If you read that, do remember to try and look surprised when Tesco finally get to expand their Crawley shop onto the Hazelwick playing fields the next time they try.

At least you have to applaud the coalition for one thing: they wanted everything to be ‘more transparent’ and they are certainly doing that, although it tunrs out that transparent could just be a synonym for blatant.

Yesterday I was a little less impressed as we passed through, as we do every day on the way home from work.

This is, as the council keep reminding us a multi-million pound scheme, so who decided it would be a good idea to put a bus stop in a single-lane road, only a few metres after a roundabout?  A bus only has to stop for a few minutes and the traffic backs up to block the roundabout.  There is a wide expanse of pavement where the bus stop is – more than enough room to make it a proper lay-by bus stop.  The stop in the other direction has room for cars to park, but not the westbound side.

Very poor planning in my opinion.

The chimney: the buildings to the left, up and down of it have already gone.

It is going to be a (slightly) historic day on Monday.  The tall chimney opposite County Oak in Crawley is coming down.  Over the last couple of weeks we have enjoyed watching various mechanical monsters chewing up the factory building next to it, and now we are ready for the main event.Unfortunately there will be no explosions.  We had been hoping for a spectacular controlled explosion, or even a Fred Dibnah-style collapse, but somebody decided that was not appropriate for a chimney right next to the A23…   instead it is going to be dismantled brick-by-brick.  On the plus side, that dismantling is going to be done by an enormous machine  and it will all be done within the day.

In a way it is a bit of a shame.  The chimney is a bit of a local landmark.  I would like to have seen it kept, maybe painted up, like the Ikea ones in Croydon, but if it has to go at least I get to see it!   The real bummer is that I can’t take photo’s because we can’t take cameras on site.

The actual plan is for Crawley Down Motors to demolish their showroom, their workshop which backs onto it and No. 8 West Street, a house which also backs onto their property – or as the Observer described it “historic 8 West Street”

And it is historic.  It is just a fairly ordinary detached cottage, dating from about the 1860s with a tiny garden, but it is the place I lived when I first moved to Crawley.  So it may not have a blue plaque outside (I checked…  I have been cruelly overlooked again!) but it looms large in my own personal history and although the bad times there may outnumber the good times I did have some good times there.

To be honest, I half-expected the place to have gone before now.  It is next to the garage workshops and backs onto the car park behind their showrooms.  When I sold it to the owner of the garage I thought it possible that he may have plans to use the plot to give access to the car park via West Street or something like that – maybe even to extend the workshops.

I would like to have sold it to a normal family instead, but that was the only offer, and I was in a hurry to have it sold so that I would not have that connection with my ex-wife any more – and of course she also had a say in it.

Maybe the plans will come to nothing, and I rather hope that is the case, but when everybody else is mourning the loss of the old cinema building I shall be regretting the passing of “historic 8 West Street” instead and wishing I had found some way to keep hold of it ten years ago.

On the other hand, you have to worry a bit about the neighbours when they can say “The safety of my family was compromised as well as the structure of my home” and yet stayed inside the house filming the demolition instead of legging it out and filming from the street.

Got to agree with the bloke though: it would be justice to make the builders rebuild the house as it was before it was knocked down.  Very educational though: I never realised there was a Newcastle in Northern Ireland.

This morning I have been faintly amused and bemused by the news from Lewes, where the local council is considering guidelines for the naming of roads.

It all seems a bit futile, and possibly a sign of a council that has too much time on its hands.  I believe there are similar ‘rules’ about the naming of racehorses which only led to owners getting ever more inventive in order to end up with a name that can be ‘deliberately misinterpreted’.   Give the public (or developers, or horse owners) a set of fixed guidelines and its like setting them a challenge, just like it is with the regimented format for car number plates where car owners still find ways to spell rude words.

More practically, if Lewes ever has a prominent local benefactor, celebrity or whatever called Brigadier Hoare, Lenny Shagmore or Maggie Higginbottom they will not be able to commemorate them by naming a road, avenue or gardens after them.

Another potential problem is that we have a living, evolving, language.  Perfectly innocent street names can contain words that change their meaning as slang continues to develop or as acceptable words become taboo: like calling a place Gaylord Avenue a hundred years ago then seeing it become a local joke.  And wasn’t one road in the City of London famously called Gropecunt Lane?

All very pointless really, but the depressing aspect is the idea of rejecting street names because they are ‘aesthetically unacceptable’.  According to who?  That is all very subjective – and also subject to changing fashions.  If a road has a gasworks at the end of it, why shouldn’t it be called Gasworks Lane?   There are plenty of Mill Roads around I am sure, and not all of them refer to quaint windmills but to the famously dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution.

Quite often the only evidence of various examples of local industrial history is in the street names.  The Victorians were often proud of their achievements and loved to name roads after them, many of them relating to the railways.   Are Railway Approach or Station Road acceptable or unacceptable?

As most roads are named by developers who want to sell what they build it is actually unlikely they will be choosing names like Leper Colony Alley – so yet another level of pointlessness really.   Roads, even in the most urban or areas, will continue to be given names like Badger’s Frolic,  Wheatsheaf Way, Honeysuckle Close or Poppy Pastures.

And in twenty years time ‘honeysuckle’ could become a slang word for a sexual activity anyway.

I do hope they allow Lettsbe Avenue though.  It would be a shame if they didn’t.

It also explained a little about the peculiarity in title deeds for houses in Letchworth which my sister discovered when handling the sale of Dad’s house.  We discussed it a bit on Sunday during what may have been my last visit to Letchworth.  Apparently large swathes of the town are still owned by the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, a charitable trust, and nearly all the properties in town have something in the deeds listing all the limitations on the property if it is part of the trust’s estate.  Even properties that are not part of the trust have these conditional leasehold clauses – leading to great confusion for us and the buyer’s solicitor. It turned out that everybody had missed the “if” which meant all the confusing sections could be safely ignored.

Looking at the short explanation on Wikipedia, it appears to be a unique situation up in Letchworth with a body that is separate from any of the councils having some level of control over planning matters in the town, even though there are no direct elections to it.  It seems to work though, and the town is still keeping fairly true to Ebezer Howard’s original founding principles – which were a bit like the principles behind Port Sunlight, Saltaire or Bourneville and greatly influenced the development of the New Towns like Crawley and Basildon.  What would Crawley and Basildon be like if Letchworth had never existed?  Letchworth gave the world its first roundabout and the New Towns took the idea and got carried away with it – in Basildon I can remember a roundabout with only two exits: it was a 90-degree bend in the road and teh planners made it a roundabout for no obvious reason.

Strange how I am now finding out more about the place when I am unlikely to go there again, but that is the way it works out.  I’m just glad to see that I was not imagining the black squirrels I have seen up there.

As yet there are no drawings or other documents available online, so I don’t know if all my previous objections will still apply; let’s wait and see.

Roadworks on Woodman's Hill, Aug 6th 2008

While walking back from the shops today I noticed that there are some roadworks on Woodman’s Hill.  Dare we hope that these are the long-overdue traffic-calming measures that were part of the S106 planning conditions on the Highwood Park development?

Just after that previous post I got a tip-off from Jim McGough that this work was being scheduled for the summer when the schools broke up.  I didn’t get my hopes up because there have been so many false alarms, and when the schools broke up and nothing happened for a couple of weeks I was resigned to it.

But this looks encouraging. I have not had a close look, so it could just be work on water mains or something, but I think it really is the mini-roundabout.  At least two years later than it was supposed to be done, but better late than never eh?