Oswestry21

We now understand that Shropshire Council have asked that all four applications be called in, that is - heard together by a planning inspector, probably at a public inquiry. Schedule and dates to be announced.

J Ross have lodged an inevitable appeal against the decision taken at the last Special Planning Committee meeting on the 29th July to turn down their application for a super market development on Central Car Park.

Their appeals can be seen here:The appeals have now appeared on the PINS website:

http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/england/professionals/appeals/search/“Search for a Case” using just “Oswestry” as the town brings up:

APP/L3245/A/10/2134748 – the appeal against the main application

APP/L3245/E/10/2134877 – the appeal against the conservation area demolition application.

The Planning Inspectorate have put this down for a “hearing” rather than for formal Public Inquiry. Which is surprising given the level of controversy and public opinion. A hearing would consist of a round table discussion between the appellants and the Planning Inspectorate about the pros and cons of the CCP development. This would appear to mean that a decision either way on CCP could be taken quickly, or it might mean that either J Ross or the Planning Inspectorate might push for a full formal Public Inquiry.

In the meantime the Special Planning Committee could, theoretically, have decided on the other three applications. Their next scheduled meetings are 23 September, 22 October and 18 November.

The schedule for the J Ross appeal hearing seems to be: “start date” is 2 September. By 16 Sep everyone who commented/objected on CCP should have been notified formally by the Council of this appeal. Copies of all those previous comments/objections will be forwarded to Robert Wordsworth, the appeal Inspector. OS21 and Coalition parties need to then submit, no later than 14 October, an electronic copy of any additional statement they wish to make, summarising their case.

A brief summary of the current state of play sifted from a  considerable amount of info. In the interests of clarity, if anyone who has a clearer understanding of the schedule and timings of this appeal process wishes to comment or correct, then please feel free to do so.

So - it ain’t over ’til the well stacked diva bursts into an aria…………………

In our last post, we described how J Ross’s under-publicised, newly amended scheme would effectively put an end to the free flow of traffic in Oswestry’s town centre.

It would have a second, equally damaging consequence for pedestrians in major shopping streets.

In order to avoid fatal congestion on the main road serving the site – Salop Road - J Ross wants to disperse traffic away from that thoroughfare and into the network of small streets around the town centre. The extra traffic generated by this, the biggest of all four schemes, would head through Oswestry’s narrow, medieval streets instead.

To achieve this, they will close English Walls to traffic coming from the direction of Red Square, except for buses.

This means the traffic leaving their new scheme is expected to turn left into English Walls. Drivers will not choose to turn right to travel through the congested new circulatory system J Ross plans for the heart of Oswestry. Instead, they will leave town via small, narrow streets – principally via Roft Street and Victoria Road.

At peak times, 546 vehicles will leave the store site per hour - one every 6 seconds.

English Walls is supposed to be the pedestrian link between the new store and the rest of the retail area, a shopping environment where pedestrians and cars mingle. In reality, cars will simply overwhelm pedestrians.

Of course, the burden on English Walls will be lightened by closing it to cars coming from Red Square. These will amount to 283 per hour (one every 12 seconds). They will be left to find their way across town however they can. Their choice is to join the already congested Church Street, or the unfortunate residential area to the south.

Other streets heavily used by pedestrians will also find themselves swamped by vehicles. If we are to believe J Ross’s figures, the north end of Salop Road, between English Walls and Oswald Road, will carry 1432 vehicles per hour at the peak – one every 2.5 seconds. Pedestrians will have to negotiate an overburdened two-lane highway where buses stop, cars overtake and weave from lane to lane, and vehicles park up to deliver to shops.

The gyratory system narrows to a single lane outside Sainsburys. Here, the peak numbers of vehicles will be 1219, about 3 per second. Long tailbacks round the system are guaranteed.

No wonder J Ross wants to disperse traffic away from the system. But, instead, the gyratory system will concentrate traffic on it. Vehicles exiting English Walls will no longer be able to turn right and escape via Salop Road. The gyratory system will compel them to turn left and join it. Likewise, cars travelling past Holy Trinity Church and north up Salop Road headed for Sainsburys car park can no longer turn right into Black Gate Street. They will have to go all the way round the system first. As will vehicles leaving Morrisons along Oswald Road, which can no longer go straight on into Cross Street. All must join the system.

Tailbacks through the town are inevitable. The shopping environment will be unpleasant. Vehicles will travel longer distances, stand in queues for longer, and emit more pollution, all in the busiest pedestrian areas.

