Week 31.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Floral Clacton-on-Sea

We Clactonians have had reason to be proud of our cliff-top gardens for many years. Throughout the time that I was employed first by Clacton Council and latterly by Tendring District Council, they were the responsibility of the Council’s Parks and Gardens Department. The Department had its own nursery that supplied all the Council’s horticultural and arboreal needs. The gardening staff planted and maintained the Council’s cliff-top and other gardens, provided cut flowers and potted plants and shrubs when required, and regularly competed successfully in the Tendring Hundred Farmers’ Show and in the Essex Show.

I became closely involved with the department in the 1970s when, under the leadership of Councillor Malcolm Holloway, the Council’s Trees Working Party carried out several very successful tree planting and tree maintenance campaigns. At that time the Council had a separate tree nursery in Thorpe-le-Soken where tree whips were grown into young trees for planting out. The head of the department, the Council’s own gardening expert, was always available for consultation and advice.

Now, of course, maintenance of public gardens, like most other public services, is contracted out. In this instance at least, the contractors have maintained the former standards. I was glad to know that the excellence of the gardens has now been officially recognised and rewarded with the presentation of a ‘Green Flag’ award. I hope we’ll have equal success with the Britain in Bloom Competition.

My wife Heather, at the beginning of the New Millennium

The Memorial Garden in particular, has special memories for me. Seven or eight years ago, when my wife was still able to walk with the aid of a four-wheeled shopping trolley (a ‘sholley’), I would often drive her on warm sunny days to Marine Parade West. There, courtesy of her ‘blue badge’ I parked a few hundred yards from Pier Gap. With the sholley we then walked back, through the cliff-top gardens as far as the Memorial Garden. There we would sit on one of the benches and enjoy the flowers and the general atmosphere of peace and tranquillity for half an hour or so before returning to the car. It was at home, several hours after such an excursion, that my wife fell and broke a hip. Sadly, throughout the remaining two years of her life, she was never able to walk independently again.

Since then I have been driven along Marine Parade, past the cliff-top gardens, many times, but last week with my mobility scooter I decided to visit them again at my leisure. On that scooter I realize that I am much more aware of my surroundings than I had ever been in a car, or even on a bicycle. It was a sunny morning and I enjoyed the hanging containers of colourful growing flowers on the pavement railings at the junction of Pier Avenue and Rosemary Road. I fully appreciated the young street trees and the wide smooth pavements on the newly-laid-out town centre.

Still quite early in the morning, the Memorial Garden was even more colourful and peaceful than I had remembered it. I drove on, past the Japanese Garden, the dry Mediterranean Garden and the 1920s Garden. I enjoyed them all, though I didn’t quite spot the connection between the 1920s (a decade that I can just remember!) and the last of these.

My expedition ended with a leisurely cup of coffee at the café near the Martello Public House, with its views of the sea and of the wind turbines being constructed off-shore. I used to park my car near there when Heather fancied a walk along the lower prom. It had been a personal pilgrimage that I can well imagine being equally enjoyed by visitors to our town……particularly perhaps those who, like me, are well past their youth!

‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’

One swallow doesn’t make a summer……..and one would have to be very bold indeed to claim that there are local signs of spring in the current national and international economic winter.

It cannot be denied though that Clacton’s outlook is a lot brighter today than it was just a few months ago. It is good to note the continuing activity out to sea. During my recent visit to the sea front I noted sixteen completed wind turbines. By the time you read this there may well be more. Things are definitely on course for the completed wind farm to be in operation early in the New Year. This may not have much, or even any, effect on Clacton’s current economic future but, together with many other similar enterprises, it does help to ensure that our town has a future!

More to the immediate point is the fact that a large retail premises in the town centre that has been looking for an occupier for several months has found one. Another, threatened with closure, is continuing in business with the same staff but in different ownership.

The former Woolworth’s store with its commanding frontages on both Pier Avenue and West Avenue has been taken over by the ‘99p Store’; not quite ‘Bond Street’ perhaps but then few of Clacton’s residents and, I think, even fewer of our holiday visitors are potential Bond Street shoppers!

I think that the 99p Store is a direct and worthy successor of the Woolworth’s that I remember from pre-World War II days. Their boast then was ‘nothing over sixpence’.

Venturing into the crowded 99p Store on its opening day I was reminded of going into ‘Woolies’ in Carr Street, Ipswich at the age of ten or eleven, with a tanner (that’s what we used to call a sixpence) in my pocket and thinking to myself that I could, if I wished, buy anything at all that was on display! Sixpence in ‘old money’ is two-and-a-half pence in ‘new’, but I reckon that its purchasing power in the 1930s couldn’t have been very different from that of a pound today.

The other threatened town centre business was the Co-op Department Store in the busiest part of Station Road. This has been taken over by the Vergo organisation, a national retail chain that seems likely to offer a similar range of goods to the Co-op. The really great thing about the Vergo takeover is that they are continuing to employ the whole of the existing Co-op staff.

These developments, taken in conjunction with the modernisation and added features of the Pier, and the imminent completion of the Travelodge Hotel in Jackson Road surely mean that, in Clacton at least, an economic spring may be on the way!

Bishops Park College – the Good News, and the Bad

There was good and bad news about Clacton’s Bishops Park College last week. Bishops Park, you’ll recall, is Clacton’s latest and most modern Secondary School, best known for the fact that a number of determined local parents are teaching their children themselves at their own expense, rather than send them there. Next month the Government is expected to rubber stamp a plan to amalgamate it with Clacton’s Colbayns High School as ‘The Clacton Coastal Academy’.

The good news is that Bishops Park, which had been listed as a ‘failing school’ by Ofsted, was last week taken out of special measures and will therefore be on equal terms with Colbayns as it takes its place in the new Academy.

Then too, a new uniform has been designed for the Coastal Academy in black, blue and gold; a black blazer with a light blue trim and the school logo (designed by Nikki Light, a learning support assistant) on the breast pocket to be worn by both boys and girls. Under it girls will wear a white open-necked shirt and boys a similar shirt but with a light-blue and gold striped tie. All year 7 to 11 students will, so the Clacton Gazette report says, be given a new Academy blazer together with two new white shirts, and a tie for the boys, as well as the new sports kit. Academies clearly expect to be funded more generously than ordinary local authority schools!

I wonder if dissident parents will decide to send their kids to the newly created academy?

And the bad news? Just that I was shocked to read in the Daily Gazette last Friday (24th July) that a gang of fifteen teenagers had beaten an autistic fourteen year old boy into unconsciousness, leaving him with severe facial injuries and stamp marks on his back. Another teenager, with whom he had been having an argument, had used his mobile phone ‘to call for back-up’ from his gang members!

What has it got to do with Clacton Coast Academy? Simply that the attack took place at the Pudney Woods Playing Field off St Johns Road, which means that the majority, if not all, the assailants were likely to have been pupils or former pupils of either Bishops Park College or Colbayns High School.

Furthermore the victim’s dad told reporters that his son had been ‘tormented by his peers, who took advantage of his autism, ever since he moved into a new class at Bishops Gate College last September’.

I hope that the new Academy will include in its curriculum the teaching of what I am old-fashioned enough to think of as ‘Christian values.’