Town needs individuality to stop it becoming a clone

Lately, whenever I read about the ‘Big Eight’ projects, I find the old cliché ‘pride goeth before a fall’ springs to mind.

All that the Elwick Place development needs is the occasional clump of tumbleweed drifting across to complete the picture of an urban desert. Though, to be fair, I did once spot a lone individual wandering past the unoccupied units under the Picturehouse cinema.

Personally, I’m pleased that the anticipated Big Name restaurant chains haven’t moved in. We’ve got enough of them clustered around Cineworld and the Designer Outlet, peddling their mass-produced gastronomic dreams, pleasant as these may be (and Mrs B and I enjoyed a pair of excellent, spicy meals at Chiquito’s in Eureka Park last Saturday).

No, what would be far better for the town would be offers of help and encouragement to individual, local enterprises, which might begin to give the town back its individuality rather than the same old, same old offerings. Increasingly, everywhere we go, we find tentacles of vast, multi-million pound enterprises cloning towns in much the same way that supermarkets have almost eradicated family butchers, greengrocers and the like, lowering (despite their claims to the contrary) the quality and freshness of produce.

I can’t imagine that I’m the only one to have been intrigued to learn that the cube originally lauded as the flagship of the new ‘Commercial Quarter’ is likely soon to be owned by Folkestone council. Surprisingly, since it was our lot who had it built as offices, we’re now being told that

Ashford has a surfeit of offices – something that every member of the citizenry already knew.

Since the council is so keen on joining the property-speculating market, even to the point of forming its own property development company and since everyone knows that since the Thatcher sell-off of council houses, the world has opened up for people such as our own Fergus Wilson, would it be unreasonable to ask why the council doesn’t buy or build a sufficient stock of social housing? Surely it’s time that government - national or local - stepped in to do something about it.