CHELMSFORD DIOCESE

THAMES GATEWAY – OCCASIONAL PAPER: 1

POINTS TO PONDER

Regeneration & Renewal magazine is a trade paper for those working in the Regeneration industry and one week it had a number of items highlighting issues relating to the Thames Gateway which are interesting individually and also link to some conceptual problems also addressed in the issue.

WHAT CHANCE COMMUNITY FACILITIES? The issue being addressed was how utilities (especially electricity into Barking Reach) are provided and funded. The privatised utilities are, apparently, legally not allowed to take risks and therefore say they cannot provide facilities into new areas. These have to be provided by the developers and therefore you need a large group of developers, all ready to proceed before anything can happen. But in addition to delays in getting things started contributors questioned whether the cost to developers of such infrastructure will mean there is nothing left for schools and hospitals.

COMMENT: If there are problems at this level, what chances “non essential” community facilities such as community centres or, dare we ask, land for churches? Certainly nothing of this nature even gets a mention in these articles.

KISS (KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID) AND REGENERATION! We all like things to be simple but Neil McInroy points out in his article that regeneration is complex. There are many issues and they are all linked and interact. There are many different interests and these, valid, positions cannot all be met. We must use a multi-disciplinary approach and he concludes that “we need to accept that in some situations complex issues will need complex solution.”

COMMENT: If the professionals find it hard to understand, what chance the general population and especially the voluntary sector?

BUT DO WE NEED TO MAKE IT AS COMPLEX AS WE DO? Another contributor Sir Terry Farrell “produces an insanely complex map, showing the 60-odd agencies responsible for the Thames Gateway’s development and their tangled, multifaceted relationships. “It’s just madness,” he says. “Every time somebody says that they need to look into something another organisation is made.”” A further contributor raises the question about who is really making the decisions? Where does the buck stop?

COMMENT: Are you surprised at these comments with 60-odd agencies involved?

BUT WHAT IS OUR VISION? Sir Terry Farrell is an architect and he believes we need an overall vision for what we want to do and implement it top down. If you don’t, he says, we have the situation he is experiencing where the refurbishment of South Kensington Underground Station, which is used by more people every day than Gatwick Airport, is being frustrated by the short term tenants in neighbouring flats who don’t want much of their 3-5 year tenancy to be lived out next to a building site. He proposes the Thames Gateway as a National Park, a place for tourism and leisure. He suggests building the 200,000 new houses at 50 per hectare and locating 90% on brown field sites, a six mile barrage across the mouth of the estuary, protecting London from floods whilst allowing tidal flows, generating wind power and eliminating the need to contain the river within barriers.

COMMENT: Sounds lovely but while continentals build at 50 per hectare, we build at 20. We like our gardens! In the end Farrell remembers the cock-up theory: “But the British don’t like to do anything. At the end of the day, the natural way for the British to defend themselves from flooding is to give everybody cut-price sandbags. That’s the British method of planning: the Dad’s Army approach.”

As church do we speak for the overall good, or is our role to support and encourage local sectarian interests?

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK - Any society or ‘civilization’ may best be judged by the way it treats its weakest members. (Celtic Daily Prayer – Finan Readings 23^rd May)