Valley Conservation Society

Holder of the KCC Award for Volunteering Excellence

Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund

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­­­­­MEMBERS’ NEWSLETTER  No 89                                                                  ___      late June 2008

Book now

for the

barbecue

FORGET Leeds Castle. Pass over Mount Ephraim Gardens. Ignore Doddington Place.  It’s time for the premier event of the summer! The Valley Conservation summer barbecue will once again be taking place in the delightful grounds of the Manor House at Hayle Place.

Enjoy all you can eat from the barbecue, including chicken, sausages, burgers and vegetarian options, but leave some room for the fantastic desserts!

We are fortunate indeed to have secured once again the services of the talented D’Avanzo String Quartet, led by Lucia D’Avanzo, who will play two sets for us from the more popular classics.

Come early, stay late, but bring your own drinks! This event is open only to members and their personal guests. Children under 14 (accompanied by an adult) come free and there is plenty of room for them to play securely in the Manor grounds while you enjoy yourself.

The grounds open at 4.30pm and we shall begin serving food at 5.30pm. Stay until 11pm if you like. As is the way with barbecues, the food is not all ready at once, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t arrive until 7pm or later. There will still be enough for you.

A number of chairs and tables will be provided, but if you have your own picnic chairs please bring them. Entry to Hayle Place is off Teasaucer Hill at the bottom of Cripple Street. Parking will be in adjacent field. You may drop off passengers, seats, etc at the front entrance, but please do not park in the circular driveway of The Manor, which is reserved for residents.

Saturday, July 19

Tickets £7.50

Accompanied children under 14  

Tickets must be purchased in advance so that we can judge the catering. Ring Alan on 01622 751926 or Maggie on 01622 674001. Or send your cheque made payable to Valley Conservation Society, to Bockingford House, Cripple Street, Maidstone, ME15 6DN.

Quiz Night

OUR quiz night on June 7 certainly exercised the grey matter of the 56 contestants, as Hercule Poirot might say.

Tovil Parish Council proved the strongest team, obtaining an unassailable lead by answering every question right on their Joker round. Congratulations to them!

Our special thanks go to Grahame Brownless for organising it all, and to his scoring assistant Maggie Davis, and to Carole Hardy for being a fantastic quizmaster (mistress?) As usual, the catering team, directed by Jane Holman, laid on an excellent supper. The event raised around £50 each for St Francis Church and for the Society.

Duck Race

THE Loose Amenities Association Duck Race on the May Bank Holiday was well supported despite some very unfavourable weather (nice weather for ducks, though). VCS manned a bric-a-brac stand at the event that raised £41. Thanks to our stallholders, Ann King and June Walker, and to Molly Proctor for granting us the use of her garden.

Loose Area History Group

THERE is no talk this month. History group members will be making a private visit to Tudeley Parish Church on Monday, July 14, to view the Marc Chagall windows. For details on how to join the history group, call 01622 741198.

All aboard

Westmount

AROUND 100 villagers turned out at the start of the month to wave placards and protest against the twin planning applications to demolish Westmount in Loose Village and to replace it with

four new homes.

One of the village’s senior residents admitted that it was the first time she had ever been on a “demo” but confessed she had found it ‘really quite fun’. Whether the planning inspector will pay any attention to local feeling remains to be seen. The two-day planning inquiry went ahead on June 17 and 18, when once again there was a good turn-out of villagers, with around a dozen in the public seats throughout the two days. The hearing is over, but it may be some months before we hear the inspector’s decision.

Lancet Lane

However, there has been encouraging news from the appeal inspector investigating a similarly over-intensive application to demolish the house at 48 Lancet Lane and to replace it with six new homes. The appeal on the first application (MA/07/1633) has been dismissed.

Hopefully, this will encourage councilors to go against their officers’ recommendation to accept when they consider the applicant’s revised application (MA/ /07/2624/S), which is yet to be determined.

Campaign to Protect Rural England

WELL known artist Graham Clarke painted a picture (in words) of what he holds most dear about Maidstone, when he hosted the annual meeting of the Maidstone branch of the CPRE in his studio in Boughton Monchelsea on June 7.

Mr Clarke stressed the historic importance of the town as a trading centre for the county, with its confluence of roads and river. Maidstone’s history was all around us, but not enough was made of our heritage, argued Mr Clarke. He called for the establishment of a floating museum on the river to pay tribute to the town’s history as an important river port, from which the county's goods had been exported on hoys to London and beyond. He also said that a museum to record the town's unique paper-making history was long overdue, a point with which your Society, which campaigned to see just such a museum established at Hayle Mill, can heartily agree.

As Dr Felicity Simpson, the chairman of CPRE Maidstone, said: "Maidstone has got so much history, the problem is that you can't find it."

The 50-strong audience, which included representatives from many parish councils in the borough, approved of KCC’s plans to site a new enlarged county archive centre at Sandling, but strong criticism was expressed over plans to relocate the town's public library to the same site. Angela Davies of Bearsted said: "It's quite wrong for the elderly, or indeed families, to move this library away from the town centre. There has been no consultation on this."

Kent Highways came in for particular criticism, especially the new “Pipkin System” that KCC has adopted to rank potential road schemes in order of importance.

