i can tell the whole thing is just a load of marketing spin.

As an aside when I received the Garden Town Brochure I had to point out to the council/publisher that Didcot was on the GWML and not the WCML, an easy mistake to make! With such basic errors it didn't give me any reassurance that this was a quality well thought out document or that I could believe its promises.