Dear Friends,
Living in the Croft, walking through Paradise or accessing the shops, we are painfully aware of the fact that once the Council passed Conditions 8 and 14 on July 23rd, Queens’ lost no time in starting their development on Owlstone Croft, with frequent HGVs accessing the site coinciding with the cable laying for the development through the Croft .
It was a disappointing outcome, but very clear from the meeting that the Council had made their decision to pass the Conditions, and were not listening to the concerns of the community about the traffic dangers and chaos, nor the negative impact on the Reserve.
Jean Glasberg gave a brilliant presentation but was ignored, as was Emma from N C School, our Consultants’ reports, and all of you who wrote, came to the meeting, and gave vital financial support. The report that we helped to fund through the South Newnham Neighbourhood Forum was excellent, and very clear on all the ways in which the Transport Plan was deficient, but that was also ignored.
It is as bad as we feared, but now we have to move on and do our best to survive and ensure that the rules are kept (e.g. providing banksmen for all HGVs as they access the site).
Our aim is to do our own monitoring of the wildlife and biodiversity of Paradise over the two year (or more) building period, and continue once the building is complete.
We have started with a talk on Tuesday by ecologist Dr Olwen Williams on ‘Trees and other natives of Paradise’, which celebrated the rich biodiversity of the Reserve whilst showing what will be at risk.
The new interactive website is a way that you can record what you see on your walks in the Reserve and will be useful for our record-keeping and monitoring, so do please use it. Here is the link again:
https://paradise-community.vercel.app/
With best wishes,
Pam
P.S. See attached documents which we submitted to the Planning Committee.
Friends of Paradise Nature Reserve 