Death of Stockport Announced by GMSF

The poverty of thought that passes for planning today was underlined with the recent Greater Manchester Strategic Framework (GMSF) launch. Having bizarrely invited landowners and developers to suggest sites (how is this ‘planning’? - I never got taught this at planning school), they simply put a red line around four bits of Green Belt to the south of Stockport, a town with a proud history, excellent transport links and plenty of spare urban land, but in desperate need of regeneration (see ‘Jones the Planner’ for a great description) and consigned Stockport itself to the dustbin.

High Lane is a typical Green Belt site, now earmarked for 4,000 houses. It is pleasant farmland that stops High Lane, Marple and Hazel Grove merging. The area relies on the A6 which is already congested all day with average speeds of 5-10mph. GMSF suggests that the much-loved Middlewood Way could be sacrificed to provide a tram-train link to Manchester, but this form of transport doesn’t currently exist anywhere in Britain. In any case, it would require a Transport and Works Act Order, cost over £400 million, and would take 15-20 years to build based on the experience of Metrolink (tram) schemes. By this time the volume house builders will be long gone.

Yes, we do need more, quality, well located and affordable housing. But we should look where there is already land or underused buildings next to good public transport services with spare capacity. The obvious place is Stockport centre which has a surprisingly interesting urban landscape but a centre like a swiss cheese. I wouldn’t live there now, but I probably would if we could create sustainable development based on European models.

Of course, GMSF did assume that some housing would be developed in town centres (1,500 in the case of Stockport). But the business model of volume house builders revolves around large new greenfield developments. If Green Belt sites like High Lane are released, these will be developed first, and the opportunity for real regeneration in Stockport (and other satellite towns that desperately need development like Ashton, Hyde, Oldham, etc., etc.,) will be lost for a generation. Forget about the 1,500, Stockport will be lucky to build 150.

​So what to do? First we need a proper, objective urban capacity and design study, together with an assessment of what is needed to make towns liveable again. And then we need to do it, rather than take the lazy way out with the red pen by building on the Green Belt.
Britain used to lead the world in town planning, and people came from all over the world to see our garden cities, new towns and other wonders. But no more. Our leaders in Greater Manchester need to get on a cheap Ryanair flight to The Netherlands or Germany to see how it should be done. In the meantime it is left to local people to do the planning for the planners.

Birmingham reborn

New Street, New Start they say. The big city saddled with the black hole of New Street station has spent £750 million on New Street and another £128 million to return trams to the streets for the first time in 62 years. So what does Brum look like now, and how does the transport function?

The standard image of Birmingham is big but boring; motorways, urban sprawl, industry, sixties concrete. Not in the top twenty UK places to visit, and that hurts particularly as there is a lot of great museums, architecture and spaces to visit. But Birmingham is changing. Concrete is crumbling, cars tamed, the permanent city-centre bus jam has been banished and several billion pounds on urban regeneration.


New Street is the main arrival point and was the weakest link with dingy platforms and a bare concrete concourse stuffed under an insipid shopping centre. So what does £750m buy you?  The new soaring curvy atrium is definitely second-city, with plenty of space, and a ginormous Pret-a-Manger. But nothing has been spent on the platforms, still hidden in their hole and accessed through colour coded lounges that are neither coloured nor lounges. I don’t know about you, but I have some seats and a sofa in my lounge. And some colours too. And I can find my toilet, a task that was beyond me at New Street. And don’t even ask about left luggage – perhaps they could find some space under the stairs - that's where I store mine. On arrival at New Street there's no street maps, no local public transport information, and generally no-one around to help. I’m not sure which way to go, and only find the exit I want at the second attempt.

Finding the station on the way back is almost as difficult, unless you follow signs for the shopping centre. The old station was buried under a shopping centre but is now promoted to be part of the ‘new’ Grand Central shopping centre. Time to rename New Street as ‘Grand Central’?