Gary Thomas, the chairman of CPRE Kent, told the audience that Kent Highways was "car-blinkered." He said that one of the four criteria that KCC considered under Pipkin was safety, but this was viewed only in terms of the number of serious accidents recorded. Mr Thomas said this gave a false reading for rural communities. He said: "If you have a rural lane that is so dangerous that no-one dares walk down it, no-one dares cycle along it, then that is regarded as safe."

KCC was also criticised for failing to give adequate responses when consulted by MBC on planning applications. Mr Thomas said: “They only ever consider whether the road network could theoretically cope with any increase in traffic generated – and never take into account the likely effect on residents already living there.”

Other members of the audience voiced frustration at the difficulty in even contacting Highways engineers when necessary, and our chairman, Bryn Cornwell, related how frequent changes of staff at Highways had several times set back our own joint plans with Tovil Parish Council to see traffic-calming introduced for the Lower Loose Valley. He said: “We’ve had engineers draw up a scheme, and then there's a change of staff, and suddenly no-one knows anything about it and you have to start all over again."

*VCS is an affiliated member of CPRE, but more individual members are always welcome. For information on how to join CPRE, contact 01303 815180 or visit www.cprekent.org.uk

How the council is using our Growth Point money

MAIDSTONE Council is to use part of its "Growth Point" funding from the Government to employ an economic development consultant.

Janice Watson, formerly an executive director with the Channel Corridor Partnership, who has now established her own firm, Channel Corridor Consultants, is to be paid £300 a day, plus VAT, to work three days a week for a half a year to fill the gap while Maidstone appoints its own full-time economic development manager. She will also recharge her expenses and petrol to the council.

Motorbike fine

POLICE are responding to calls about nuisance motorbikes in the area. One youngster was caught doing “wheelies” in Cave Hill recently. Unusually, he was insured and licensed, but police still issued him with a fixed penalty for his irresponsible driving.

Our local PCSO, Neil Lettington, has stressed the need for residents to call police immediately if they consider that motorcyclists are misbehaving in the area, so that the police have the chance to catch them in the act. Dial 01622 690690.

Thai very much

THE Society is used to occasionally having louts take potshots at the wildlife on our ponds with air-rifles, but we were surprised by one recent development. Three men were spotted dragging our ponds with boathooks. It turned out they were Thais harvesting the pond’s water-cress (without permission). Whether this was for their own consumption or to serve up in some local restaurant remains unknown!

Garden grabbing

THE MP for Tunbridge Wells, Greg Clarke, has been leading a campaign to have the Government redraft its planning advice so that councils are no longer obliged to regard back gardens as “previously developed land” – a status that the local authorities allege makes it difficult for them to resist garden cramming developments such as those at Westmount and Lancet Lane, referred to above.

Mr Clarke has collated the Government’s own statistics to reveal that in 1997 in the South East of England, 16 per cent of all new homes were built on existing residential sites, but by 2006, the latest year for which figures were available, that figure had rocketed to 32 per cent.

Cricket Club

THE Loose Cricket Club, which last year was granted permission to build a pavilion at the former Hillreed tree nursery site off Old Drive, and allowed a change of use provided that the number of matches was strictly limited, is already considering a new application to have the conditions relaxed – even though the pavilion has not been built.

The club may have thought that they would be simply be able to exceed the permitted number of matches without anyone saying anything, but residents in the area are unhappy at the additional traffic, noise and disturbance that they face, and have been monitoring the number of matches carefully.

Opponents should be ready to object the moment the club’s application is filed.

In case the club has forgotten, their permission was restricted by the following condition:

“The site shall be used only for the playing of cricket (including matches and practice sessions) for not more than 40 days in any calendar year and for the playing of football for not more than 10 days in any calendar year. Reason: In the interests of the amenity of nearby residents and because the access road is not adequate to sustain a more intensive use, in accordance with policies ENV4 and ENV28 of the Maidstone Borough-Wide Local Plan 2000.”

Can we have the first question again, please?

FOR those members whose love of quiz nights was not sated by our own quiz earlier this month, VCS member Denise Lintern has organized another on Saturday, July 5, starting at 7.30pm in Loose Junior School, to raise funds for the Maidstone Alzheimer’s Society.

Tickets are £6 each, teams of up to eight people. Take a plate of food with you towards a shared supper and take your own drinks for yourselves. Inquiries to Denise on 01622 745944.

Where did you put your toggle?

THERE must be many members who have at some time been connected to Loose Swiss Scouts. If you are one of those, you may be interested to hear that the Swiss Scouts are holding a re-union to mark their centenary: 1908-2008.

Group Scout leader Trevor Gallavin said: “We would like to hear from any past members of the group who are interested in attending a reunion to be held on Saturday, 25 October, at our headquarters in Pickering Street.”

Those interested should e-mail their details to Audrey Beeching at  Audrey1945@aol.com

*For a history of the Loose Swiss Scouts, visit the local history page on our website: www.valleyconservation.org.uk

New thinking on stream silt

THE task of dealing with silt on stream beds is universal, but the Americans are

taking a new approach to the problems of soil erosion, making a historic link to millponds.

You can read an interesting article in the New York Times on the subject by clicking on http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/science/24stream.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin

And finally

A word puzzle for you: discover the coded message!

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Next meeting: All meetings of the Society are open to all members to attend. The next meeting of the executive committee will be on Wednesday, July 2, starting at 7.30pm at Bockingford House, Cripple Street, Maidstone. Call 751926 for directions.

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Printed and published by Alan Smith, Bockingford House, Cripple Street, Maidstone, ME15 6DN.