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Tewkesbury Civic SocietyProtecting Tewkesbury's Architectural Heritage and ensuring today's developments add positively to it.
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Activities
Conservation Area Protection
Conservation Areas are explained in POLICIES/CONSERVATION AREAS. We are lucky to have one.
Despite the protection offered by the status, there are many things that can degrade our Conservation Area; poor buildings and building changes, poor street and pavement layout, ugly street furniture including signage, smelly fume vents, poor street cleaning, poor management of licenced premises and bin blight to mention some.
The Society seeks to help protect our Conservation Area.
We can and do attempt to positively influence things where we can; our consultee role in Planning Applications is the most formalised and regularised.
We have played a similar role in a few licencing applications or reviews, cases where the local environment was experiencing or was threatened by disturbance. In this latter area it would be of great help if TBC met their commitment to digitise all licence files, these are where planning files were a decade ago, in hardcopy form, and that makes it very difficult for the public to keep check and follow events.
In the other areas where there is no established protocol for supporting, opposing or suggesting changes to something of concern, we rely on lobbying. The best example of this currently is our lobbying effort explained in detail under ISSUES/BIN BLIGHT AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS.
Other lobbies include ISSUES/RIVERFRONT, ISSUES/ROADS AND CROSSINGS and ISSUES/DEVELOPMENTS WITHOUT PERMISSION.
Sometimes lobbying spills over into active demonstration as was the case when TBC wished to pave over the Crescent, a deeply unpopular idea. It was one of those officer driven initiatives that did not get the attention it deserved from Councillors, Section 106 (Planning Gain) money was to be used. There was nominal public consultation the results of which were ignored. This Society with others used all the properly available routes to argue against their plans, to no avail. Only massive demonstrations finally led to the abandonment of the plan.
Despite the protection offered by the status, there are many things that can degrade our Conservation Area; poor buildings and building changes, poor street and pavement layout, ugly street furniture including signage, smelly fume vents, poor street cleaning, poor management of licenced premises and bin blight to mention some.
The Society seeks to help protect our Conservation Area.
We can and do attempt to positively influence things where we can; our consultee role in Planning Applications is the most formalised and regularised.
We have played a similar role in a few licencing applications or reviews, cases where the local environment was experiencing or was threatened by disturbance. In this latter area it would be of great help if TBC met their commitment to digitise all licence files, these are where planning files were a decade ago, in hardcopy form, and that makes it very difficult for the public to keep check and follow events.
In the other areas where there is no established protocol for supporting, opposing or suggesting changes to something of concern, we rely on lobbying. The best example of this currently is our lobbying effort explained in detail under ISSUES/BIN BLIGHT AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS.
Other lobbies include ISSUES/RIVERFRONT, ISSUES/ROADS AND CROSSINGS and ISSUES/DEVELOPMENTS WITHOUT PERMISSION.
Sometimes lobbying spills over into active demonstration as was the case when TBC wished to pave over the Crescent, a deeply unpopular idea. It was one of those officer driven initiatives that did not get the attention it deserved from Councillors, Section 106 (Planning Gain) money was to be used. There was nominal public consultation the results of which were ignored. This Society with others used all the properly available routes to argue against their plans, to no avail. Only massive demonstrations finally led to the abandonment of the plan.
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In fairness we believe TBC learned from this episode that more consultation with and involvement of the community was necessary in future, hence things like Tewkesbury Town Regeneration Partnership (TTRP).
