I see from the local papers that the planning application to rebuild the Sikh temple in West Green was turned down.  I’m not surprised by this, but I’m a little disappointed.  I saw the plans while I was making a social visit to the temple this year and they looked like a vast improvement on the current building and I might have gone down to the town hall to support them, but I only heard about the meeting from a work colleague the next day.

Being realistic, I doubt if the new building would have gone ahead even if it did get permission, because of funding.  There hardly ever is the money for these buildings at this stage, of course.  Normally the granting of planning permission is the thing that kick-starts the fund-raising, and that doesn’t always reach its target before the permission expires – just look at the Hindu temple application for a good example of that.

While it is true that the site is not huge, and that there is a lot of traffic generated, that happens already. I think that the plans tried to address that as much as it is possible to, and would not have made it worse.   Quite why anyone would prefer a single-storey eyesore to decent-looking two-storey building I don’t know.

The best possible solution would be for the town’s two Sikh groups to work together and make the proposed Gossops Green temple suitable for both to share.  That would enable the Spencers Road site to be sold off to provide some funding for a new shared temple, but differences between the two groups have always made that a non-starter in the past.   The good news is that some of the younger members of both communities are starting to say the same thing, along with the more progressive older members.

They will have a hard job persuading the more conservative members of both groups, but at least the idea is being talked about.  The irony is that if they ever succeed in working together the residents of Spencer Road who got the application for a new temple building there turned down on grounds of being an over-development would probably end up with a three- or four-storey block of flats thereinstead.