The council house has a particular place in my affections because I was born in one 70 years ago and grew up there and so I know of their benefits and of their drawbacks, especially those that existed in the 1930s with a single cold water tap for an entire family and an outside lavatory. But things have changed since those days and they are now fully modernised, often with central heating and double glazed windows, and let at reasonable rents. In recent weeks I have taken a whole range of pictures reflecting the development of these solid and dependable houses that have become an integral part of our townscape and so Harrington Street is taking its place on this web site alongside the Red Hall and Wake House as part of the history of Bourne. Bourne Diary - November 2000
by
Rex Needle
Saturday 4th November 2000
The building of council houses by the local authority has been a major factor in the expansion of Bourne since 1900 and nowhere is this activity better illustrated than in Harrington Street. Between the wars, a considerable number of these properties were erected on the eastern side of the town, both houses and bungalows. The eastern part of the old Meadowgate Road, now called Manning Road, was developed in 1914 and 1919 and Alexandra Terraces were created between 1924 and 1925. Recreation Road received 42 council houses in a single year, 1928, and between then and 1930, a further 48 properties were erected in George Street.
Harrington Street was developed between 1936 and 1937 with a total of 44 houses and ten bungalows, all of which are in use today. Then soon after the end of the Second World War, building started again with the creation of additional streets and roads. Harrington Street was further extended between 1947 and 1950 with a different style of council housing, pictured above, while 70 more houses appeared in Ancaster Road. Queen's Road was established in 1953 with Edinburgh Crescent adjoining and by 1960, 118 council houses, bungalows and flats were built in these two roads while Kingsway appeared a few years later.
New building activity during the first half of the 20th century altered the appearance of the town more rapidly than at any other time in its history. For example, in the years between 1914 and 1970, Bourne Urban District Council alone erected 546 houses, bungalows and flats while during the same period, there was extensive private residential development on the west side of the town, stretching out towards Bourne Woods. This brings into perspective the new housing development now planned for the Elsea Wood site to the south of the town where 2,000 new private homes are planned over the next two decades.
The council houses of past years were originally designed as accommodation for the working classes and have been built by local authorities for more than a hundred years. Intensive building programmes during that period, especially in the years following the two world wars, has left most localities with a row of these distinctive houses, constructed to a simple and similar design, but providing rented homes and gardens for families of modest means.
The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher changed the perception of the council house when their Housing Act of 1985 included a statutory Right to Buy entitlement, introduced to encourage home ownership, and this enabled thousands of sitting tenants purchase the properties in which they lived at discount prices. As owner-occupiers, they could then change the appearance of their homes to suit their own tastes and these changes invariably started with a new front door, a feature that today distinguishes the house that is now privately owned from that which is still rented and is much in evidence today in Harrington Street.
Bourne Castle is one of those buildings that we would like to see pictured on the web site and although it is part of the tradition of our town, whether it actually existed is another matter. The hills and hollows that can be seen in the Wellhead Gardens, our town park, are thought to be the remains of the ramparts and moats of this fortress from centuries past but the documentation on it is extremely light and much that has been written is fanciful and romantic and frequently copied from dubious sources. Proof of such a building is hard to establish and rests almost entirely on occasional documentary evidence and some rather inadequate archaeological excavations in 1861. I have ploughed through masses of material in my researches into the castle and my article is posted today in Bourne Focus but whether or not the building that once existed here was merely part of an early settlement, a large manor house or a fortified building must remain a matter of conjecture.
Fireworks' Night is being celebrated this weekend and yet the streets have resounded to the sound of intermittent explosions these past two weeks while the skies have been illuminated with occasional displays, all of which have no doubt been the result of itchy young fingers anxious to light the blue touch paper to see what happens. This annual celebration of the death of Guy Fawkes and the salvation of our Parliament has long outlived its usefulness and few children today could say why we have bonfires and pyrotechnics on November 5th, or perhaps November 4th if the big day falls on a Sunday as it does this year. They only know that this night is an exciting one, staying outside until late, wrapped up against the autumn cold and damp, with hamburgers and baked potatoes as an added treat, while the adults enjoy themselves letting off the contents of that box of fireworks that has been stored under the stairs these few days past.
