Councillors treating town like a play thing

Don’t you sometimes think that roads leading into Ashford should have signs saying “Welcome to Toytown”? There are games on the internet in which participants build towns, adding houses and an entire plethora of bits and pieces – parks, sculptures and who knows what else – much as our council is doing to our town.

And it is our town, not a plaything of the council’s.

“Heigh ho” someone says and, presto, we have a brown blob in the middle of a road which is supposed to be a work of art emblematic of the town’s “railway heritage”.

In terms of the lifetime of the town, railway stuff was short lived, especially when compared to Ashford’s proud heritage as a market town dating back to 1243, when King Henry lll granted a charter to hold a market for livestock.

In 1856 local farmers and businessmen formed a company that is the oldest surviving company in the country.

“Heigh ho” someone says and, shazam, we have a misnamed “flume” running down Bank Street, of which the least said the better.

“Heigh ho” someone says and a Yorkshire firm is employed at ridiculous expense to stick an out-of-character cover on the badly sited and little-used bandstand.

“Heigh ho” someone says and, abracadabra, a Cornish firm is hired to make a flower planter in the shape of an ancient steam engine.

“Heigh ho” someone says, and, cor blimey, plans are laid to stick up a beacon in North Park. It’ll be gas-fired (which will delight the hard-up souls who have to pay extra for their domestic gas through a card meter) and will reflect certain council members’ childlike obsession with all things railway, as it will be using replica train wheels and smokestack in its construction.

They tell us it will be used to mark such things as royal birthdays and the centenary of the end of WWl. Its real purpose, of course, will be an excuse for local notables and bigwigs to pose round it for photo-opportunities.

But to other matters; all power to the headmistress who told slackers to “suck it up”. I heard a couple of late teens moaning about the hours they were having to put in at work. “I had to work 23 hours last week” said one. “That’s nothing”, said her chum,”‘I’m really knackered – I had to do 30 hours this week”.

Mrs.B, a pensioner, regularly works a 14-hour shift. Council left one little section of Loudon Way – namely the bit between the bus stop and the junction of Cypress Avenue – out of the double yellow lining equation.

Bizarrely, that one bit of the road, maybe only 75 to 100 yards long, was not yellowlined.

So for the past two years the bus drivers have continued to park there and the end result has been that anyone in a car who wants to turn out of Cypress Avenue into Loudon Way to head towards Chart Road can’t see whether it’s safe to pull out because of those parked cars.

Thus the obvious question is why is the safety of many Godinton Park residents put at risk every weekday so that a small band of bus drivers can park their cars near their place of work.

Stagecoach recently spent £2.8m on a fleet of Little & Often minibuses.

Perhaps some of that money might have been better spent on providing a proper car park for their staff instead of allowing them to put other people’s lives in danger. Ian Campbell Godinton Park, Ashford