Towers springing up like ‘rampant mushrooms’
AS recently as January 2016, Councillor Kevin Maton was Coventry City Council’s cabinet member for business enterprise and employment, having previously been chair of the planning committee.
In the Introduction to the Local Plan, which was published in that month, he wrote this on the subject of building on greenbelt land: “We have really tight boundaries and the only way we can grow the city is to use some of our existing under developed land. We are talking about a really small proportion – around 10 per cent. I think this is better than the alternative, which would be to build skyscraper tower blocks across the city.”
Now it looks as though we will have both. Greenbelt land is likely to be built on and skyscraper tower blocks are springing up all over the city like rampant mushrooms, with yet more being planned.
I presume that Cllr Maton was talking about affordable housing for residents when he made his comments and the current chair of planning might well argue that the current flourishing crop of tower blocks are intended largely for students. Well, recent terrible events have shown that unless proper management and inspection of tower blocks is carried out at every stage, they have potential for disaster no matter who is living in them. Students are just as flammable as anybody else. And an ugly building remains an ugly building no matter who is living in it. George Moore Stoke
Toilets number one eyesore in the city
RECENT reports quote five eyesores that could blight the UK City of Culture bid. Surely number one should have been the toilets area within Pool Meadow? Fred Foster Radford
Magic money tree bears fruit for some
THE magic money tree is of course alive and flourishing – unless you are a nurse in particular, or don’t belong to one of those groups which Theresa May deems essential for her survival, which just now is anyone who isn’t in the DUP, as her own MPs will almost unanimously cling to the wreckage.
What Mrs May has in fact done is lower her mask sufficiently to demonstrate to even the most conservative of cost accountants that the whole edifice of austerity is a lie to enable the super-rich who pay few if any taxes to continue to squeeze everyone else and to buy up at firesale prices whatever is left which isn’t nailed down. Richard Branson is himself leading the charge right now against the NHS.
One will be waiting a very long time for the Church of England to stand up to her with essential Christian teaching on social justice.
It did not gain its reputation as the ‘Tory Party at Prayer’ for nothing. Bill Haymes Coventry