Who would deny them such a seemingly innocent pleasure? Unfortunately, this night never passes without its casualties, always serious injuries, sometimes death, while the sale of fireworks from the normal retail outlets remains questionable. There is a place for the organised bonfire party, supervised by responsible adults, where children of all ages can enjoy the occasion, but the availability of these highly dangerous toys that are let off indiscriminately by hooligans before the event has led to one of the most annoying and anti-social acts that disturb the peace of our autumn evenings.
It is quite unbelievable that factories manufacturing fireworks must not only have a special licence but are also subject to regular stringent checks from the Health and Safety Executive and yet the products they turn out are available over the counter in shops and supermarkets. Stricter control over the sale of fireworks would be an obvious solution to the danger that they present. Legislation to confine their use only at organised events would be another. But then, those who administer our national government from Westminster seem to be as out of touch with what is going on in the country, and as resistant to change, as those who run our local affairs from Grantham and Lincoln.
The number of books emanating from our villages in recent years has been quite astounding. The millennium produced a crop of local histories while many with a tale to tell have put pen to paper with the intention of recording their experiences for posterity. The latest such publication to come my way is A Baston Childhood*, the story of David Wynne who was evacuated from Hull to this village on the edge of the fen in 1940. He was only six years old but the country life appealed to him and the people he met made such an impression that he stayed on after the war ended and still lives not far away.
They took to him and he to them and this mutual respect earned him many friends and presented him with an entirely new way of life, rural rather than urban. These memories of a wartime evacuee are honestly recorded, with sympathy, humour and affection, and will be of interest to anyone who knows Baston and its people, past and present, and to future social historians seeking to find out about the way it was in the English countryside during those dark days of the Second World War.
* A BASTON CHILDHOOD is obtainable price £5.50 plus £1 postage and packing from David Wynne at 1351 Lincoln Road, Peterborough PE4 6LR, UK, telephone 01733 571658.
British Rail's explanation last autumn that leaves on the line were responsible for train delays caused much hilarity around the nation but it would have been no laughing matter if they had in fact resulted in a derailment or a crash. The permanent way was designed to enable the free flow of engines and rolling stock unimpeded by foreign objects and so it is with vehicles on the country's roads. John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836), the Scottish engineer and inventor to whom we are indebted for our present day macadam road surfaces, never intended them to be obstructed in any way and the modern versions of his creation, bound with tar or asphalt, need only the slightest hindrance to present a risk for the oncoming motorist. Saturday 11th November 2000
It is therefore difficult to believe that such a danger to drivers should be caused by one of our local authorities, in this case South Kesteven District Council. The council employs contractors to cut the grass verges in many parts of Bourne, including Queen's Road, where they are particularly wide and dense if left unattended for long periods. I saw them in action there a few days ago and one would imagine that contractors engaged on such work would clear up after themselves but it was not so on this occasion. The grass clippings and the rubbish encountered by the hand-operated cutter was thrown into the road and left there and as this had been a wet day, the hazard was particularly perilous and many passing cars slowed down accordingly.
This is not the first time that I have seen such a situation here in Bourne where the waste clippings and other debris have been left on the carriageway for several days to be eventually washed into the gutters by the rain and then into the drains. We must therefore ask whether there is any supervision over such operations, whether officials from the council's Customer Services Committee who are responsible for street cleaning and grass cutting, ever leave their offices and go out on location to see what is happening in the world beyond their desks and cups of coffee. It would seem not in this case otherwise the contractors would have been instructed to change their modus operandi.
The operator in Queen's Road was working down one side of the road and then back up the other but had he gone the other way round, the grass clippings would have been thrown back on the verges and not on the road and this dangerous situation would have been avoided. This may seem to be a trivial matter but road crashes are not. Grass cutting along roadside verges is carried out regularly and Queen's Road is frequented daily by children from the Robert Manning College further down the street. Methinks that a little supervision is in order by our district council before there is a very nasty accident.
I have been dismayed in recent weeks to find that several of my neighbours have been cutting down the trees in their gardens. This is really no concern of mine because people do as they wish with their own properties but I do feel a sense of loss when a tree disappears from a familiar spot. On one side next door, an ornamental cherry tree has been given the chop while on the other side a massive pear tree that has attracted birds for almost 20 years, was reduced to firewood one Sunday morning. From my study window, I have seen sparrowhawks perching there with a variety of other species, and one spring I spotted a pair of long tailed tits cavorting in the branches, not a rare sight but an unusual one in this part of South Lincolnshire. In the next street, a huge and stately ash tree that must have been there since the estate was built a quarter of a century ago has been lopped down to the main stem and even if this is left to grow again, it will not see real branches for another ten years.