Another feature of the proposal is the removal of the pedestrian crossings where Salop Road and Oswald Road meet. The corner will be widened, here, allowing traffic (10 cars per second at peak times) to sweep faster and more easily around the system and into Oswald Road. One-way, two-lane highways, and features such as this corner which enable smoother traffic flow, encourage driving at greater speed and reduce road safety.

And all because J Ross seeks to shoehorn an oversized store into an unsuitable site surrounded by a network of narrow streets. This store would be grossly out of proportion to the place for which it is intended. No wonder the traffic arrangements don’t work.

It is vital not to let J Ross get away with this amendment to their original scheme, which would be entirely destructive to our town centre.

Write with objections to the amended scheme to: Edwina Smart, Shropshire Council, Castle View, Oswestry SY11 1JR.

Peter Lloyd,

Secretary, Trinity residents group.

J Ross’s final plans to make their proposed superstore on Oswestry’s central car park acceptable to public and planners were launched, two weeks ago, with absolutely no fanfare from the developers themselves. This is not surprising, given that it would effectively put an end to the free flow of traffic in Oswestry’s town centre.J Ross’s first proposals were rejected because the enormous amount of traffic generated by the store would have caused intolerable congestion on Salop Road. Oswestry would have stopped working as a market town.

In an attempt to ease that congestion, the new plans propose a new two-lane, one-way circulatory traffic system, cutting through the heart of the town.

Starting at the old Black Gate pub (now the Bull Ring), two one-way lanes of traffic will head north past English Walls and into Leg Street. They will then swing east into Oswald Road, where the present direction of traffic will be reversed. The two lanes will then lurch right, past Sainsburys on Black Gate Street. Here, two lanes will narrow to one, before broadening out into two again when meeting the traffic exiting from Sainsbury’s car park, and re-joining Salop Road.

This new system will in no way reduce the traffic generated by the scheme. But by doing away with the present mini-roundabouts, and replacing them with what is in effect one big roundabout, it is hoped to prevent some of the congestion at junctions.

What the amended application fails to mention is that the new system introduces a brand new source of congestion. Vehicles will now have to slow down and cross from lane to lane - a manoeuvre technically known as “weaving” - as they seek the correct position to leave the system by English Walls, Oswald Road or Salop Road.

At various points, lines of vehicles will simultaneously be weaving from the right hand of the two lanes of traffic into the left, and from the left into the right. This in an area of town where pedestrian activity is at its busiest. At some places - outside the Smithfield pub, for example - this double lane change will happen where there is a pelican crossing. As well as being chaotic and congested, roads here will be unsafe.

The merging of two lanes into one outside Sainsburys will also ensure prolonged delays as queues of standing traffic back up round the system.

Nick Scott, leading the J Ross bid, aspires to follow latest government policy, laid out in a document called Manual for Streets. Here is what Manual for Streets says: “Streets should not be designed just to accommodate the movement of motor vehicles. It is important that designers place a high priority on meeting the needs of pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users.”

But the sole raison d’être of this one-way, two-lane scheme is to allow traffic to and from the superstore. Pedestrians don’t come into it.

The problem arises because a developer, motivated by profit, wants to shoehorn an impractical Birmingham-sized supermarket into a pint-sized market town.

They hope to capitalize on public exhaustion. Everyone who objects to the scheme has already written their letters. Can we summon the energy to write again?

The developers also hope to slip their application through by muddying the waters. This more complex proposal gives the illusion of doing away with the congestion that caused their last scheme to fail. As we have seen, it does nothing of the kind.

The amended scheme has a second, equally damaging consequence - which I will deal with in my next post.

It is vital not to let them succeed with this sleight of hand. A store of this size on the central car park would be entirely destructive to our town centre.

Don’t let them get away with it. Write objecting to the amended scheme to: Edwina Smart, Shropshire Council, Castle View, Oswestry SY11 1JR.

Peter Lloyd,

Secretary, Trinity residents group.

D day tomorrow. Decision or Deferral? After two years of debate since the Town Council/OCA Smithfield shambles first came to light, during which Oswestry has become encircled by Tesco in every neighbouring town,  the Strategic Planning Committee meets at the Lion Quays tomorrow afternoon to decide whether Oswestry is to become another clone town/ghost town and become one of the last to clamber aboard the sinking ship of supermarket over-provision, or whether it can have some self belief in its own economy and community and offer the rare opportunity to inhabitants and visitors alike to experience what it is to be a market town.

All the current applications were visualised in a very different economic climate to that which we are now experiencing. All are based on a need argument set out by Nathaniel Lichfield Partners which have been steadily and incrementally reduced since 2007 to a shadow of their initial findings. Petrol costs are rising, food miles and local food issues are now common components of newspaper articles and news items. And realisation that true leakage is the leakage from the local economy created by supermarkets is now common knowledge.

