Great Western Coffee Shop

No mention, however, of re-opening the Portishead Branch line for passengers.  :-X

Not within his remit. It lies within North Somerset.

I know.  That's why I posted with a 'lips sealed' emoticon.

What a wasted opportunity, though.  Nigel Ashton and Elfan ap Rees should be hanging their heads in shame, for taking such a unilateral decision to opt North Dibley out of the whole West of England mayor venture.

No, it wouldn't have changed the result at all - and nor did I suggest that it would have done so.  But the inclusion of the innately conservative, and safely Conservative, North Somerset Council would have made the new Conservative West of England Mayor's position all the more powerful in deciding issues such as transport, housing and business development.

 ::)

You sure about that? Must be the largest PC in the country :-)

Could be a mistake, but could be FTN expressing his opinion.

The correct name is indeed North Somerset Council.  However, those of us who live and/or work in the local area, and often have to wonder at the perverse decisions and actions of our local council, have been known to refer to it rather derisively as North Dibley Council, or North Somerset Parish Council.  Myself included.  ::)

May I offer our apologies for any confusion this may have caused to readers from outside our parish.  ;) :D ;D

Similarly, the use of lower case for the names of authorities choosing not to join the West of England Combined Authority.

Blessed be the fruit.

The inclusion or lack of a space between North Somerset Parish Council in action and North Somerset inaction can really only be appreciated by those who are unfortunate enough to live in the aforesaid areal. The latest bout of  Uriah Heep hand wringing by the current leader and deputy over the number of homes required to be built by the government,over the next few years, is hypocrisy at its most nauseous.

Makes me wonder why we need the Western Super Mayor (thanks, bignosemac!) and the extra layer of bureaucracy. I thought he was supposed to innovate and drive transport forward, not the opposite.

Ironically in North Somerset we had no say in the Metro Mayor, therefore he should have no say in our Railway!

That is just one example of how north somerset parish council isn't as detached as is made out.

At the risk of banishment to the pedantry step, I shall point out that NSDC had a say, but opted out. That might prove either a jolly good idea, or bring about the demise of the Western Super Mayor, or both.

Sounds like Dibley Parish Council aka North Somerset and the Portishead bus routes. I would love to see a tree lope along the aforesaid branch line, but I will settle for some further lopping just now. If an oak and an ash got so entangled might they be said to be eloping ? Ahhh...... I'll get my coat.



Edit note: Quote marks fixed, for clarity. CfN.

I have lost three or four nearside wing mirrors on my van, due to the frequent need to tuck in to the hedge to allow oncoming vehicles to pass, but having occasionally fouled the outstanding foliage where the hedge has been strimmed - but only between ground level and just below the height of my van's wing mirror.  ???

I've just been reminded of this phrase used by someone here (Chris from Nailsea? Or I am just assuming it's him because of Nailsea?) to describe the, erm, parochial tendency of North Somerset District Council, on reading this:
Particularly that last sentence.
http://www.citymetric.com/politics/manchester-shows-why-english-devolution-should-be-city-regions-3387

Ok, I should probably find out about this Durkheim character now.

[Yes, there must be somewhere more appropriate for this, but I don't know where. Admins please do move it!]

Thing is, West of England (or 'Bristol' as sane people call it) isn't surrounded by independent mill towns - it's surrounded by satellites that were deliberately developed to facilitate its growth. As far as I can see, Bristol's boundary has not changed significantly since 1951, so we now have a situation where the region's economic engine is managed independently from its fuel supply, as it were. To make things worse, it seems South Glos would always rather compete than cooperate.

Perhaps we should be grateful that North Som (lovely though many of its people surely are) is, politically, nothing more than a bad joke.

Bristol's equivalent of mill towns would be in the coalfields of, you guessed it, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset: Coalpit Heath, Pensford and so on. And Keynsham of course – it's only a matter of convention that a place making chocolate is called a factory not a mill. Well, apart from the lack of milling.

But the Western Super Mayor (the Mayor of Woe?) seems so far happier to read his contract than use it.