What about the services? Pick a German city at random and find a unified suburban train network, probably an underground Metro and overground trams too. But Birmingham has unaccountably split their transport by diverting trains to Snow Hill, a decent walk away. The single new tram line links the stations, but meanders at walking pace through precious city space and arrivesup apologetically at the side entrance to New Street. Plans for a new HS2 station will fragment the train network further. Surely a priority must be a proper cross city tunnel for trains and trams?

Of course every German city has integrated fares for all public transport too, but English expectations are so low I’m not surprised New Street has no sign of where to catch a bus or how I buy a ticket, or if I can buy one that allows me to use trams and trains too. To emphasise the lack of integration, I enter a ‘Travel Shop’ near New Street and ask for a public transport map. The staff look confused. Apparently they work for a bus company and send me back to the station.

So we’ve made it outside, what to see? Birmingham has an impressive Town Hall, Art Gallery, etc., together with some opulent pubs, banks and shops which show how rich and important Victorian Birmingham was. But sixties carmageddon and concretopia (also the name of a surprisingly readable book) has eliminated most other evidence. Some nice old buildings survived around Gas Basin on the Worcester and Birmingham canal: the remnants have been used as a backdrop for regeneration and I head off there. The walk from New Street takes you through the bland, lumpen Mailbox (a former sorting office converted into upmarket shops) to the Cube (ditto). Gas Street Basin itself is actually quite small. And the quality of the new stuff is shocking. The Premier Inn is awful beyond belief, blank brick walls, privatised space, clumsy fire escape, looming like Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Even worse is the lumpen Crowne Plaza behind. Between this and the canal there are plans to squeeze another 1.2 million square feet of mixed office, flats, leisure, retail etc. The artists’ impressions look ominous and desperate. All around are weeds, litter, random car parking and underused buildings. It's clear that Birmingham still doesn’t really understand people.

Out in the Jewellery Quarter things look up. Despite a general air of decay, many of the buildings have character. At the centre is the slightly shabby neoclassical St Paul's church in a square of interesting buildings housing independent businesses. Organic growth has produced real regeneration and real local jobs. Walking back past Snow Hill, a solitary baroque terracotta archway with a Great Western Railway Crest stands defiant against the monstrous blank wall of a car park.
So what did I learn? New New Street looks nice, but the result of £1 billion is disappointing. How can you spend this much without touching the platforms or providing space for HS2? Or somewhere to sit? Big cities desperately need to think bigger and integrate their trains. And maybe integrate fares too. There are some good regeneration projects, but still too much reliance on ‘icons’. But the spirit of enterprise is there, pushing Birmingham to tear itself down and build itself up again. I just hope it lasts longer than the 1960s.

I come to praise Himalayan Balsam, not to bash it …

In a nature reserve near you, hardy work parties of wardens and volunteers will have ‘bashed’ the dreaded exotic invader Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera or HB) all summer. Introduced to Britain in 1839, it is our fastest growing annual plant with beautiful flowers and explosive seed pods loved by children. But according to Natural England and the Environment Agency it:

·         Is a highly invasive annual weed, which can reduce biological diversity by outcompeting native plants for space, light and nutrients

·         Restricts access to the river, leaves autumn river banks bare of supporting vegetation and prone to erosion and the dead plant material increases flood risk.

·       Attracts pollinators away from native species, reducing the genetic diversity of native species and fitness by reducing seed set.

But the charge sheet feels a bit hysterical. Can any plant be this bad? What is the evidence? Once you start to dig a bit, there’s not much. A few short term studies, one that looks at the effect on just a single native species, some that don’t really support the conclusions put about by our conservation bodies at all. Few seem to have been subjected to peer review, a scientific process that allows us to be fairly certain about the results. Indeed given the urgency of the calls to eradicate HB, not much at all. But what do the experts actually say?
A study by Hulme and Brenner[i] showed that more species are present if you remove Himalayan Balsam (HB), but noted ‘in open and frequently disturbed riparian vegetation, many of the species negatively influenced by Impatiens are widespread ruderal[1] species. Thus while several authors recommend its removal such action may only lead to a compensatory increase in the abundance of other non-native species and thus fail to achieve desired conservation goals.’ This doesn’t suggest that there is much effect on the sort of native plants that we might want to conserve. TIckner[ii] compared the competitive ability of nettle and Balsam sometimes our native nettle loses out. But nettle only grows where there are a lot of nutrients – the sort of sites that have little diversity of other native British plants anyway.

