Come and help plant the newly-acquired Catalpa tree in that little triangle of land where Back of Kingsdown Parade joins Clevedon Terrace. Or just come along and provide support, advice, opinions, company….
All welcome!
We have just been contacted by Beck Marsh (Business Planning and Development Manager, Specialist Drug and Alcohol Service, Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust - 0117 3784551), with the following information:
“Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust currently provide services from Colston Fort, Montague Place, Kingsdown. The ground floor has recently been vacated and there is a proposal to relocate the Specialist Alcohol Service from Clifton, into this building. The service provides medical assessment and therapeutic interventions including one-to-one support and a groupwork programme. It offers daytime appointments, from Monday to Friday, to service users who are typically referred by their GP. The Trust believes that this relocation will greatly enhance conditions for service users and staff, and improve accessibility for people with disabilities.”
She asks us to extend an invitation to the informal briefing session at Colston Fort (opposite Montague Green) at 7pm on Monday 17th November, to meet key staff, discuss the proposal, have a tour of the premises and view the proposed plans. Local councillors and the High Kingsdown Residents’ Association will also be invited.
There is further information in this Briefing Paper - download as a Word Document: briefing-doc
You can contact Beck at Beck.Marsh@awp.nhs.uk
Graham Syrett from Neighbourhood Watch mentions that there was a burglary on Sunday 26 October at the Kingsdown Wine Vaults. The suspect is aged between 18 and 30 and was wearing a dsitinctive red, blue
and white horizontally striped knitted hat. Any sightings or information please to 945 5023 - please mention
neighbourhood watch.
As you may already be aware, the KCG Committee decided not to oppose the helicopter pad application, mainly because we felt it was likely to be granted whatever we said and because there was clear support at the open meeting for the view that we should just live with it and it wouldn’t be as bad as some people were claiming.
However, the Council clearly feel that the application is not a simple straightforward one that can be decided by a planning officer, so it will be considered by the Development Control (Central) Committee at its meeting on Wednesday 5 November 2008.
The Council’s notification says: “The meeting will take place in a Committee Room in the Council House, starting at 2pm, although it is not possible to say when the case will be considered. From the Wednesday before the Committee date, a copy of the officer’s report and recommendation can be seen at:
• Planning Reception, Brunel House, St George’s Road
• Reception Area, The Council House, College Green
• The Council’s website www.bristol.gov.uk/planning. Please select PublicAccess for Planning.
Copies can be obtained subject to the usual photocopying charges. From 48 hours before the start of the meeting, you will also be able to view the officer’s report and any appendices, from the Council’s website www.bristol.gov.uk/meetings.
You will also be able to view this committee live via a web cast transmission over the Internet. Please visit www.bristol.gov.uk/webcast
We will not write to you again, however if you wish to find out what happened at the Committee meeting, you could telephone the above named Officer from mid-day on the day following the meeting.”
Anyone who wishes to attend and speak at such meetings is able to do so, but there are rules governing the procedure which can be found on the Council website or by telephoning the Planning Department.
Well done, and thanks, to all who supported our objections to the hospital trust’s plans for a block of flats in the garden of 42 Alfred Hill, a historic listed building. Back in June we urged the Council to keep to its own new policy guidelines for our area: “Stick to the policy – keep the gardens …. After two recent unsuitable applications – both withdrawn after widespread criticism - the UBHT hospital authorities have now put in a third one, this time to build four flats in the garden of the listed building at 42 Alfred Hill.”
We’re delighted that the Council has agreed with us and refused the application, citing several strong grounds for doing so. You can see the detailed reasons by looking at the Planning Applications section of the Council website and entering the reference 
08/02222/F.
No doubt the hospital will be back with more plans, though maybe not until the property market improves. Let’s hope they take more notice next time of local views and Council policies for the conservation area.
(Ref: 08/02222/F)
Here are some of the main points of our meeting (very condensed, from two and a half hours of discussion). My apologies for late posting - I thought I had put these on the website but clearly I was wrong. Tony Kerr
We reviewed last week’s well-attended open meeting about the helicopter landing pad, and decided not to oppose the UHB Trust’s application. We will, however, ask for more work to be done on the appearance of the landing pad, and a planning condition to ensure that if the Trust do ever want night flights, then a new application would be needed.
Several enforcement matters are still dragging on, despite continued pressure on the City Council to stick to their own (new) procedures and implement their own policies on unauthorised conversions, parking in gardens, satellite aerials, advertising, etc.
There was good news on several fronts – the very successful second Homegrown Festival, an improved application for the historic St James Priory, chance of replacing ugly lampposts, a new Catalpa tree for the triangle by Clevedon Terrace.
As ever, there are several problems with developments just outside Kingsdown that will have a significant effect on us – 4-10 Stokes’ Croft and Hamilton House nearby, a huge development of student accommodation in King’s Square and continued discussion of the University’s building plans.
IDEAS PLEASE! As well as all the above, and the usual crop of new applications we’re going to talk about ways of improving Montague Green (more trees? fewer trees? another seat or two?) and how things are going with the AGM’s request from a couple of years ago to try to improve the road junction of St Matthew’s Rd and Clevedon Terrace.
If you want to know more, you can email us or find Committee members’ contact details on the website.
Next meeting is on Thursday 13th November. Any member is welcome to attend for all or part – so get in touch if you’d like to come along.
We don’t normally recommend websites - though we do have a lot of local links over in the right column - but Bristolstreets.co.uk is so good we just had to say something. It’s much easier to explore it than to explain exactly what it does, but suffice to say that it’s a really clever way of communicating information about streets, buses, cycle-routes etc. and it’s a purely private initiative - no Government grants, consultants, or committees are involved.
Click on a street and the local bus numbers appear. Click on them and the whole bus route is marked, with stops. Same for trains - with the next departure times - and City Car Club locations. Property for sale or rent and - most impressive of all, I think, a Cycling section which is so good the City Council are using it for their £22m Cycling City programme. As well as official cycle routes, it shows those recommended by other cyclists and comments on hazards and suggestions for improvement - all marked on the map.
Do have a look at Bristolstreets.co.uk and if you like it, tell your friends so it gets used enough to keep developing.
Here are the notes of the meeting last Tuesday at the Ark, kindly produced by John Frenkel and checked by the UHB Trust. Sorry they’re too long to reproduce in full, but you can download a copy in Word format: 08-10-07-helipad-meeting.
You can also download the PowerPoint slides used by the Trust officers: uhb-helicopter-presentation. NB it’s a large file (2.8Mb)
The KCG Committee meets this evening (Tuesday 14th October), so we will decide what formal response to make to the City Council about the planning application for a helipad.