The bigger population centres - Nailsea, Clevedon, Keynsham, Thornbury and Yate - were all quite small before their postwar expansion as satellites; Bradley Stoke, Emerson's Green, Warmley, Longwell Green and Patchway are straightforward contiguous suburbs.

Here's a modest proposal: Why not expand Bristol's boundary to follow the M4 from the Severn to the old Midland line at Westerleigh,  then more or less follow this and the A4174 down to Keynsham; leaving out Dundry Hill, it could loop south of Bristol Airport, then make a beeline for the coast somewhere just south of Clevedon.

Oops, I just annexed the Nordzomerzetland.

Why leave out Dundry? Anyway, what you've described is my idea of some sort of Greater Bristol. Maybe that would need to include Yate and so on as well. Probably not just my idea either. But Bristol, as in the Bristol City Council area, would be ridiculous that big; however, atm it's ridiculously small, excluding almost half the contiguous urban area.

Another question is whether "Bristol", "Bath", "South Glos", should still exist as separate LAs post-WoE (and obviously similar for Greater Manc, West Mids and so on). Maybe they should, on the subsidiarity idea, but as currently set up it seems to involve either crazy fragmentation (such as TfL not being able to implement its own schemes because most of London's roads belong to Boroughs) or duplication (everywhere else).

Well ... actually the production of chocolate does involve milling, both early on (when it's called cocoa) and at the refining step of making confectionery. On the other hand, an early cotton mill was called that because it had a water wheel on its end wall, and had nothing to do with what happened inside it. the name stuck, perhaps also because millwrights would have erected them (at least until the age of steam and the later bigger machinery).

Have you been there? Actually you're right, we may need to keep the high ground for defensive purposes when Rees-Mogg establishes Gilead with its capital in Clevedon.


I've always thought of Bristol as being more-or-less comparable to Nottingham - you know, that city in the East Midlands, about the same size as Bristol, with a spiffy new tram system? But until you said that it'd never occurred to me to look at that city's boundary:

http://open.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/ROCertificates/NottinghamCityCouncilAdministrativeBoundary.pdf

For 'Arnold' read 'Bradley Stoke'; for 'Carlton' read 'Emerson's Green'... what are they doing right that we aren't?

Thinking outside the parochial boundary and not shouting, 'Gerroff my land!'  Or to put it another way, they don't think they're something special and different and need to remain unsullied by 'the others'.

Or... oh, I get it; there's a thing called 'Nottinghamshire', which - who knew? - turns out to be like a county that goes like all the way round Nottingham. Maybe Bristol could do with one of them? Now lessee, what could we call it..?

Was there last Saturday. And in Clevedon! Scarlet's, yummy cafe with a view of the pier. No cafe in Dundry but the views are better.

Nothing, if that map's anything to go by. They have areas of their city which are excluded from the administration, comparable to the ones we have.

The pub opposite the church is quite agreeable.

I went for a walk along East Dundry Lane the other week. It brought to mind my mental image of what the Northern Irish border must have been like in the early eighties, with massively reinforced farm gates, fly tipping and signs of burnt out cars all along the way. I wasn't aware of any snipers, but then I wouldn't have been, would I?


All depends on who 'they' are in this context. My understanding is that NET was born out of cooperation between Nottingham City and Notts County. And there's the rub. I don't give a monkey's who empties the bins in Warmley, nor do I care if worshippers in Patchway consider Gloucester Cathedral to be their Mother Church. We need something like Avon, but smaller and not gerrymandered to ensure the tail wags the dog. The problem is neatly summed-up, I think, by this editorial from the Bristol Mercury in 1888:


Edit: Fixed quotes, hopefully

Hmm.  ::)

While I didn't invent the phrase, I do acknowledge that I adopted it, and indeed defined it in a previous post on the Coffee Shop forum.

I've therefore now moved a few previous posts, from various existing topics, and merged them here in this combined topic - which isn't specific to bus or rail, but hopefully explains what the 'Dibley' reference means.

 :-X