Chittka and Schürkens[iii] reported that suggested competition for pollinators might reduce the amount of viable seed set. But they only looked at the effects on Stachys palustris, which is pretty common anyway, and even then it was a one season trial. This is a long way from showing that in a real habitat HB affects the viability of even this one species which is of no real conservation interest, let alone other species. We know that HB has high-sugar nectar and flowers for a long time. But of course it might just support more bees in the medium term leaving the same number of bees available to pollinate other flowers. And finally Tanner[iv] looked at the effect on invertebrates. The evidence was inconclusive and fertile ground for a follow-up study.

I can’t find a scientific paper that looks at the alleged erosion-enhancing effects of HB; all the evidence seems to be anecdotal. HB often inhabits urban river banks where flows are unusually peaked, favouring the sort of erosion that HB is blamed for. It might of course be that HB is just good at colonising river banks that are already prone to erosion and that this is nothing to do with HB.
So there you have it. The studies are generally short-term and focus on the disturbed, urban and the sort of nutrient-rich habitats that HB favours rather than more important plant communities. None of the studies ‘prove’ that HB reduces biological diversity in the long or medium term, or that it is responsible for erosion, or for reducing genetic diversity. Of course, the scientists themselves are honest about pointing these issues out in their paper, and state that more research is needed. But these caveats are never reported in the campaign against HB.
That there is so little hard evidence that HB harms conservation is bad enough. Even worse than this, Wadsworth looked at control strategies and concluded that they are ‘rarely effective in the long term’. Now I’ve ‘bashed Balsam’ myself, enjoyed it, and even met some nice people. It is certainly true that HB gets in the way and takes up a lot of space. There may be a need to remove the plant where it blocks a path. But in an age of austerity should we really be spending millions of hours and millions of pounds fighting an enemy when the case is so weak?

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[1] Scientific name for plants that tolerate disturbance. Examples include docks, dandelions and thistles.

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[i] Hulme and Brenner 2006: Assessing the impact of Impatiens glandulifera on riparian habitats: partitioning diversity components following species removal (Journal of Applied Ecology2006 43, 43–50)

[ii] Tickner et al 2001: Hydrology as an influence on invasion

[iii] Chittka and Schürkens 2001: Successful invasion of a floral market

[iv] Tanner et Al 2013: Impacts of an Invasive Non-Native Annual Weed, Impatiens glandulifera, on Above- and Below-Ground Invertebrate Communities in the United Kingdom

Transporting Burnley into the future

While the big rail money is splashed on London and HS2, and Northern rail electrification is cancelled, what about Burnley? Robbed of direct trains to Manchester in the 1960s and industry in the 1980s, better transport links are now seen as essential if Burnley is to gain from the 'Manchester' effect'.

Lancashire have quietly beavered away with their EU Citizens Rail project to provide a new hourly train service to Manchester appropriately from Manchester Road station, and have funded a new ticket office. Externally it is functional and a bit ugly; clearly not the ‘attractive and iconic gateway to the town’ promised in the brochure. And no sign of the promised ‘coffee cart’. But definitely an improvement on no building; at least you can wait in the dry. The open cycle racks and locked wheelie bin compound shows the comparative priority given to waste and cyclists. The forecourt is overdesigned and over-engineered - a lot of cash has gone into making life difficult for pedestrians in an unimaginative, 1980s way. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that a better job was possible for half the money.

There is no sign of a buses apart from an old bus shelter on the otherwise untouched Blackburn platform, so it’s a walk into town. The diagrammatic map at the station is confusing and one of the good commercial maps now universal in London would've been cheaper anyway. There is the inevitable pedestrian-hostile roundabout. Then a nice canal-side development (visitor centre closed), and a lovely Victorian town hall and theatre, evidence of Burnley’s proud past. But opposite, the unpleasant 1960s Chaddesley House shows the extent of the subsequent architectural and social decline. Occupied, but barely maintained by social services, at least there is a Wetherspoon’s a few doors down to cope with the fallout. And their coffee is good and cheap. In the middle distance looms a vast Tesco Extra. No doubt it was justified as 'edge of centre as it hollowed out the town centre. Only the football club has performed in Burnley in the last couple of decades.

