A recce on site

Today will be a long one. I will be leading the next working group meeting tonight as we start the process of preparing a neighbourhood development plan for the town centre. I have organised the necessary paperwork for the meeting as well as getting some photos printed of various key parts of the town whose possible future will be coming under discussion in the next year.

I met one of the group for a pre-meeting meeting which was useful to discuss what we need to achieve. We met at the Lockkeepers Cafe which is situated to the right of this scene beside Wallbridge Lock and were able to sit out in the warm sunshine. Once we had finished I walked around this site because at my next meeting thirty minutes later I was going to be briefed about some proposals for improving this site on the south side of the canal. When the new Brewery road bridge was constructed two years ago this site was still awaiting a new purpose. It seems that some money may have been made available to create a piazza, or open space for local people to use. I thought it would be useful to have some pictures of the site, so I walked all the way around and made a record of it from each position.

There is a problem with the wall on the north side of the canal which has just begun to collapse. It is the remnant of the old cellars of the original Stroud Brewery wharf which no-one seems to want to take responsibility for. It might be that these new plans will address this issue, but we shall have to wait and see, yet again.

The good news is that the large building at the back, which was formerly the hq of the Stroud and Swindon Building Society is nearly refurbished and the energy company Ecotricity will be moving into it in addition to many other buildings in the town. The national success of Ecotricity, a 'green' energy supplier means that level of employment in the town is in a much better state and the economic health of Stroud is improving. We are really lucky that they want to run their affairs from this Cotswold market town rather than the 'normal' corporate city base that one might normally expect. But Dale Vince, the owner of the company is by no means a corporate figurehead. It wasn't many years ago that he was living in a caravan outside the town and constructing the first of his windmills. I admire his commitment and acumen which have resulted in many benefits for the town. In fact Stroud has always benefited from the success of entrepreneurs, but in the last few centuries they were making money from the cloth trade, which is now virtually gone, except for one small mill producing snooker table cloth on a site only a couple of hundred yards downriver from this scene.