The other story in the Crawley News today was about expenses for councillors on fact-finding visits to Liverpool and Rotterdam. The facts appear to be that a group of 7 officers and 6 councillors went on visits to compare town centres to help them with planning the major redevelopment of Crawley, the developers paid for the travel and the borough council paid the £1000 of food & drink expenses.

At a time when we are being told how tight money is, this gives out the wrong signals, but does not seem like a huge amount of money. It is about £76 each which is not bad for an overnight trip to Holland and an afternoon in Liverpool. A decent rijstafel and solid breakfast would take most of that. Its probably less than Tex Pemberton blew in an evening when Fastway got its award up in London.

There is some finger-pointing about spending the cash (and quite right. Even if its justified, the press should be holding this up to scrutiny) but when the town is having hundreds of millions spent on redeveloping the town centre it does make some sense to do some proper investigation and see how comparable places have been developed.

I remember visiting towns while on planning summer schools and learning a lot in just a few hours. It can be worthwhile. I don’t have a problem with the principle: I just have a problem with the word ‘comparable’.

In what ways are cities like Liverpool and Rotterdam anything like Crawley? By all means go and look at other town centres, but why look at city centres? Are we going to become a city soon?

Crawley covers about 45km2, Liverpool covers more than twice that area, and Rotterdam covers 206km2 – 319km2 if you include the water in the middle. Crawley’s population is about 100,000, while Liverpool’s is 447,000 (plus the contiguous conurbations) and Rotterdam’s is 596,000 for the city itself and over a million for ‘greater’ Rotterdam.

Liverpool was Britain’s second port after London, Rotterdam is Europe’s largest port and until recently the busiest in the world, with an enormous volume of oil and containers passing through. Both cities are steeped in history. Liverpool has more listed buildings than it knows what to do with and parts of Rotterdam are still recognisable from 16t-century paintings. They were both major settlements while Crawley conisted of two blokes rubbing stones together.

Liverpool has Everton and Liverpool FC, Rotterdam has Feyenoord, and we have Crawley Town FC. Rotterdam has office and apartment blocks at the 150-metre+ scale, with more planned. That must be about 40 storeys. Crawley has kittens about plans for a 10-storey block.

So what lessons can we learn from two giant seaboard cities to help us develop our totally landlocked medium-sized town? Population density per km2 is 2190 for Crawley, 2889 for Rotterdam and about 4000 for Liverpool… Either there is a secret masterplan to increase our housing density by throwing up some Rotterdam-scale towers or…. or the choice of places to visit was not a very sensible one.

Towns and cities comparable to Crawley in terms of area are Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Oxford, Luton, Southend-on-Sea, and Exeter. Towns and cities comparable in terms of population are Mansfield, Worthing, Chesterfield, Carlisle, Dover, Lewes, Eastbourne, Durham or Worcester. Towns comparable to Crawley in terms of history are Stevenage, Basildon, Bracknell, Basingstoke and Harlow.

A few of them are even airport towns.

So don’t knock the council for sending people to other places. I have already pointed out that comments in planning meetings sometimes give the impression that the councillors have never been outside the town’s boundaries, so a bit of horizon-broadening can be good. The problem here is not that money was spent – the problem is that it was wasted.

Who chose the locations? I really don’t know but I’m going to guess it was the developers, and I am really going to push the boat out and guess further that they already have projects in Rotterdam and Liverpool or that something going on there suits their own agenda – although that is pure speculation.