CONTAMINATED SITE FEARS

REGARDING this story in the excellent Stockport Express last week: Residents in new fight to stop development.

In 1922 at Harcourt Street North Reddish and at Tenement Lane, Adswood, a firm called Jackson’s set up brickyards.

Clay was dug out of claypits to make the bricks. When bricks were no longer made on the site, the clay pits were filled in with rubbish at a time before controls on what was tipped were introduced.

In 1974 three planning permissions were refused by Stockport council for the Harcourt Street site because the land was too contaminated to build on.

Both sites have a similar layout and similar histories.

When deciding inexplicably to build the new Vale View primary school on the Reddish site, the council intended to protect the children from contaminants by means of prickly bushes.

Local people and I pointed to the contamination on the site, for which I was branded vexatious and I still am to this day.

Local people claimed four footpaths across the site.

When the council wanted to move them to build the school, I objected to this on the grounds that the footpaths might be being diverted into areas of contamination.

Because the council had to prove to this public inquiry the site wasn’t contaminated they finally did proper contamination investigations in October 2009, long after the school should have been built, compliant with BS10175 on a strict grid pattern, which showed the site to have been entirely contaminated with lead, arsenic and brown asbestos.

I have been asking since the new primary school opened in 2011 whether the council is monitoring potentially dangerous landfill gases from the site.

The answer is, most recently the other week from new and highly paid chief executive Pam Smith, ‘don’t be vexatious.’

I think Ms Smith forgets she is our servant and not our master. Sheila Oliver Address supplied