Our house is on the very edge of the fen which can be seen it all of its glory from my upstairs study window although the landscape has only a few trees. However, when you step outside the front door of my house, you are firmly into a residential area, with well-established gardens and many trees that attract a variety of wildlife. We can no longer depend on all of our farmers to preserve the countryside and safeguard those habitats enjoyed by England's wide variety of animals and birds because the majority put profit before philanthropy and that means an extensive use of agro-chemicals to increase yields but destroy most of our natural flora and fauna.
Surveys conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology have proved that gardens are now a valuable refuge for our wildlife and in many areas there is no alternative. I would therefore urge anyone thinking of cutting down a tree on their property to think again because in the process, they may also be destroying a valuable habitat for many species that have been driven out from elsewhere at a time when their very survival depends upon a safe haven.
In the past three years, I have spent a great deal of time walking the streets and photographing the best of the buildings and other features in and around Bourne and have amassed a sizeable collection of pictures, many of which already have a place on this web site. Others will be included as the months go by because this is an ongoing project and we are unable to do everything at once.
The image that emerges is one of a quiet but progressive English market town with many interesting things to see and a population that is happy to live here. Those places that I have selected to photograph show what is best in the neighbourhood but my peregrinations have also revealed that there are many buildings and byways, nooks and crannies, that are quite frankly a disgrace and must deter those visitors we are trying to attract here.
The object of this web site is to reflect Bourne as it is and so I intend to include some of these eyesores in the coming months. I have already found several that are a blot on our urban landscape but there must be many more because nothing in life is perfect and so if anyone out there has their own pet hate, please add your suggestion to the Bourne Forum or email me with details.
Before those who run our local affairs start to complain that this exercise is either "negative" or "unhelpful", or use any of those other silly phrases from the lexicon of political correctness, please remember that we do not live in an ideal world and unless there is bad in it, there can be no good.
One of the busiest of the back streets in Bourne is Burghley Street, a narrow and winding thoroughfare that connects North Street with Exeter Street and one that carries far more traffic than it should. Heavy lorries and vans compete daily for passing space with cars, making it extremely hazardous for pedestrians using totally inadequate pavements, a constant reminder that it should long ago have been designated a one-way street and a weight restriction for vehicles imposed. Saturday 18th November 2000
I have been taking a close look at Burghley Street that is added this week to the Bourne Town section of this web site and have found it to be an interesting street containing an eclectic mix of properties that include cottages and council houses, commercial premises, a church, clubs and car parks and a quaint little private house called Hedgehog Corner. But it is a dangerous road, whether walking or driving, and the road safety aspect should have been addressed long ago and yet, as with many important matters affecting our town, the silence on this subject from those who run our affairs is deafening.
We hear much about the dumbing down of our public services and one only has to listen to the pop music radio stations or tune in to the various television channels, particularly the BBC, to realise how far down this road we have gone but whether this is due to a lower intelligence rating among the populace or among those who run our affairs is debatable. Local authorities have been comparatively free from this unwelcome encroachment of our perceptions of what is and is not acceptable in our daily lives but now South Kesteven District Council has joined the bandwagon under the pretence of focussing attention on the more cultural aspects of this corner of Lincolnshire that extends from Grantham in the north, Stamford and Market Deeping in the south and Bourne in the east.
An examination of their new Internet web site for tourism that has been added today to the Lincs Links will reveal exactly what these revelations are and no doubt the authors of this little bit of frivolity have been studying the inside pages of the Sun and the News of the World for ideas because the content is deliberately titillating and designed to appeal to the baser instincts of their readers. Some of the contrived and outrageous puns to be found here must have been inspired by the red top press, not least the title of the web site which is called Thinkingshire, as though this part of England is the only place which is likely to provide any intellectual stimulation. The section entitled "e-sensual breaks for thoughtful couples" is almost certainly aimed at people who are always at it because during their stay in "South Kissteven" they are invited to sample many romantic opportunities such as moonlit meanders ideal for quiet togetherness, hand in hand tranquillity trails, seventh heaven hideaways, four-poster beds and satin sheets.
