Week 23.09

Tendring Topics ........on line

Clacton-on-Sea’s Future?

If there’s one lesson that I have learnt from decades of reading local and national newspapers, it is that “artists’ impressions” of proposed future developments rarely if ever resemble the completed job. Usually this turns out to be a disappointment. The completed development lacks attractive features – trees and shrubs, a water feature perhaps - that were shown in the ‘impression’ but were cut out on grounds of economy while the building work was in progress.

It isn’t very often that I look at an ‘artist’s impression’ and hope that it won’t prove to be an accurate prophecy. However that is precisely what I thought when I saw the picture above on the front page of the Coastal Daily Gazette of Tuesday 1st June. It is part of the vision of award-winning couple Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway who have been commissioned by Tendring Council to help bring Clacton-on-Sea ‘back to its former glory’. Wayne and Gerardine have recently masterminded the regeneration of Boscombe on the south coast that has undergone an £11 million makeover and been named as regeneration project of the year.

I hope that this picture isn’t typical of their ideas because I just don’t like it. In the foreground is a cliff-top restaurant fronted by decking on which there are some tables and chairs with a couple enjoying a coffee. Children with balloons are playing on the decking and a young woman is pointing to the pier and to the beach below.

The Pier today - view from the east cliff

The pier doesn’t look greatly different from now except that there are some green trees (presumably in containers). There is no sign of a helter-skelter, roller coaster or similar traditional ‘ride’. There are some mysterious white buildings at the pier-head that look as though they are the products of the same school of architecture as that of the ‘acclaimed international artist’ who recently built a fortunately short-lived work of art, resembling an oversized and unfinished poultry shed, in Jaywick.

The beach (normally Clacton’s busiest!) is almost deserted except for a dozen deck-chairs that appear to have been have been hastily abandoned – a seaside version of the Mary Celeste perhaps? There is also a young couple looking out to sea. Could they be watching the pirate vessel that kidnapped the other beach users (or perhaps the sea monster that gobbled them up!) disappear over the horizon?

No, it’s not an ‘artist’s impression’ that fills me with hope for Clacton’s future.

Is regeneration really necessary?

Anyway, does Clacton-on-Sea, or the Tendring District, really need to be regenerated at a cost of millions of pounds? Certainly bits of it need serious attention but I think that the holiday resorts of the ‘Essex Sunshine Coast’ are doing pretty well as they are.

Our coastal towns are relatively small ones. The largest is Clacton-on-Sea with a current population of about 53,000. It is absurd to imagine that we can have all the same facilities as, for example, Southend (population 160,000), Blackpool (142,000) and Brighton (156,000). We don’t have their financial resources but we do have other natural attractions that those towns lack.

A correspondent to the Clacton Gazette of 3rd June complains that it is absurd that Clacton should be named as one of Britain’s ‘top ten’ resorts when Blackpool is not. She has just returned from the Midlands where nobody has even heard of Clacton while Blackpool is well known. I have never been to Blackpool (though I have heard of it!) but I learn from Google that it has an average annual rainfall of 872 mm and 143 rainy days. The comparable figures for our Essex Sunshine Coast resorts are less than half of those. That could possibly contribute to Clacton-on-Sea’s inclusion in the top ten and Blackpool’s omission. We natives don’t always appreciate our good fortune in living in the driest part of the United Kingdom!

I do know both Brighton and Southend from personal experience. Neither have anything comparable with our miles of safe, gently sloping sandy beaches, extending from Walton-on-the-Naze round to Frinton, Holland-on-Sea, Clacton and Jaywick. Two friends of mine from a small town in eastern Germany (where quite a few folk have heard of Clacton-on-Sea because I have told them!) were able to visit us last year and were captivated by those beaches and by Clacton’s new-look town centre, so often criticised by some hard-to-please Clactonians.

Not only is Clacton numbered in the top ten of holiday-friendly resorts but we have three European Blue Flags and these certainly aren’t given away like confetti. They have to be earned, and they have been earned by beaches in Dovercourt, Brightlingsea and Clacton. Last year Clacton was also deservedly awarded a ‘green flag’ for the excellence of its public gardens and there is every reason to hope that this will be awarded again this year.

What better place is there to bring up children than beside the seaside in Clacton?

It is, of course, no good attracting visitors to our coastal resorts if they find getting here to be a tedious and frustrating business. Every bank holiday weekend, and warm and sunny weekends in the summer, finds the access roads jammed with traffic as Londoners and folk from Suffolk who (unlike, it seems, those in the Midlands!) have heard of Clacton, come to to visit us.

What we do badly need is a cheap, reliable rail service, operating throughout weekends as well as weekdays, bringing in visitors from Ipswich and from London and Chelmsford. It surely should be possible to arrange excursion trains from Ipswich to Clacton and Walton without passengers needing to change trains at Colchester. During my Ipswich childhood and youth I remember how much we preferred Clacton’s sandy beaches to the stony ones of easier-to-get-to Felixstowe, where there always seemed to be a bitter wind blowing in off the sea!

Probably the whole discussion is academic. In the present economic climate, do we really think that millions of pounds are likely to be available for an ambitious regeneration programme?

Just now though I wish though that some local residents weren’t quite so eager to denigrate Clacton-on-Sea in the correspondence columns of the local press. I’m not really quite a native, but I have spent fifty-five happy years here and I certainly wouldn’t wish to live anywhere else.

Brooklands Estate, Jaywick

While I don’t think that Tendring District as a whole, or even Clacton-on-Sea needs regenerating, parts of the district do need radical attention.

There’s Jaywick’s Brooklands Estate for instance, continually declared to be the third most deprived area in Britain. Where are the two worse areas, I wonder? Brooklands is only a relatively small part of the civil parish of Jaywick but it is in a mess and no one seems to know quite what to do about it, or how to do it.

There is not much doubt that Essex County Council would like to see it flattened and redeveloped with ‘desirable residences’, appropriate businesses and seaside attractions. Existing residents would be rehoused ‘elsewhere’. The former Clacton Urban District tried that in the 1960s by declaring it a ‘clearance area’ under the Housing Act 1936. They failed. A public enquiry ruled against the Council.

Needless to say the existing residents, particularly responsible ones who have worked hard to make their seaside homes attractive and habitable, fiercely oppose this solution. They just want the existing roads on the estate to be properly paved, lighted and drained. Sadly, this wouldn’t solve the Brooklands problem either. There would remain a great many properties that were built for summer holiday use only. They were never intended for all-the-year residence and their owners can’t or won’t improve them. Cheap to-buy-or-rent substandard homes tend to attract (or perhaps to create) problem householders.

I can’t see any quick and easy way to regenerate Brooklands. I don’t think for one moment that trying to turn it into a regional art centre will do the trick. Attempts to do so would probably prove as expensive, and as subject to derision, as Colchester’s still-uncompleted Visual Arts Facility (VAF)!

Perhaps the answer is to be patient and deal with it a little at a time. Tendring Council could surely seek the demolition or compulsory purchase of individual properties judged to be unfit for human habitation and incapable of being rendered fit at reasonable expense. Demolish the worst properties and rehouse the occupants one at a time, slowly clearing an area large enough to be redeveloped while leaving intact dwellings that have been improved and brought up to an acceptable standard.

Yes, it would take a long time – but hardly longer than the half-century or more that the problem has existed with virtually nothing being done about it.