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.

week 12/10

Tendring Topics……on Line

An Easter Message – from Network Rail

The Government, so it is said, is urging us to get out of our cars (no, not me personally; I haven’t got one!) and onto public transport. By so doing we’ll be easing traffic congestion on the roads, reducing petrol consumption and doing our bit to ‘save the planet’.

Occasions in the year when large numbers of us are inclined to travel at the same time, are our public holidays. We don’t have as many as most of our fellow Europeans. Perhaps because of that, we tend to make the most of them – to get away from our town or suburban homes, see friends or relatives and perhaps visit the sea or the countryside.

Two of these holidays are really special – Christmas and Easter. For one thing, both have more than one day of holiday. Both are major Christian Festivals though sadly the ‘Christian’ dimension is now only a minority interest. At Christmas time families of every faith and of none like to get together – and families are much more far-flung than once they were. Easter is the first holiday of the spring. It is a time to get out into the country and enjoy nature as it wakes from its winter sleep, or perhaps to visit the seaside for the first time in the year.

It might have been thought that our railways would have seized the opportunities these universal breaks present. It was, after all, the railways that first made travel possible for ordinary people. I am sure that there was a time when that was precisely what the railways did. In the past the LNER (remember them? The London and North-Eastern Railway) put on extra trains into London and other big cities at Christmas to facilitate family reunions, and provided ‘special offer’ excursion trains at Easter, Whitsun and the August Bank Holiday to take passengers on day trips or for the weekend to holiday resorts like Clacton, Frinton and Walton. I have lived in Clacton long enough to remember crowded trains pulling into Clacton Station on Saturdays, and the local children with their home-made barrows supplementing their pocket money by transporting holiday-makers’ luggage to their boarding houses or perhaps to Butlins Holiday Camp.

Is that what Network Rail and the various railway companies created by privatisation, do today? Not a bit of it. The closure of Liverpool Street Station from Christmas Eve till after the New Year has become as much part of Christmas as Santa Claus, roast turkey and Christmas crackers. We count ourselves lucky if ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ the closure doesn’t extend days into the New Year.

This year the coming of Easter was welcomed in the Daily Gazette with the headline Easter closures and strike threat spell rail chaos. ‘Work to replace overhead power lines between Liverpool Street and Romford on Easter weekend will cause disruption across the whole of Essex’. There is also a strike threat over plans by Network Rail to axe up to 1,500 jobs and change working practices! Private enterprise and ‘throwing the railway service out to healthy competition’ has certainly made a difference!

We can look forward to the usual Bank Holiday chaos as special buses replacing disrupted rail services join the thousands of motorists taking to the roads over the East Holiday.

Remember the slogan 'Let the train, take the strain?' Perhaps it’s time to add 'But the road must carry the load!'

Essex County Council – an unwieldy and extravagant giant

I have just received my Council Tax Bill for the coming year. I expect that everyone resident in the Tendring District will get theirs during the next day or two. I really can’t complain. I pay my Council Tax by direct debit, in ten instalments. During the next financial year, after the first payment the remaining nine will be just £1 more each month than I have been paying during 2008/2009.

I note that of my total annual charge of £1123.66, Essex County Council gets £845.25, Tendring District Council £105.38, Special Expenses (I’ve no idea what that means) £18.61, the Essex Fire Authority £51.66 and the Essex Police Authority £102.76. On the whole I think that we get value for money from Tendring’s share and I don’t complain about the needs of the Fire and Police Authorities.

I do question the County Council’s £845.25 though – nearly three times as much as the sum of the requirements of the other authorities. I heard Lord Hanningfield, the County Council’s former leader, claim (as he was leaving court where he had been charged with fiddling his expenses) that he had given 40 years of his life to the public service and had saved the County Council ‘millions of pounds’.

If that claim is anywhere near the truth it makes one wonder what the County’s cash demands would have been like without his Lordship’s hand on the tiller!

A ‘Freedom of Information’ request by The Daily Gazette has produced some interesting statistics about the County Council’s staffing and expenditure over the past few years. I knew, of course, that Essex County Council was a gargantuan organisation and, I suppose, the biggest employer in the county. I was nevertheless surprised to learn that in 2005/2006 they employed no less than 38,589 staff either full-time or part-time. The majority of these were in the field of education but there were still 11,669 non-school staff. By 2008/2009 though, the total number had fallen to 37,764 and non-school staff to 10,0069.