This is in the main a very high quality web site and so it should be because it is funded with the money we pay in council tax but such prurience is likely to misfire and the climate engendered by the deliberate sexual connotations you will find here might well deter those very people they are trying to attract.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast, wrote Alexander Pope (1688-1744) and so it must be with estate agents. There are already several in Bourne, most of them within a few doors of each other in the town centre, apart from the many more that cover this area from Stamford and Market Deeping, and now another has opened in the old Post Office premises in North Street, latterly used as an off-licence. The selling of houses must be a very profitable undertaking to attract so many, even in such a small area of South Lincolnshire as this where they now appear to outnumber our banks. But I imagine that the competition for business is just as keen in this rural area as in the cities and so the newcomers will have their work cut out just to break even.
Perhaps they are hoping to cash in on the new Elsea Park residential development where 2,000 new homes are planned on 325 acres of green belt land alongside the A15 to the south of town but if so, I must tell them that not a brick has yet been laid and it will be at least a year, perhaps very much longer, before any of the houses on this estate will be netting them their much needed commissions.
I always understood that when launching a new business, the cardinal rule was to research the market first to ensure that there was a sufficient demand for your goods and services to warrant the investment and the risk. Perhaps the owners of the new agency have not yet noticed that the estate office across the road and a little further up the street that opened only a few months ago, has just closed down. Or will this be a lesson learned too late?
I wrote last week about the needless felling of our urban trees that I thought was vandalising the environment, but hardly were my words in print when I inadvertently committed a similar crime by killing one of our most colourful birds. We were driving to Stamford on our weekly shopping trip when this misfortune occurred and although it was an accidental death, it was no less sorrowful and I felt quite sad for the rest of the day but there was very little I could do to avoid it. We had just passed through Toft village on the A6121 and turned a bend in the narrow and winding country road when I spotted a large bird rising from the hedge on my right, trailing feathers as it went. The sparrowhawk had just seized a young bird, most probably a mistle thrush or even a starling, certainly a larger species than the finches on which it normally thrives, and it was still alive and struggling wildly and its exertions were sufficient to prevent its captor from gaining height.
The sparrowhawk swooped down on the road clutching its prey in its talons and then it landed immediately in front of my car and I could do nothing to stop it because I was being followed by another car and a van and although I broke the rules of the road by braking for a moment, it was too late and even impossible to avoid them. On the way home, I slowed down at the same spot and we saw this once grand and stately bird lying on the tarmac carriageway, a mass of reddish brown and white striped feathers, ruffled and bloodied, but the bird it had taken had gone and had therefore perhaps survived. It occurred to me when I got home that the paint work of my new car might have been damaged by the impact but I was so dismayed at the loss of one of our most attractive raptors that I did not have the heart to carry out such an inspection until next day when I found just a few small marks that were easily removed but this was little consolation to the loss of such a beautiful bird that cannot be brought back.
New safety precautions have been introduced for the weekly dumping of household waste at the Rainbow supermarket car park in Bourne on Saturday mornings. Portable red and white barriers at the rear of the refuse freighters will in future ensure that there is an orderly queue and so lessen the likelihood of anyone being injured in the unseemly melee of elbowing and shoving that we have experienced in the past. I once saw an elderly man collapse here and as he lay helpless on the ground, several people stepped over him to dispose of their own loads of garbage rather than help him up and I would not wish to witness that again because it might easily have been me. Saturday 25th November 2000
It has taken fifteen years to get this far, for those who run this amenity to realise that there is a real danger here to life and limb, and we therefore have cause to wonder how long it will be before our local authorities wake up to the fact that a permanent waste centre is needed as a matter of urgency, not in the next budget year, but now. The sight of council tax payers who contribute £700 and £800 a year or more to our public services being forced to queue up on Saturday mornings to dispose of rubbish that should be collected from their doorsteps is a sorry one indeed, totally demeaning and a sad commentary on the way in which we meekly accept the dictatorial methods of those who are supposed to safeguard our interests.
This has now become a very sensitive issue and is reflected by the attitude of the freighter operators. While taking photographs on Saturday, I was subjected to intimidation and verbal abuse and I can understand this because they must know that the facility they are providing is extremely unsafe and inefficient and one that is the subject of much public criticism but as a journalist of some experience, I am not deterred by such incivilities and so here is one of my pictures and it is unfortunate that it will make the way we do things in Bourne the subject of ridicule around the world.
