Oswestry21

Burgess’s on the industrial estate, with car park……… been for sale for a while…….. medium sized supermarket.

Inchcape’s VW dealership building on Victoria Road, with large car park, currently for sale ……….. cinema.

Just throwing this one in the air as it raises questions about how these kinds of decisions are reached……………….

Why does it not seem possible to utilise existing spaces and resources already integrated with towns imaginatively, thus allowing towns to grow according to real needs instead of  creating spurious and extrapolated needs to justify large scale status development that not only still leaves the resources and spaces empty, but creates more empty space in the process? Is it just lack of imagination and holistic vision? Is it a desperation for perceived status? Is it just a culture of bad planning? It seems that often we have what we need to become what we want - not just in Oswestry…… but in general.

An article entitled “Do we need more supermarkets” about plans for new supermarkets at Cefn Mawr, Ruabon and Smithfield, Oswestry, mentions OS21 a one of the opposition groups.

There is an opportunity to leave your comments below the article. An interesting range of opinion there, but all critical of the Eagles Meadow development and the effect it has had on Wrexham town centre. Of all the applications being put forward for Oswestry, it is the Smithfield out-of-town retail park which would be to Oswestry what Eagles Meadow has been to Wrexham - town centre decimation. 

OS21 is NOT against supermarkets on principle, nor against a cinema for Oswestry. Oswestry would benefit from a cinema, and areas of the town that have been pitifully neglected by planners would benefit from retail development. What OS21 is concerned about, on the evidence of what has happened in similar towns elsewhere, is the scale of development, the location, and the impact on the economic activity of the existing town centre.

The fact that we have a development spokesman contributing to the website, and developers sending e mails on a regular basis, plus the fact that someone has misused the oswestry21 name to manipulate Google search only serves to demonstrate that OS21 is presenting plausible arguments against the scale and location of development.

If the arguments were not considered plausible, they would not generate this amount of reaction.

Some of the justification for the scale of development is based upon statistics showing that people from the further reaches of Oswestry District shop in Shrewsbury and Wrexham.

Oswestry District extends to the edges of Wrexham in the North, and almost to Bicton Heath in the South. Even without petrol at £6 a gallon and rising, it is disingenuous at best to suggest that another supermarket in Oswestry is going to generate a substantial increase in shoppers from these areas.

The cinema is the bait to catch the fish. And the scale of the fish is designed to suit the developer and the supermarket operator and not the town. It should not be a matter of “We want a cinema at any cost”. 

If we were to offer you a 72″ plasma screen televison on the basis that we then build a shed in your garden, where you would have to pay us every time you wanted teabags, toilet paper, meat and veg, a cd or kettle, somehow, I don’t think we’d have too many takers.

This is the way it works. So, yes to an Oswestry cinema, yes to appropriately scaled and located retail development. But let’s question, via democratic process, whether we need corporate nannyism to allow developers to build a corral into which operators can herd us like sheep, siphon the local economy away to head office and to hell with the rest of town.

Think on…………….. a sheep, or a citizen?