All the applications facing the Strategic Planning Committee are either far too large or too far out of town, or both. All will affect the town, independent traders, the community, and drain the local economy. Until real need in the form of sensible creation of employment land for real long term and decently paid jobs and the subsequent building of housing in the locality is in place, there is no need for further supermarket presence in a small market town that already has Sainsburys, ALDI, Morrisons, M & S; S, Iceland, and the various other outlets that provide food retail that have opened recently.

Here’s to a sane and pragmatic decision to either refuse all four applications or to defer a decision until such time as scale is appropriate to need. The desperation evidenced by developers in recent days says far more about their need to make the bucks than it does about any consideration for the town’s need to continue as an economic community.

Twist or bust.

Headlines such as “Tesco enjoy best Christmas in three years” and “Cut price ASDA slices through the recession” are doubtless heartening to shareholders, but behind the figures lies a more depressing story for shoppers.

“Supermarket giants Tesco and Asda dramatically increased prices on key items in the runup to Christmas in what an independent expert has called “a systematic, cynical and aggressive attempt to exploit demand”, a Guardian investigation can reveal. Batteries, lightbulbs, medicines, Christmas drinks and must-have children’s toys were among essentials whose prices were increased.

Both companies ran marketing campaigns before Christmas and at New Year boasting of thousands of price cuts but many consumers will have been unaware that they were also raising thousands of prices in the same period”. (Systematic, cynical, aggressive’: expert verdict on Tesco & Asda prices. Guardian, Feb. 12th 2010)

While supermarkets are keen to trumpet the price falls in 1000’s of selected Christmas “essentials” The Guardian reports on a third party retail survey (”We used data compiled by third party analysts from the Asda and Tesco online stores to show how many price rises were imposed between December 9 and December 22″) of prices in Tesco and ASDA which reveal 1000’s of price rises between the 9th and 22nd December ‘09. While the price falls hyped by supermarkets often fall into the bracket of a matter of pence, the price rises in the case of ASDA range from 455.5% to a fraction of a percentage over a range of 2059 items, and in the case of Tesco from 158% to a fraction of a percentage over a range of 1578 items.

In the article: “How supermarkets can cut ‘thousands of prices’ but your bills may go up” by Felicity Lawrence, Guardian, Friday 12th Feb 2010, Professor of Retailing Paul Dobson of Loughborough University, who has been conducting a five year study of prices at the big 4 -Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA & Morrisons said: “Retailers are happy to tell us about their price cuts but they forget to tell us about the price rises. We keep hearing about a price war but it’s the most curious price war I’ve ever heard of, where you can’t detect an overall drop in price levels or a fall in profits.”As anyone knows, you don’t make money by being generous. And if you do by appearing to be so, then it’s achieved by sleight of hand.

With the imminent date for some kind of decision on the Oswestry supermarket situation looming on the horizon - March 18th - the coalition of OS21, Civic Society, CPRE and the Chamber of Trade are orchestrating a poster campaign around the town, and also a leaflet drop by Royal Mail which will be delivered to all households in the SY11-1 and 2 postal districts.

The posters will raise awareness of the campaign, and the leaflets will provide information about the consequences for the town centre and it’s economy if Oswestry were to have another supermarket and part of it will form an addressed objection letter that will require and address and a signature - and a stamp. 7,500 leaflets will be delivered.

The pace is hotting up as March 18th approaches, but it’s likely that any decision will lead to a long period of appeals and possible judicial review, so this looks likely to be one battle in a long war. The consequences of excess supermarket development are visible in town centres everywhere, and for anyone who doubts it, they might like to take the short trip to Wrexham and walk down the unfortunately named Hope Street now Eagles Meadow has landed.

We will also put the objection letter on this site this week under a tab on the bar above which will be downloadable and printable.

It’s a crossroads for this town - it can be one of the few towns to not opt for supermarket retail supremacy, and forge a workable and viable 21st century identity for itself, or one of the last to settle for selling it’s retail economy down the river and becoming a town centre of boarded shop fronts. Address and sign your objection letter, talk about the issue with friends and family and ask them to do the same.

For every £1 spend on food in supermarkets, just 8p goes to the farmers

Five large retail chains account for 80% of food sold in the UK

Around 2000 independent convenience stores disappear every year, more than 5 a day

Research shows that 50% of turnover from local retailers is returned to the local economy. Large retailers may return as little as 5% to the local economy

(Countryside Alliance)