Owen Temple

I promised to update you on the situation of the trees and grassed areas around Consett Town Centre, so here it is.

Derwentside District Council’s Executive considered a report around January of this year in relation to ‘Town and Village Centres’ (or Placemakers, as the initiative was proposed to be called).  Around £800,000 of the £1.5m budget was identified to be spent on ‘off street car parking’ around the District, and the Car Parks were listed in the report.  The proposal is, generally, to take out the trees and grassed areas and provide a number of additional tarmac’d parking spaces.  Following on from that decision, a programme of work has been arranged and the projects are being picked up ‘one by one’.  So plans for the work at Albert Road and Edith Street have been drawn up and the work costed, but the council would go through the Planning process before any work was authorised.

I’ve seen the “plans” referred to above which would involve the removal of trees and grassed areas on four sites: the edges of Albert Road car park, the edges of Edith Street car park next to the parish church, the grassed mound at the junction of Front Street and Albert Road (formerly a Baptist church) and the parkland to the rear of Albert Road, Edith Street and Alexandra Street which the Residents Association have been working all year to raise money to get it landscaped as open space.

These plans would turn Consett into a grey parking lot, undoing the work of the last twenty years to build some greenery into the environment.  

The only slight encouragemt I had was the assurances I got that nothing would happen without going through Planning. This would at least give warning and enable opposition to orchestrate its approach.

If you care about this it would be good if you wrote to Peter Reynolds, Director of Environmental Services, Civic Centre Consett DH8 5JA telling him your feelings and asking for assurances that no action will be undertaken before there has been full public consultation. The more evidence there is of popular feeling the better.

I will certainly undertake to let you know if I hear anything else.