You may think this kind of downsizing explains the millions of pounds Lord Hanningfield claims that he and his colleagues have saved. You would be wrong. During the same period, total spending on staff – in schools, at the County Hall and in other offices – rose from £880 million to £997 million.

But that is not the end of the story.

In addition to paying almost a billion pounds to their own employees, the County Council also paid £25.3 million to outside ‘consultants’ last year. This compares with the £14.4 million that they had paid out in this way in 2005/2006.


There are, of course, occasions when any local authority may have to spend a few thousand, perhaps a few tens of thousands, on outside consultants with the expertise to deal with one-off problems beyond the capacity of its own staff. With an authority the size and population of Essex, I suppose that the reasonable expenditure on such expertise might run to a few hundred thousands.

But £25 million spent in a year by an authority that is already spending almost a billion a year on the wages and salaries its own staff? I’d have thought that the £14.4 million paid to consultants in 2005/2006 was well over the top. I’m lost for words (which doesn’t often happen!) to describe last year’s £25 million!

The County Council has clearly become a huge, unwieldy and extravagant tier of administration that should be dismembered and replaced by smaller more local local authorities. I wish Colchester’s MP, Bob Russell, every success in his campaign to secure unitary status for Colchester. I’d like to see similar campaigns in the Tendring District and every other district and borough council in our county.

A Thought for the Thoughtless

In last week’s blog I mentioned motorists who park their cars over dropped kerbs or partly on footpaths, as being among the problems faced by mobility scooterists and by those who push prams or wheelchairs. Scarcely had I posted it on the web when I learned of Brightlingsea’s Considerate Parking Initiative that appears to be dealing with that particular problem. What’s more it is doing so without the kind of heavy-handed officiousness that can be guaranteed to create resentment and antagonism.

Recognising that those who park badly do so from thoughtlessness rather than from malice, drivers of badly parked vehicles are given written notice that they are causing a problem. Ian Taylor, a Tendring Council parking services official involved with the scheme, is quoted in the Clacton Gazette as saying, ‘We are specifically looking at anti-social parking, which doesn’t necessarily contravene any regulations but annoys and upsets people………We want drivers to stop and think about where they are leaving their vehicles and what effect it can have on those around them’.

It especially targets parking in front of dropped kerbs, at junctions and on pavements and grass verges. Street wardens and some council officers issue the notices. These may be followed up by a visit to the offender’s home. Photos are also taken so that persistent offenders can be identified. The scheme has worked in Brightlingsea and is to be introduced in Harwich and Manningtree next month. I hope that the needs of Clacton haven’t been overlooked!

At the risk of seeming preachy, I cannot do other than to point out that the real answer to this, as it is to so many other problems arising from human behaviour, lies in advice given some two thousand years ago, when road transport consisted largely of ox-carts, pack horses, and chariots: ‘Treat other people as you would like them to treat you

How much indignation and anger would be averted if all of us – motorists, cyclists, mobility scooterists and pedestrians always tried to obey that rule.

There are Six of them – and all of them are Great!

I was an ‘only child’, with neither brother nor sister. However an unexpected blessing resulting from my sixty-year long marriage to Heather was the acquisition of a sister-in-law, a fine nephew, and four lovely nieces – all much kinder and nicer to me than a mere ‘uncle-by-marriage’ has any right to expect.

They in their turn have given me five great-nieces and a great-nephew in whom I take pride and interest – and whose birthdays I make every effort never to forget!

Here they are – all together to celebrate two important ones.



Nicola (‘Nikki’) first on the left, had just celebrated her 18th birthday and her cousin Catherine (‘Cat’), fourth from the left, her 16th. Clinging to Nikki is her five year old cousin Rosie. Between Rosie and Cat, is Cat’s twelve year old brother Adam. On the right of the picture, Rosie’s seven-year-old sister Millie is in the arms of Nikki’s sister Tania. Tania, of whom we’re all very proud, is a second year medical student. It astonishes me to realize that she will be twenty-one later this year. It seems such a little while ago that her Mum and Dad brought her to Clacton as a tiny baby to introduce Heather and I to our very first great niece!

They are five great nieces and a great nephew!