Local resident Kevin Burchill has created a short survey to enable us to accurately gauge the strength of feeling amongst our population for the town owned space versus developer owned housing estates…
If you can, please would you take a moment to go through the survey form, it only takes a moment and will help a great deal.
CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE SURVEY
(Note – a previous version of this survey allowed multiple entries so has been replaced with improved security)
I have often walked across these fields on my way to the river and thought very little except about my destination, a swim below the weir, for my dog, not for me. Had I been aware at all I would possibly have thought, “a bit scruffy and neglected “; the potholed car park, the unkempt grassy bit, the swampy rugger pitch, the muddy slopes down to the riverside path. I would never have imagined that this unhallowed land could one day become symptomatic of the wrongs and harms done against our society.
And yet, here we are now with this unprepossessing plot suddenly representing both the proud communitarian spirit of our town and at the same time, the planet destroying rapacious greed of our captains of industry, of our wheelers and dealers, of our leaders of men, of our great and good who wilfully line their pockets with more gold than they can ever decently use. And more guilt than they can ever comprehend. These hidden and hiding men and occasional woman who meet together and secretly shake hands, who avoid meeting the eyes of their fellow citizens, who laugh at the aspiring words of those who would “speak truth to power” because they know that they already know the truth, which is that their personal enrichment, whether in gold or status, in power or politics, that these trump any concerns about communal health, environmental wellbeing, planetary survival. They know that they will be winners because for decades now the cards have been carefully and cruelly stacked in their favour and our democracy favours their desires. And so this scruffy bit of land with all its potential to become a thing of beauty has become for some like me a place of anger, a symbol of carefully constructed injustice, an insulting two fingers to our grandchildren. A scruffy field maybe, but a terrible beauty to fight for too.