The Christmas Post

With the Big Day getting ever nearer we've been mulling over what to say in our annual Christmas post.  As regular readers will know, we discontinued our greetings card idea a while back because we thought it was time to embrace reality and move on.  The "last post"  approach tickled  our fancy again but we've used that too many times and they invariably turned out not to be the "last post" at all.

This year, however, there is some news to pass on.  Many readers will no doubt have forgotten all about the conditions of the planning permission granted in 2010, nearly seven long years ago to the day.  One of the conditions requires the owners to implement the landscaping and planting scheme which they themselves submitted in support of their planning application.  And this very same landscaping and planting scheme clearly shows a number of trees and shrubs being planted throughout the site and, in particular, along the boundary with Stone Road.

The planning permission requires the owners to implement the scheme within eight months of the development being put into use.  Now, we're not sure whether this means when the first residents move in or when all the development activity has been completed so we got in touch with the Borough Council to find out.

What they said in their (very quick) reply came as a bit of a surprise.  They are now investigating to establish if there has been a breach of planning permission on the site. (On second thoughts, given the history of the whole thing, perhaps it isn't that much of a surprise after all).   We'll post full details about the possible breach as soon as we find out.  And, of course, if you know what's going on, do let us know.

One thing that we have noticed about the site is that a fence has been erected on plot 1 along the Stone Road side.  Strangely enough, it runs exactly along the line where trees are supposed to be planted.  Whether the good residents of plot 1 know about this, we can't say.  We'd have thought that their solicitors would have brought the conditions of the planning permission to their attention before they bought the property.  There again ... you never know.

We've been hearing loads of stories about the goings-on of this development for some time now: unoccupied properties being broken into, bricks being stolen, bills not being paid, court hearings and now a breach of planning legislation.  We thought that once the building work had started back in 2015 that would be the end of the matter and we could all get on with our lives.  Some hope.

And oh yes, we nearly forgot.  Merry Christmas to one and all!