Just 10 houses ruin plan near reservoir
DEAR Editor, With reference to the story in last week’s Post (Plans for 3,000 homes around Edgbaston reservoir condemned by locals), I can assure you that if there was approval for 3,000 homes AROUND the reservoir then it would not only be the locals who would condemn the suggestion.
There is approval for 3,000 new homes in Edgbaston and the locals have no objections whatsoever to 2,990 of them.
In other words what the 4,000 people who use the reservoir on a weekly basis are asking is why 10 of those 3,000 homes are proposed to be erected on the site of an area of the Reservoir which has been designated for public recreation for the last 199 years?
The site has been used for public recreation, for instance in the form of a skating rink and the Tower Ballroom amongst many other things, for the whole of that 199 years.
The leaseholders of the Tower Ballroom defaulted on their payments a few years ago and the Birmingham City Council saw this as an excellent opportunity to try to reclassify the site as brownfield [useable for housing in the layman’s terms] and to therefore remove this recreational facility from the citizens of Birmingham.
The Edgbaston Reservoir Collaborative (ERCO) are not a crank group, they are a group of concerned people who are prepared to fight for the rights of the everyday users of the Reservoir not to lose that facility.
A facility of tranquility, a chance to see wildlife and birds, to have a peaceful walk with their families, join a sailing club, go rowing or paddle boarding in fact to soak into their everyday lives the sight and use of a unique piece of water and area of land conserved by earlier generations for that very purpose.
ERCO have produced an alternative scheme to ‘green-up’ the site, in the same way as other several other areas are dealt with around the waterside. This seems to have been ignored except for the facetious addition of an amphitheatre to their scheme where ERCO had shown a simple circular, stepped seating area accessible to everyone whether they were on their feet or in wheelchairs, pushchairs or on crutches.
Trying to imagine what will happen if those 10 houses are constructed on the site of the Tower Ballroom is the stuff of nightmares.
In time, the houses will be sold on by the developers for millions of pounds, someone will think it appropriate to go for a swim and get drowned, and the proposal for an amphitheatre, with all the connotations for its use, beggars belief.
The site will be open for public vehicular traffic 24 hours a day, the wildlife will be disturbed and the danger for pedestrians unimaginable.
Please try to get your reporters to get the facts right before they set off any more hares.
Ann Levitt, Harborne, Birmingham