I take the new train. Every hour a 30 year old diesel with a grotty toilet and ripped seats strolls towards Manchester (less than 30 miles) in a leisurely 53 minutes. It dawdles and then stops and inches gingerly across the new single track ‘Todmorden Curve’, delivered late but maybe that was just as well since the current gently rusting trains have only just become available. We pick up speed downhill, but driving is quicker most times of the day and certainly cheaper if you are on your own - £12 return in the peak, or £10 if you can. In the big city, if you want to continue your journey by Metrolink you will need a new ticket; by bus there is theoretically ‘plusbus’, but you have to buy it at the same time as the rail ticket and understand pages of confusing conditions. For instance, it claims to be valid throughout Greater Manchester, but the validity maps only show central Manchester. Very, very few people use Plusbus. We don't want your southern integrated ticketing here, lad.

This is the 'Northern Powerhouse', or 'Northern Powercut' now electrification plans are on hold. But what should we aspire to, what could we reasonably achieve and what should we settle for under the current circumstances?

We can agree that Lancashire have done their best, building a new station building and rail service at a time when resources are difficult to find and spare diesel trains are scarce; they have brought in European funding, and perhaps more importantly expertise. But I think we can all agree that we can and should do better.

A German service between comparable towns in, say the Ruhr or in The Netherlands in the Raandstaat would have modern, airy stations served by up to six modern electric trains every hour. Bus and tram connections would be available at both ends and included in the ticket price and they would even wait for the train (yes, really), but you might not need them as the train would probably continue in a tunnel under the city to your destination. Stations would have ample cycle parking, there would be good cycle and walk maps, cycle hire and certainly and safe and convenient cycle routes. Car drivers would acknowledge your existence, although my experience is that taxi drivers will still moan about you in the pub.

Maybe we can’t have all this now, but Scotland (5 million people) has improved and electrified railways and even built the 30 mile new Borders Line. Compared to this, Greater Manchester and Lancashire (bit over 4 million) has done little apart from build Metrolink tram lines - fine, but not really a solution for longer journeys. There isn’t even  any integrated ticketing worth mentioning even though Manchester owns the tram network. Of course Scotland is not perfect – the Edinburgh tram problems show this, but with a devolved Government, at least they have a choice while the northwest has the odd scrap thrown by the Treasury. With the cancellation of Trans-Pennine electrification, perhaps 30 year-old trains and 30mph is the way forward for Burnley in the foreseeable future. Or maybe not.

Recent work carried out by Blackfryers

Agricultural building, Mansfield The owner of a small holding wanted to build a barn to hold animal feed, agricultural machinery and materials but was refused planning consent as the site was in a sensitive landscape area and the need for the building had not been established. We have worked with the client and local planning authority to establish the agricultural need, present crime figures and produce more acceptable revised proposals that reduce the potential impact of the development through siting, size and landscaping. A planning statement submitted included visualisations of how the new development would look.

Leisure centre, Northamptonshire Consent had been obtained for a Leisure Centre including swimming pool, gym and bar, but the development as built was so different from the permission that the local planning authority was refused to discharge conditions, in particular for flood risk. It also indicated it might refuse consent for further development elsewhere on the site until the issue was resolved. We have worked with the local planning authority to regularise the planning consent including finding an acceptable solution for potential flood issues so that all parties are happy with the outcome and potential future development on the site can go ahead.

Caravan and Lodge Park extension, Lancashire An environmental scoping study was prepared for a site south of the Lake District formerly used for sand and gravel extraction which the owner wished to develop for static caravans and lodges, together with associated facilities potentially including a small hotel and convenience shopping.  Part of the site is a County Biological Heritage Site and it is next to an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The report gathered together relevant planning policy and existing environmental information both on and off site and quantified the major environmental constraints of ecology, flood risk and transport issues.  It also examined other potential environmental issues, but concluded that none of these either individually or jointly were significant enough to prevent development going ahead, and also fell far short of the level at which a formal Environmental Impact Assessment would be needed.

