TrustNews Dec 20
Silver Hill - here we go again!
It was the late great Huw Thomas who prompted Robert Adam who then nudged a councillor chum who told me to look into Silver Hill when l became a councillor in 2011. It was immediately apparent that there was little to see, in contrast to the amount of talk about the site's history.
The Council is following the same approach today in that there is nothing to see but for plenty of fine words and aspirations. There is an odd fixation on the purported need to attract the young, but there are no clear solutions for the opening up of historic waterways, a world class museum, a solution for public transport, a ‘pocket’ park or any provision for the needs of the not so young.
Nothing about the Council's current proposal excites. Nothing which indicates empathy for the city’s heritage or its context. Nothing that suggests that the structure of the proposal is anything but vague. The so-called ‘meanwhile uses’ may appeal but the concept is spoiled by the plan to spend £4 million to retain the especially ugly King's Walk for a decade or more. Gone is the idea of working with several developers so as to encourage variety.
“We must get on with things," the Council will cry, without acknowledging that the years of delay are of its own doing. It extended the contract made with Thornfield by more than ?ve years, including a year after the Judicial Review (2015) in which it spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to revive a version of the scheme it had said was unviable. The Supplementary Planning Document (SDP) was produced in 2017/18 and, subsequently, JTP put a lot of work into preparing schemes and delivery options, but they never saw the light of day because Council officers decided to give the job to JLL. Time, money and a huge amount of goodwill was wasted by that decision.
Oblivious to the contradiction, the Council is now claiming that JLL is realising the SPD whilst, at the same time, it maintains that JTP’s schemes based on the SPD were unviable. The JLL scheme is about 100,000 square feet smaller but said to be much more viable. Go figure.
The Council should be told of the faults in its proposal through its online consultation process, and because we, the Winchester Deserves Better group, can see this leading to a repeat of the Henderson debacle, we are girding our loins again to provide the Council with constructive criticism and some solutions.
We say that before selling the site the Council needs either to itself direct master planning experts to ensure that the public benefits are secured, or it should pass that responsibility to a Community Development Trust or a similar civic entity. The CWT de?nitely has a role to play here and, whenever we are allowed to hold hands again, we look forward to doing just that in a concerted effort to achieve what really could be a transformational scheme for our wonderful city.
Kim Gottlieb
www.WinchesterDeservesBetter.org