'Tendring Topics' Rides Again –

                                                                                                                                              well, after a fashion!

 

 

First – a bit about myself:

 

            My name is Ernest Hall and anyone from north-east Essex reading this blog, may remember me as being, for twenty-three years, the contributor of Tendring Topics, a chat-and-comment column, to a weekly free newspaper that was first called The Coastal Express, has had its name changed several times and is currently I believe (though it is no longer distributed in my street) The Tendring Weekly News.

 

Tendring Topics commented every week – often critically but always, I hope, positively – on local and occasionally national and international affairs.

 

I live, and have lived for the past fifty-two years in a modest bungalow in Dudley Road, Clacton-on-Sea. As well as being a freelance writer and author, I have been employed by the former Clacton Urban District Council as a Public Health Inspector and later as Housing Manager, and by the Tendring District Council as their  first Public Relations Officer.

 

            I was invited to contribute Tendring Topics shortly after my early retirement from the Council's service in 1980 and I continued to do so regularly until 2003 when I received a letter thanking me for my services and informing me that – with immediate effect – they would no longer be required.  As far as I know there has never been a successor to Tendring Topics in the free weekly newspaper.

 

Five years have elapsed since that date.  During those five years my most painful experience has been the loss of my wife Heather in July 2006 after sixty years of marriage.  She had inspired and encouraged my writing and, indeed, we did a great deal of work jointly.  I have somehow survived and managed to carry on thanks to the support of my family and good friends.

 

            Also, of course, during those years, I have grown five years older.   I have progressed from a car (it broke my heart to give it up after a half century of motoring) to a bicycle and then, when I found that was getting too much for me, to an electric mobility scooter.

 

            On the plus side, I can still handle a keyboard, most of the time manage a computer adequately and perform basic and elementary functions with a mobile phone and a digital camera.

 

            These skills have encouraged me to attempt to fill this blog regularly.  I propose to continue writing Tendring Topics though by no means limiting myself to things actually happening within the Tendring District.  This Tendring Topics , will, I have little doubt comment freely on national and international affairs and, probably too, on some of my own affairs!  I can, after all, only view the district and the world, through my own now-somewhat-failing eyes.

 

Here anyway, is a start:                                                                                                                                                                                       15.01.08

 

                     Tendring Topics                        

 

Clacton's Town Centre

 

            As Clactonians will be all too well aware, Clacton's Town Centre was in a state of turmoil throughout the last summer season – the holiday season.  The flow of traffic of the one-way system in Rosemary Road had already been reversed and the flow through Jackson Road was then also reversed. As might have been expected, for a week or so total chaos reigned, though motorists now seem to have become accustomed to the change.

 

            Footpaths along Pier Avenue and Station Road have been repaved and those in Pier Avenue substantially widened.  There is now no direct traffic access from Station Road through to the seafront via Pier Avenue.  An extremely controversial and expensive 'water feature' (jets of water shooting upwards from the paving) has been provided at the junction of Pier Avenue and Station Road on what was once referred to as 'Christmas Island'' The 'town centre' section of Pier Avenue has been somewhat half-heartedly pedestrianised.  Private cars are banned during the daytime but buses and, so it seems, delivery vehicles and taxis still drive freely along it.

 

            What do Clactonians think of it?  If the postbag page of the Clacton Gazette is to be believed – not a lot!  Hardly a week goes by without the publication of at least one angry letter condemning the scheme and the council for having wasted thousands of pounds of public money on 'a totally unnecessary scheme' the main effect of which will be to drive hard-working town centre traders out of business.  It will, writers to 'Postbag' insist, completely destroy the town centre while having not the least effect in attracting holiday visitors. 

 

            Perhaps so; however, when I was the Council's Public Relations Officer I discovered the hard way that members of the public pick up their pens to write to the press much more readily to blame than to praise.  Possibly the condemnation isn't quite as universal as letters to the press suggest.  I know too that my daughter-in-law from Enfield, while being driven with me to the sea front via the somewhat circuitous route of Pier Avenue, Jackson Road, West Avenue and back into the seaward end of Pier Avenue, commented on what a vast improvement had taken place in Clacton's town centre.

 

             I have come to the conclusion that what people think of the change depends, quite literally, on their viewpoint.

 

If I were still entering the town centre seated in the driving seat of a car, I am sure that I would hate the changes – though probably not to the extent of writing angry letters to the press about them.   I would hate the alterations to the one-way systems.  I would loathe the fact that it is impossible nowadays to drive from east to west through the town centre.  I would resent those new, wider pavements in the busiest part of Pier Avenue and being unable to park, or even drive, there.

 

            If I were still a cyclist I would feel less strongly about it all, but I would resent having sometimes to park my bike and take to my feet, further from my destination than I would once have.  I would envy – though not try to emulate – those, usually young, cyclists who are convinced that all pavements are, in fact, cycle tracks!

 

            However, now I'm a mobility scooterist I find myself wholeheartedly approving the changes.  It is a joy to ride on my 'iron horse' over those smooth, roomy pavements in Pier Avenue and Station Road – such a contrast to the pavements elsewhere in the town!  The reversal of the flow of traffic through Jackson Road has made crossing its entrance into Rosemary Road less hazardous than it was.  There are lots of dropped kerbs in strategic spots and, of course, with the wider footpaths, there is no problem about parking my scooter while popping into a shop.

 

What effect will the changes have on the town?  I think that visitors to the town will like the changes – though I doubt very much if there will be more of them as a result.  The summer weather (and last summer's was disastrous) has far more effect on visitor numbers than anything the council, or anyone else, can do.

 

            I don't think that the changes will hasten the destruction of small businesses in the town centre. Small businesses have been dying all over Clacton for years. Three once-flourishing enterprises in St Osyth Road - within a couple of hundred yards of my home – have died and been replaced by housing accommodation, during the past two years.  Their loss was certainly nothing to do with the town centre development.

 

            Were the changes worth the money that we spent on them?  Well, as Professor Joad used to say (Oh dear, that dates me doesn't it?) 'It depends what you mean by worth it'.  On my scale it was much more 'worth it' than, for instance, public money spent on the Greenwich Millennium Dome, the Millennium Footbridge over the Thames, or the Trident Missile system.  However it was much less 'worth it' than money wisely spent on education or health.

 

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