Thursday 29 January 2015

Batts Ford Bridge: The Road to Nowhere?

Road building projects around Bedford take a really, really long time. The idea of bypassing the town was first mooted in the 1930s.. but it will finally be completed in 2016 when the last section is built.

Batts Ford Bridge is a similar scheme that has been around for decades [1] [2].. but what is it? Basically it is a road bridge squeezed in between County Borough Hall and Bedford College on one side, and ending up where the old marketplace used to be on the other.


You can see more details of the scheme here [pdf]. Now, while having a truckload of cash thrown at the town is a good thing and, you know, well done and all that.. do we really need a bridge in this location?

"Of course we do!" you might say. "The traffic is bloody horrendous!". And yes, look at a traffic map anywhere near rush hour and it looks pretty grim.

A great deal of that traffic is trying to squeeze down the High Street and the complex St Pauls Square to Union Street mess that forms the A6. Trying to travel from South to North on the A6 is always something of a challenge due to the complicated route, although thank goodness that the town bridge was widened in 1940 allowing four lanes of traffic. And of course there's always a mass of traffic trying to cross the County Bridge and go up or down Prebend Street.

If only there was a way of getting rid of all that A6 traffic from the middle of the town. Oh wait.. isn't that what the last section of the Western Bypass is going to do?


So, anybody in their right mind would go along the bypass instead of through town. Except there is a problem.. the A421/A428 junction (known to just about everyone as the "Swan Roundabout") can be horrendously busy at rush hours. Sometimes in the morning the southbound traffic on this section queues beyond the bridge over the Great Ouse.

I would suggest that when the bypass is completed that the traffic in the town will ease somewhat.. but the traffic at the Swan Roundabout will become even worse (and I'm not just saying that because I live near there!).

Perhaps Batts Ford Bridge is the wrong solution? After being on the table for decades, the challenges surrounding twenty-first century traffic management around Bedford are going to be quite different from those of the past?

Monday 13 October 2014

Revisiting Robert Leggat's Bedford news archive


These days we are used to being able to find any bit of news about anything.. anywhere. But in the digital age you can only search back so far before you hit a wall. And with local media you tend to hit that wall quite quickly.

So I found myself trying to look up a bit of local information from the 1990s, something that is pretty difficult to do online. Well.. to be honest, I didn't find the information that I was looking for because I got side-tracked by Robert Leggat.

So who exactly is.. or should I say was Robert Leggat? Well, he died rather too early aged 70 in 2011 (his Guardian obituary is here) but during his life he was fascinated with technology, especially photography, computers and the fledgling web. I met him several times, and he was an interesting character who was definitely a bit of a pioneer.

Between 1997 and 2008 (when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease) Robert maintained a a portion of his website initially called "Mainly for Expats" and then just "Weekly News" which was a summary of local Bedford news from the local newspapers and other sources.

So.. the thought came to me that this particular website might be handy in finding the information I was after. But of course, it has been long deleted and consigned to the great bit-bucket in the sky.

Or has it? Well.. no. There exists a thing called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine which has been trawling and recording the web since the late 1990s. It's incomplete and slow, but it can be a very useful research tool for finding out what might otherwise have been forgotten.



A bit of wrangling finds two pages that cover almost all the new stories covered in the site, this page from 2004 and this one from 2009. There are some interesting bits and pieces listed there that I suspect people had probably hoped had be forgotten. Unfortunately, you can't search the archive to find the topics, it's a rather manual process.. and the Internet Archive seems to have some trickery installed to prevent downloading.

Alternatively, you can just use the Wayback machine to flick through some local history here (up to May 2006) and here (up to April 2009).

Anyway.. here's to Robert and the pioneering work he did!

Monday 29 September 2014

On the late Frank Branston..

Source: Bedford Borough Council
Frank Branston died five years ago this summer, a point that seem to pass un-noticed by the local press. Or perhaps the increasingly erratic delivery of the local paper failed that day.

Anyway.. what about Frank? What was his legacy five years on?

I've always thought that Frank was a awesome newspaper man but a rather poor mayor. He founded Bedfordshire on Sunday back in the 1970s and used it to shine a spotlight on wrongdoings and corruption in local politics, and he was a major force in cleaning up the town.

Even at the turn of the century when I was actively involved in politics, the horror of the idea of being pasted over the front of BoS was a sobering one. I didn't always agree with what BoS and Frank were saying, but there's no doubt that Frank was passionate about Bedford and always tried to act in its best interests.

But Frank became obsessed with the idea that things weren't happening in Bedford because of the inertia of Bedford Borough Council, an authority that was (and still is) notoriously under No Overall Control. When the last Labour government made directly-elected mayors a possibility, he jumped on the idea and pushed it very hard through BoS. To be fair, the Times & Citizen and many others supported the campaign, but Beds on Sunday seemed to push the hardest.

Eventually there was a referendum on whether or not to have a directly elected mayor which had a pretty pathetic turnout of just 15%. And of course in those circumstances, the 11,316 people who wanted an elected mayor were those who could be bothered to get out and vote, and Frank's idea carried the day.

But who should be mayor? Well, perhaps it was no surprise to find that Frank thought it should be him. And so it went to the vote, and Frank came home with a very healthy majority in both 2002 and 2007.

