What's Cranbrook New Town got that Seaton hasn't got?
The new town of Cranbrook to the west of Exeter Airport is going to be the "jewel in the crown" for East Devon District Council planners. They get a blank canvas, so they can do anything they like. Cranbrook will have 2,900 homes - that's about 200 less than Seaton currently has and about 850 less than Seaton will have if the Liatris plan goes through.
There is a document available to the public on the EDDC website
http://www.eastdevon.gov.uk/plg_employmentandretailcranbrook.pdf
called "East Devon New Community: Cranbrook: Employment and Retail Strategy" dated November 2006. Here are a few extracts:
Section 3.2: Multi-purpose community building - 500 sq m to be provided on the 0ccupation of the 150th dwelling.
Well, isn't that nice - we have 3,100 dwellings and we have NO multi-purpose community building. What are we being offered with Liatris? A community ROOM - 90 sq m. So Cranbrook gets a community building more than five times the size of ours as soon as the 15oth house is built.
Section 3.4: Up to 17,500 sq m of employment floorspace and up to 6,700 sq m of retail floor space.
Now here's a conundrum. If the Liatris plan does go ahead, we get ZERO sq m of employment floorspace and 7,600 sw m of retail floor space IN ADDITION TO OUR CURRENT HIGH STREET SHOPS. So, we end up with much more shopping space than Cranbrook (assuming the current Town Centre remains viable, of course ..... ah, I see.)
And, it says on page 12 of the report, that the 6,700 sq m of shopping space will result in 200-250 jobs. That's funny - we are being told that 7,600 sq m of shopping space will result in 300-350 jobs. How you cram 100 jobs in 900 sq m is going to be interesting to see!!!
So, if you live in Cranbrook you get 500 sq m of community space; if you live in Seaton you MIGHT get 90 sq m but there is no guarantee.
If you live in Cranbrook you get 6,700 sq m of retail space. If you live in Seaton you get more than 10,000 sq m of retail space - 7,600 sq m on the Liatris site plus the Co-op (750 sq m) and let's say 50 independent shops of 50 sq m each (that's being conservative) = 10,850 sq m.
Cranbrook will serve Exeter Airport, is very close to Exeter and to the M5. Seaton is in the middle of nowhere. Yet Cranbrook gets a community centre more than 5 times bigger than the one being offered to us by Liatris (currently we have nothing) and gets 30% fewer shops.
What's going on here?
posted by Fighting for East Devon's future @ 10:14 pm
3 Comments:
What really annoys me about Cranbrook, is if you ask anyone whether they want the new town that is Cranbrook they say no.
They don't want a new town eating away at the country side making Devon towns drift into each other.
So why are EDDC building it?
That's democracy for you!
Just a reminder, EDDC were asked to take the number of homes at Cranberry, sorry, Cranbrook up to 3,500 but they resisted citing geography mainly.
So I suppose that when they opened their geography book and looked, out fell the Liatris plan for Seaton regeneration...hmmm...we could stick 600 houses there, thus neatly getting out of spoiling our nice sparkly new town...where is Seaton anyway?
Now it makes sense - it's the Cranbrook spillover! You want to go to school:go to Cranbrook. You want employment: go to Cranbrook. You want your community facilities: go to Cranbrook.
You want to put your head on your pillow for the night: sorry, that would be Seaton.
I wonder when we can expect the Seaton-Cranbrook express bus so that everyone without a job in Seaton can be bussed to Cranbrook.
Stop, I'm scaring myself .....
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