Snow and planning applications

Ah my amazing powers of prognostication, looks like we're in for some snow tomorrow morning; potentially 6 hours of the stuff. Now seeing that half-an-hour of snow fall seems to cause enough problems to shut down the entire United Kingdom what's 6 hours going to do?

Expect grid-lock on the roads, trains to be cancelled or delayed, and airports to restrict runways.

Expect power-cuts and burst water-mains.

Expect the government to blame the local authorities and the local authorities to blame the government.

Expect the wolves to come out of the woods, and Mad Max-style dune buggies careering around the country, hopefully without Mel Gibson being present.

Expect a lot of happy children who'll treat it all as a load of fun. (In the same note expect schools to ban snowballs for health and safety reasons)

and finally expect it to all clear up by Friday and for us all to forget about it until the next time it happens.


Some good reading for locals in the next Planning Development Control Committee All report notes. The monopole mast that 02 were looking to plant in Pearl Lane looks as though it's going to be rejected, bravo. How they thought they'd be able to build one next to a Landscape Protection Area is beyond me. The scary bit is where else they were looking (Page 2)

Corner of Hermitage Way and Areley Common.

That's be here then

or behind the bench on the other side of the road. Nice I can see why they'd want to stick a 15m pole here.

Further down starting with page 17 I see the sheltered flats they want to build where the Shell Garage is on Vale Road got delegated approval subject to 106; that's you can build it provided you do something nice for the area. In this case the dangles are £224,000 towards off-site affordable housing, which will go where exactly? £10,000 towards transport measures, which may include a pedestrian crossing across Vale Road and make Suzie happy; and finally £2,733 towards upgrading the canal towpath. Note this a 45 flat building with 14 car-parking spaces. There is no on-street parking, but at least there's a free car-park opposite, hence the pedestrian crossing. Although the agent did show studies that most occupants were unlikely to have cars and thus require permanent parking, studies aren't reality though so we'll have to wait and see.

Still nothing from Tesco, looks like they're still taking advantage of the Highways Agency pre-planning consultation on traffic impact. One interesting pop-up on the weekly applications though Standard Life are looking to split Unit G on the Crossley Retail Estate that's the one on the right here next to Halfords

As Standard Life are the owners I can only guess that they're finding they can't rent out that large a unit and thus want to split it in two. On the one hand it would be nice to get someone there, on the other it would be better to get someone into the old M&S store in the centre of town. Ah well.