If you build offices, they will come. Or maybe not

oes anyone pay?’ I asked him. ‘Some do, it depends very much on the time of day,’ came the bus driver’s reply as I tapped my bus pass on the machine.

Mrs B and I decided last Saturday to take a trip to Herne Bay. Looking out of the bus window, it occurred to me that not many councillors could travel that route. ‘Why?’ you might ask. Because the countryside on either side of the road is simply littered with fields just sitting there waiting for housing estates to be built on them.

Of course, there were a few sheep standing around which might have to be moved on but, apart from that, the untrained eye might lead one to think that, one field being much like another, the Chilmington insult to our local community could quite reasonably be moved to where there are fewer people to be upset.

The council has dealt a damaging blow to local culture by evicting the Ashford Youth Theatre from their Dover Place premises to make room for its dream of a ‘business park’.

We are told that offices being built there will create a huge number of jobs. I’m not sure how this works, this assumption that, if you build lots of offices, people will flood in to fill them up and jobs will follow.

For rather a long time that ghastly building now renamed the Panorama had stood pretty well empty with boards outside advertising it as providing inexpensive office spaces in ‘the fastest growing town in Kent’ (or something like that). People didn’t exactly rush to form queues – orderly or otherwise – to set up businesses there and provide jobs. That proved to be fruitless. After years of work and delays the place was finally converted into flats (apartments?) which anyone might assume would soon be filled in order to relieve the muchadvertised ‘housing shortage.’

To judge by the very few curtained windows following the conversion job, people are not falling over themselves to live there. There was also provision for fantastic retail opportunities on the ground floor. So far there is a gym.

‘The countryside on either side of the road is simply littered with fields just sitting there waiting for housing estates to be built on them’