There is absolutely no argument over whether we need a new location for this waste disposal. The present site is totally inadequate because the amount of rubbish now brought here during three hours on a Saturday morning is more than that dumped in one week at any of the other 80 civic amenity freighter sites in towns and villages across Lincolnshire. Furthermore, Anglia Regional Co-operative Society Ltd who own the supermarket, want the service moved because they have been receiving complaints about inconsiderate and often dangerous driving and parking and the dumping of garbage before the mobile skips arrive.
An alternative has already been identified in Cherryholt Road, currently occupied by the Bourne Recycling Centre, and the owner has offered an improved service on a secure site for six days a week compared to the Saturday morning chaos we are currently experiencing. This would satisfy everyone. What then are we waiting for? What is the problem? Well, I can tell you that the problem is one of delay, procrastination and obfuscation, all attributes that are sadly widespread in local government today. The prospect of an immediate decision, one that has not been through the usual channels of preliminary consultation, site inspection, officer's survey, initial report, intermediate report, final report, sub-committee, committee, and full council, is anathema in local government. Nothing must be seen to be simple. Everything must be wrapped up in gobbledegook and indeterminate procedures, passed from desk to desk, department to department, official to official, eating up time and money as it goes but actually solving nothing. This is the Department of Circumlocution envisaged by Charles Dickens gone mad.
We are continually being told about the amount of paperwork that councillors have to deal with and the interminable meetings they attend but is all of this administrative activity really necessary or have they succumbed to the principles of Parkinson's Law, the treatise propounded by C Northcote Parkinson in 1909, that work expands to fill the time available for its completion? We only have to see a single episode of the television programme "Yes, Minister" to realise that civil servants can easily flatter their masters and keep them quiet with a stifling fog of bureaucratic flatulence, deluging them with piles of unnecessary documents and lists of useless appointments, making them feel important without actually achieving anything and so perpetuating the status quo.
Red tape is there to be cut. Rules of procedure can be waived if the cause is just but I can hear the feeble excuses now. "Oh, it's not as easy as all that" or "It doesn't work in that way", yet we are never told why not and I am tempted to ask how many councillors still retain that enthusiasm and zeal to put the world to rights that motivated them in standing for office in the first place or whether these high ideals are sacrificed once they are elected. Or are they seduced by the power that is bestowed upon them in taking office, a power that extends to the title only and not to the deed? After all, this is simply a matter of Bourne people wanting somewhere permanent to dump their rubbish and surely the provision of a waste recycling centre does not need a White Paper or a Royal Commission to decide.
How many councillors out there can put hand on heart and tell us honestly one thing that they have actually achieved for the town by their own efforts? Yet whenever there is cause for celebration, there they are in their smart suits and chains of office, posing for the cameras and hoping for a prominent place in next week's newspapers, but it is usually not they who were responsible. The two major community innovations in Bourne of recent years, the saving of the outdoor swimming pool in 1990 and the establishment of the Wake House project that was opened earlier this year, were brought about not by the efforts of our local councillors but by the people themselves who, in the case of the swimming pool, even took to the streets with a protest march to publicise their case. Must we do that for the right to dump our waste in a safe and secure environment?
Lincolnshire County Council, which is responsible for the current Saturday freighter service, cannot shirk its responsibilities in this matter. The public protection committee that handles the county's rubbish has a declared waste management strategy dedicated to ensuring that adequate disposal facilities are available around the county and that is not the case in Bourne. There can be no question either of shelving this matter on the grounds of cost because this is a wealthy county authority and not one that is being run on a shoestring. It has a spending budget of more than £550 million in this financial year and good housekeeping dictates that it keeps adequate reserves for such contingencies.
In a democracy such as ours, we look for leaders mature enough to know how the world is and what we expect of them. The establishment of a permanent waste recycling centre is of vital importance to Bourne, which is on the verge of a massive new housing development that is likely to bring another 5,000 people into the town who will generate many more tons of bulky garbage every week. If this new amenity is not in place soon instead of depending on the charity of a local supermarket company, then there is very little point in our elected representatives continuing to hold office for they will have failed us abysmally at the very time when we needed them.
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