Old Posts

24 July 2006 - Billy Pye

It seems that there is some confusion about what was said at the Gregson meeting last week about the closure of Alfred Street under Centros Miller's Master Plan.

I personally chaired the meeting and my memory of what was said is as follows: In a discussion about tactics that might be employed to stop the development should the council decide to let it pass to the next stage many suggestions were made.

One of these was that it would perhaps halt the whole development if the closure of Alfred Street could be prevented. My understanding was/is that this was suggested by a person who is opposed to the development. It was not said in an atempt to put the intrests of Freehold above the intrests of Alfred Street residents.

In any event I think that we can all agree that this development will massively increase traffic coming into and leaving the City and consequently it will increase the amount of rat running along Ulswater Road.

The closure of Alfred Street will make this worse. Having the development without closing Alfred Street will also make it much worse than it is now because of the sheer increase in the number of cars in the City. 

We have a choice.  We can from this point on assume that this development will go forward and we can then all seek to look after our own corner of the City at the expense of other parts of the City OR We can do everything possible to stop this development in the intrests of us all. 

None of us wants more traffic, a multistorey carpark, the demolition of Stonewell and a dead city centre - should we not focus on these things?  It seems to me that the only people who will benefit from any internal squabble about these matters at this point will be Centros Miller and their supporters within the council.