YOUR PICTURE OF THE DAY
Looking over Halifax from Trooper Lane, taken by Alan Greenwood
I noted that, although there are some bins further down Keighley Road, near some of the bus stops and Esso/Tesco petrol station, there is no bin near any of the three bus stops close to the junction of Keighley Road and Beechwood Road.
It also feels, with well over 100 pieces of litter on a 150m stretch of road, that street cleaning is not being done often enough or effectively enough in this area. You must have a better idea than I do, of how many thousands of tons of litter is deposited by thoughtless people in and around Halifax. Simply multiplying what I picked up by the many hundreds of miles of roads in Calderdale it is a shocking and saddening amount to think about. I appreciate council resources are always stretched, not least in these unusual times. However, please can the council confirm whether bins can be provided close to the bus stops and what the street cleaning regime is in this area as it seems insufficient.
Council and the Environment Agency thinking about, developing a wetlands area on the east end of the Brearley playing fields.
For a start it has been tried before with a similar scheme close to the Brearley bridge, planting and forming a timber walkway around a naturally occurring dam. It lasted less than 12 months when the nearby River Calder in flood washed it all away and deposited tonnes of silt on the area. It never attracted frogs, newts or anything.
It is amazing how Calderdale can come up with £5 million for such a scheme, when five years ago they claim they could not afford to renovate and continue to mow the playing fields in summer months after the 2014 floods, and allow the community continued use as an amenity area for ball games, walking, and so on. In fact the field to the east end, which the proposed new scheme will occupy, was the best draining and most serviceable playing field in any case, regularly hosting the HB Saints football games in winter months. That was lost to them when the Rochdale Canal sprung a leak, swamping the playing area and the Canals Trust would not do anything to address the problem.
The Saints now play on the area next to the cricket ground, having completed a massive amount of work by themselves, providing a super and serviceable playing surface, which just shows what can be done to such an important playing facility.
Furthermore it can easily be cleared up and recovered after inevitable flooding, unlike a wetlands area that will look like the hanging gardens of Babylon in plastic waste and other undesirable products which will be deposited by the river on to shrubs and reeds. Who will wade in to that to clear that lot up when it happens?
There has been a suggestion that wildlife will be reintroduced and encouraged, such as water voles and moorhens, but sorry they will be quickly decimated by our resident mink living in
‘The generosity and
kindness of the community has been
overwhelming’ JODI PAIGE-HIRST