Interview Date: 17th November, 2024
C: Clara Cheung, G: Gum Cheng, A: Anne Daw
| I. | C: | Can we first of all ask about how you got involved, or how your neighbours here on Harcourt Road got involved in this BBEST plan. |
| A: | When I moved on to the road, I had a little bit of experience of planning applications, so we started to fight these planning applications on Harcourt Road to try to maintain our street community. And there is a tipping point. I think it's important to know we're not against students. We never were. We wouldn't have moved here in the first place if that had been the case. But there's a tipping point when you get too many: there's a balance. And communities need people of all ages and all types of jobs and all sorts to balance everything so that you have a happy community. Otherwise, you get sort of a tyranny of majority, you get students having parties all the time and making it very uncomfortable for the rest of the people who live here, etc, you wouldn't want it the other way either, you wouldn't want all old people, because then the students would be really bored. So it's a nice balance, right? | |
| So after about five years of fighting these planning applications, we had started to get some success, and we started to understand the planning system a little bit better. At the same time the Tory government put in an ability for local communities to make their own planning policy. And we were sick and tired of having to just wait until a developer decided to throw a bomb at our street, and we had to try to prevent this bomb from falling. And the local government was not very helpful. The national government policy was not very helpful. | ||
| So there was a lot of frustration that the forum was not getting anywhere, particularly with the university, because whatever the university wanted to do, the local government just said, you can't stop them. That's them. Whereas we felt that the local government should be representing the local community, not just one of the big employers, and it needed to be a balance. The local council did not feel the same way. So there was a strong leadership form of government, and the local Labour Council ruled everything. So we started getting a lot of resistance in the Broomhill Forum at the same time as we were fighting planning applications, so going to a lot of meetings there, trying to represent Harcourt Road. | ||
| we got a grant from the National Government to create the local forum, neighbourhood forum, so once we were designated as a neighbourhood forum, we could get a grant, and that paid for a little bit of time to put together a website and to get all of that data put into a database. |
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Harcourt Road
Curated by Bloc Projects.