The Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group public meeting on November 6th was oversubscribed and spilt out of the Burnham Town Council chamber into the lobby behind.
In that lobby, a printer was churning out copies of the order of service for Remembrance Sunday, making it impossible to hear what was said in the chamber. Eventually, I wriggled myself in.
Continue reading “Bus Back Bitter”
Last week, we celebrated the first year of the Dengie Climate Action Partnership (DCAP) with a social at the Victoria Inn.
More folk turned up for the social in the pub than regularly do for the monthly meet-ups in Burnham Council Chamber. An unsurprising but salutary reminder that an open formal meeting is not for everyone.
Continue reading “Year One”
Today was supposed to be day one of the new 45 bus service on the Dengie. This would replace the D4 and Dart 5 with a much-reduced timetable combining those two buses. The scheduled services would be reduced to two a day in either direction, Monday to Friday, with the Saturday service lost entirely. The Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group (DHBUG) had intervened to tweak the timetable in Essex County Council [ECC]’s tender as the original proposal gave little time at the route’s destination before returning. As many users depended on the bus to do their weekly shop they would have found themselves with less than an hour to do so. At the DHBUG AGM on 7 June, many attendees were furious about the changes and reduction in service – but ECC didn’t send anyone to the meeting and Arrow Taxis who had won the tender sent a message saying that it wasn’t worth them coming as they didn’t know anything about what was going on past what had been published already.
Continue reading “Get on the Magic Bus”
Thoughts on the General Election and Reform UK in Maldon constituency.
Last Thursday, I stayed up all night for the first time in years. It was the UK General election of course and despite the perils of displaced slumber I was minded to burn the midnight oil and watch the disgraced fall. I didn’t have the comforts of home and TV to assuage the sleep deprivation, however, because I had a formal role to play as a ‘counting agent’ invigilating the manual tallying in my constituency. We got the last bus to Maldon, had a drink in the Queen’s Head and walked down to the Blackwater Leisure Centre as the sunlight disappeared.
Continue reading “We shall encounter, counting, face to face”
In the previous post, I mentioned that the Slow Ways route Bursou One is one of three footpath-orientated ways between Burnham and Southminster. I committed to adding my preferred walking route between the two as an additional Slow Way. It’s now been added as Bursou Two. Below, I have appended my route description from the site, plus a review of walking it on Sunday 17th March.
Continue reading “Bursou Two”
After writing about the role public transport, particularly the railway, must play in planning local decarbonisation, I will next write about the role of active travel – walking, wheeling and riding. Before I return to the desk-bound dissection though, it’s time to get outside.
Continue reading “Bursou One”
I am grateful to Tony Fittock (District Councillor for Althorne ) for letting me know that the process of creating a new Local Development Plan for Maldon District has begun. So my previous post on the matter revealed my own ignorance of the Maldon District Local Development Plan (LDP) Review: Issues and Options Consultation, which ran from 17 January to 14 March 2022.
Mr Fittock also shared a link to the report ‘Growth Options for the Review of the Local Development Plan’ [p.33 onwards] provided to the meeting of Maldon District councillors on 14 September 2023.
From this, I learned that ‘the Plan Period for the review of the LDP Review is going to be 20 years.’ As the current plan runs until 2029, this indicates that its successor will cover the period up to 2050. As noted previously, the UK government is committed by law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% of 1990 levels (net zero) by 2050. The next Local Development Plan will therefore set out a vision and a framework for the future development of Maldon District that must include complete decarbonisation.
Continue reading “Zeroing In”
It’s now 6 years & 7 months since the Maldon Local Development Plan 2014-2029 [pdf] was approved (21 July 2017) and 6 years & 5 months since the Burnham Neighbourhood Plan 2014-2020 [pdf] was made part of the Maldon LDP by Maldon District Council (8 September 2017). The period both these plans cover ends in 2029 – now just 5 years away.
Continue reading “If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”
It’s seven years since we moved to Burnham-on-Crouch now, enough that we’re both more settled than either of us had been for many years before. We know the place and we know people, we’re wiser to the stories and characters of a five-mile radius. One or both of us have become involved in groups here, most often Claire leading the way: archaeological digs, the Burnham Art Trail, Covid mutual aid, the Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group, Maldon Greens, the Maldon & Heybridge Transport User Group.
I was pleased to see the ‘East Atlantic Flyway‘ among the seven sites recently backed by the UK government for Unesco world heritage status and the recognition of the ecological importance of the east coast wetlands that stretch from the Humber to the Thames.
This oriental margin is the terraqueous zone I wrote about in Managed Retreat #1, a fudge of ‘warpings, flats, carrs, fenlands, broads, salt marshes, intertidals, littoral zones and the drowned lands of the London-Brabant Massif’. In the tamed realm of these islands, it’s one of those places where the self-willed still pierces the fabric of the human superstructure, where civilization is thinner.
Continue reading “East Atlantic Flyway”
Dengie Bioregion 