Council Recommends New Housing for Stoke Bishop and Westbury

Bristol City Council has announced its preference for the former waste depot site on Sea Mills Lane to be turned over for housing development.

The 1.1 hectare site on the corner of Sea Mills Lane and Avon Way (see Google street map image below) is owned by the Council and its use has been reassessed as part of the Council's site development document which is currently the subject of a public consultation until May 18th. An initial Council report suggests that up to 25 houses could be built on the site.

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The City is required under the terms of its nationally-coordinated Core Strategy, to provide 26,400 new homes in the city by 2026. As a brown field site, The Sea Mills Lane location is a preferred site, with the new housing needing no use of green spaces or green belt land.

Avon Wildlife Trust, meanwhile, has called for the site to include a mix of housing and open space, in order to maintain the site's role as a wildlife corridor between between Sea Mills Wood and the Trym Valley, both of which are designated as Sites of Nature Conservation Interest.

The site is currently unused and was formerly a depot for waste management SITA.

The Council is also proposing redeveloping the Coombe House old people's home on Canford Lane, which it describes as a building "not fit for pupose" and also subject to the Council's recently floated proposal to outsource its entire stock of care home provision to the private/charitable sector. The Council estimates that 15 new omes could be built on the Coombe House site.

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Tiblisi, Georgia and Bristol

As events unfold in the Caucuses, Bristol residents may be unaware of the link that has existed for 20 years between their city and Tiblisi, the capital of the now war-torn nation of Georgia.

2008 is the 20th anniversary of the Bristol Tiblisi Association and a variety of events are being held to mark the fact, including The Falcon and the Unicorn - a cultural and literary exhibition currently running till October at the Central Library.

Stoke Bishop Councillor and former Lord Mayor of Bristol Peter Abraham made an official visit to Tiblisi in 2007 where he was hosted by the city's first elected mayor, Gigi Ugulava, tipped by some as the next President of Georgia (Russian invasions notwithstanding.)

It seems a timely opportunity to become better informed about the links between the two cities.

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Redland Green Catchment Area Changed

Plans to change the designated area of first priority (the catchment area) for Redland Green School have been finalised following an indication earlier in the school year that Bristol City Council was intending to make such a change.

As a result, Westbury on Trym and Stoke Bishop families now find themselves in the areas of first priority for Henbury and Portway Schools respectively.

The Council has also created a new area of second priority which encompasses BS9. Places at Redland Green School will, in theory, be available to children in this area once all families living in the area of first priority have been allocated places. Westbury on Trym residents are therefore effectively excluded from the new school as the area of first priority is already heavily oversubscribed.

Please click here for a map of the new catchment area. The area of second priority can be viewed here.

For news on Portway School, which is in the process of applying to become an academy, please click here.

For all posts on this blog dealing with Redland Green School, please click here.

Individualised programmes in maths and English for all ages and abilities. Redland Kumon Centre.

Co-op, Somerfield and the Future of Food in Westbury

If, as the Evening Post has confirmed, the Co-op is attempting to buy the Somerfield chain, the future for food shopping in Westbury on Trym looks, well, interesting to say the least.

When the new Somerfield convenience store opened on Falcondale Road earlier this year, I asked the duty manager whether the old Somerfield in the village could survive. She gave me one of those scripted answers that we all know have come from head office when asked an awkward question - which confirmed my view that the Canford Road Somerfield was under threat.

Now, with the Co-op interested in taking over Somerfield, things look even more complex. Co-op have, of course, a successful store on Stoke Lane. Will they really want two others within a mile of that one?

Beyond these economic and business issues, however, is the more fundamental question: how will we continue to feed ourselves if our strategy for doing so is so dependent on oil? From the use of intensive farming methods to the transportation of food around the world, to the industrial processing methods, the plastic packaging, the congestion on our roads from supermarket lorries and the drive to the supermarket to buy increasingly expensive food carried home in plastic bags, the whole way we feed ourselves is increasingly being seen for what it is: unsustainable.

There is an alternative: eating locally grown food in season.

The monthly farmers' market at Westbury on Trym Primary School is a small step towards that model. The next step is to grow some of our own.

I know it sounds crazy but that's how good ideas often start - at the fringe of society. Eventually they appear obvious solutions and everyone takes them for granted.

At least, that's how I see it.

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Ullah Brothers Guilty

Stoke Bishop residents Mohammed and Nadeem Ullah have been found guilty of conspiracy to supply cocaine and heroin at Bristol Crown Court. This is a good result for the city and the neighbourhood, in my opinion.

As previously reported on Trym Tales, the brothers were the subject of an undercover police operation in which they were filmed exchanging drugs worth £22,000 from their business Weapons Galore in Upper Easton.

Having seen first hand what heroin and crack cocaine does to people - the way it completely takes over their lives and turns them into manipulative self-centered addicts - I am pleased that two distributors are now facing lengthy prison terms.

The Stoke Bishop brothers - resident in Eastmead Lane before their arrest - may not have looked to their neighbours like international drug traffickers. Perhaps I'm wrong. The fact is that all residents have a duty to report suspicious activity to the authorities and play our part in stopping the criminals ruining peoples' lives.

We can do so anonymously here at Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

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Curtain Twitching in Eastmead Lane

Stoke Bishop residents will have had plenty of ponder on in recent weeks with the arrest and trial of two of their neighbours on alleged charges of running a drug operation from their Bristol business.

Bristol Crown Court was told this week of the surveillance work undertaken by the police on Mohammed and Nadeem Ullah of Eastmead Lane and of their business premises Weapons Galore in Upper Easton.

In scenes reminiscent of a Hollywood B movie, officers described how a covert police team watched as Colombian John Cardona Granada arrived at the business premises and Nadeem Ullah deposited a bag in a car outside. The bag was later found to allegedly contain cocaine worth £22,000.

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