Travel Plan, Carnforth Evidence was provided to allow the discharge of a planning condition requiring implementation of a travel plan imposed by Lancashire County Council. The travel plan includes public transport, walking and cycling measures and the provision of relevant information on these modes to people staying at a lodge site.

Seasonal occupancy of caravan sites Planning applications were submitted to the Local Planning Authorities at three sites in the South Lakes and Lancashire areas to replace seasonal occupancy restrictions by alternative conditions that allow sites to be occupied for holidays all year round. In the past these conditions have often been used to ensure that caravan and chalet sites are not permanently occupied, and in some cases to allow sensitive environments to recover. However the nature of tourism is changing. There is a significant trend towards leisure breaks in winter. Advances in caravan and lodge design and insulation mean that these are suitable for holiday use all year round, and that owners now want to enjoy weekends away, even in the middle of winter. The relaxation of these conditions will pus money into the local economy and create jobs at a time when relatively fewer seasonal jobs are available, as well as making the sites more viable for owners.

Residential development, Sheffield Advice was given on the development potential of a site that could be suitable for residential development. The site formed a triangle to the rear of established housing and advice was given on a number of potential constraints including access, traffic, wildlife, noise, visual intrusion and other potential effects on neighbours. A strategy was proposed to approach both the local community and planning authority that gave the maximum chance to secure approval for development on the site.

Replacement garage, Peak National Park Advice was given on the replacement of a garage and the redevelopment potential of a site in a Peak District village. Sensitive issues included the effect on a Conservation Area, neighbours, and materials.

Environmental Management System (ISO14001), Greater Manchester Peter Black was responsible for managing the introduction of an EMS certified to ISO14001 at an organisation employing 450 people. The case including resources and timescales was developed and presented to the Chief Executive. Following board approval, the process was managed including preparation of an environmental legal register, training, awareness, auditing, monitoring and overseeing the annual certification process. The EMS has dramatically increased environmental awareness and standards within the organisation, including legal compliance, and has saved money, particularly from better stock control, better separation and recycling of waste materials and reduction of fuel bills both for buildings and the car and van fleet.

Climate Change Strategy, Greater Manchester The need for a climate change strategy was established, and carbon footprint calculated using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Other background data and various Government policies were assembled and analysed leading to the creation of a strategy that is saving significant amounts of money on fuel bills for heating, air conditioning and diesel for the company fleet. The organisation secured a grant to install a micro-hydroelectric plant at one of its premises. Overall the strategy resulted in substantial reductions in climate change gas emissions and significant positive publicity.

Major bids for sustainable transport funding, Greater Manchester Two major bids were produced for £29 and £50 million of funding for sustainable travel. These both included preparation of project management plans, assembling bid resources and a bid team and managing the process through to final bid submission. Key stages were devising measures, ensuring these formed a coherent programme, proving detailed implementation plans and risk management and securing public and political support.

Blackfryers

Blackfryers is a small transport, planning, environment and sustainable development consultancy based in Manchester. We provide advice, coordinate and deliver projects for the public sector and small/medium sized businesses on:

·         Climate change including carbon foot prints

·         Planning applications, environmental assessment and projects development

·         External funding including bids to the Local Sustainable Transport Fund

·         Sustainable transport policy and implementation including cycling and smarter choices

·         Travel Plan design and implementation

·         Environmental Management Systems

·         Communication of sustainable development and other environmental issues to the public and decision makers

Our team provides straightforward, professional and cost-effective advice through both our own experienced staff and a wider network of experts. For potential new clients, we offer a FREE half day trial so that you can make sure that we can provide the right help.

Blackfryers is driven by our ethical outlook as well as our ideas and creative edge. We care about what we do. We deliver projects with intelligence and enthusiasm across different areas.

We keep communications simple, so email Peter Black on PeterBlack62@gmail.com or call us on 0750 522 1405.

We are VAT registered, and our offices are in South Manchester..