There was that awkward period where Frank was mayor and his wife still owned the local newspaper.. but we'll gloss over that. Or the way he shafted the Better Bedford Party after his 2007 election.. perhaps we'll leave that alone too.

Now, it's one thing to stand on the sidelines and scrutinise local politics. It's quite another thing to actually try and carry out politics on a local level. Fans of Frank will say that his attempts to improve the town were blocked by bickering councillors, but I think that the realities of dealing with running the town were much harder than Frank had anticipated.

Source: PropertyWeek
Frank turned to the town centre, and his vision of redeveloping Riverside North and the bus station area, but in my opinion his plans were grandiose and frankly monstrous. He wanted a six story neo-classical building right next to the river, the complete demolition of the bus station and the surrounding area to be replace by a new one, a new department store (for whom exactly?) and new cinema (also.. for whom?) in a very modern design that for some unknown reason involved demolishing the only decent building on that side of town, the Pilgrim's Progress.

Frank's untimely death but paid to those plans, although we did get this awful statue thing on Silver Street instead.

Source: Britain from Above / Melgibbs
And there's The Branston Way, the western bypass which is a bit of a disappointing road.. but other than that there seems to be little evidence that Frank was actually mayor.

But despite my reservations about his ability as a politician, Frank did make a huge contribution to the town that he cared so much about, and for the fifth anniversary of his death to go un-noticed is a bit sad.


Wednesday 24 September 2014

Bedford Town Hall is looking good!

Bedford Town Hall is looking good.. better than ever, in fact.


Yup, that big empty space is where one of the ugliest buildings in Bedford used to be.

There are those that argue that Borough Hall should be next, but it's a much better looking building and really just needs a bit of TLC. Oh, and the top floor is missing.


Now, if only they could get rid of this monstrosity..


Tuesday 23 September 2014

Whatever happened to NIRAH?

NIRAH was a project to build an Eden Project style aquarium in Bedfordshire that was started about a decade ago. Although it attracted criticism, but eventually it attracted money from the government and other sources.

But then it went quiet (apart from a libel case), with concerns raised in 2012 that NIRAH hadn't submitted its planning application, and now that planning permission has run out completely after receiving millions of pounds of taxpayer's money.

Public records [pdf] show that the company still exists, and still occasionally changes directors. But the silence from NIRAH on anything has been deafening.

It shouldn't be a surprise that NIRAH has fallen through, leaving the status of public money uncertain. They used to have a website of nirah.org which outlined their plans. What happened to that? Well, when the domain expired in April 2012 they didn't bother to renew it and it is now something-or-other in Japanese.

You might think that the site disappearing of the face of the Internet will stop us looking at the project. Not a bit of it, we can use the Internet Archive to find an old copy of the site which does admittedly look pretty slick, and it has a couple of brochures you can download [1] [2] with the details of the proposals.


So perhaps the "News" section can tell us what they were up to? Not exactly.. all those stories stop dead in May 2007, and if you look at the press releases you can see that information was always pretty sparse.

It is of course purely coincidental that, having received millions of pounds of public money, all communications from NIRAH seemed to have dried up. But it does show a significant lack of oversight that these funds should have been allocated in this way and so little progress has been made. So why has there been a lack of oversight?

Well, national governments have a habit of chucking billions of pounds down the drain, so a few million here and there won't make much of a difference. But for local authorities money is always tight, and the reported £1.6m lent to NIRAH would certainly be usefully used elsewhere. But one problem is that the council that loaned NIRAH the cash, Bedfordshire County Council, was dissolved in 2009 and although that money now theoretically belongs to other local authorities, they were not the ones who were meant to have oversight.

I know a bit about Bedfordshire County Council.. I was a councillor on it for five years, but when I left it was clear that it was becoming a train wreck (this outsourcing disaster that I always opposed is an example). The NIRAH thing happened after I left, but I have always strongly opposed the use of public money to support what is ultimately a high-risk PRIVATE enterprise such as NIRAH.

My attention was drawn to the quotes in this BBC report from 2008:
Richard Stay, deputy council leader and on the board of Nirah, said the council would get its money back.

The aquarium would also be a scientific research centre and a visitor attraction, four times larger than the Eden Project, in Cornwall.

Mr Stay said: "There is value in the intellectual property rights, the planning permission and the actual land value which more than adequately covers the value of the loans made to Nirah.

"So if Nirah doesn't happen, we stand a pretty certain chance of getting this money back." 
Now, Cllr Stay and myself come from very different parts of the political spectrum, but in my personal experience I have found him to be an intelligent and trustworthy sort of chap, so I'm really hoping that there's something to be clawed out of the ruins of this disaster.

I also noticed another quote by one of the few people who seemed to be prepared to voice reservations about NIRAH, Susan Gaszczak:
Liberal Democrat county councillor Susan Gaszczak said: "Although it is an amazing concept... it is a time of a global credit crunch.

"It is a very difficult time to start raising that kind of money, and especially when you see the taxpayer suffering on a day to day basis." 
That incidentally is a name that you might recognise and it's another case where people should have listed more closely to what Susan was saying, in my opinion.

My personal opinion is that is it clear that NIRAH is a busted flush, as I always suspected it would be. I don't know what assets they may have, but it is time for the taxpayers to get whatever they can from whatever remains.

UPDATE: Susan shared this very interesting transcript of  a BBC item about NIRAH.