OPINION: Letters to the editor of the Newbury Weekly News
What is the timeframe for this footfall data?
I fear your usually excellent journalism slipped up in your article titled ‘Positive signs for the pedestrianisation scheme’ (Newbury Weekly News, July 10)
Your journalist did not mention that the question I submitted at the executive regarding the pedestrianisation was never answered.
I asked what modelling was done before the scheme.
Councillor Gourley didn’t answer that question, because there was none, but instead gave a load of statistics about footfall.
He said town centre activity rose 2.1 per cent.
From when? From February or March? No data given.
Northbrook Street up 12.5 per cent; once again from when?
And finally, the Market Place up 35 per cent; still no date from when?
I would have said that if Northbrook Street and the Market Place were up by so much, yet the town centre was only up by so little, then what is left of the town centre is on a large minus.
Another part of the council manipulation is the consultation.
The council is urging people to fill out their online consultation now while the weather is fine and the evenings are long.
They are also forcing objectors to give their names and addresses.
Surely the consultation should take place at the end of the trial period as no doubt you can’t change your mind if you have filled out the form already.
Why is there a consultation despite the public already coming out against pedestrianisation?
It’s because the public gave the wrong answers for the Liberal Dictators.
John Gotelee
London Road, Newbury
Banning vehicles will not benefit footfall
I feel that our high streets are dying and I don’t believe that banning vehicles will improve footfall.
Out-of-town retail parks offer free parking for two hours, surely town car parks can offer the same incentive.
I try to support our high street shops but a) they don’t offer the range of clothes that my family needs (we are tall). I sometimes order click and collect through Next.
b) I live within five minutes walking distance of the retail park.
Mrs Dixon
Newbury
Let’s have a Wantage-Hungerford bus route
I recently completed the West Berkshire Council’s Traffic Survey, and stated that, as a resident of Great Shefford, I was very happy with the no 4 service between Lambourn and Newbury.
I think every two hours is pretty good for a rural bus service.
This led me to revisit an idea that I have been mulling over for a long while; that what is really needed is a regular bus service across the Downs between Wantage and Hungerford.
There is no way of getting from Great Shefford to Hungerford (our nearest town and railway station) by public transport except via Newbury – a journey that would take all day there and back.
Wantage (which is the same distance from Great Shefford as Newbury) would take even longer.
And you can’t do either on a Sunday.
The A338 was once the route for stagecoaches between the cathedral cities of Oxford and Salisbury.
The Bear in Wantage and The Three Swans in Hungerford were coaching inns and The Swan in Great Shefford and (possibly) The Tally Ho at Hungerford Newtown were posting houses, where the horses were changed.
But that was 200 years ago.
A Wantage-Hungerford bus service would be of great value, and could be extended to commence at Grove if and when the new railway station there is built. (A feasibility study for such a project is to be carried out this year.)
An across-the-Downs bus route would also be beneficial to the communities of Fawley, Whatcombe, Shefford Woodlands and Hungerford Newtown.
For instance, the care home at Newtown is only accessible by car and can therefore only recruit staff who can drive.
This is just one benefit that would accrue from such a public service.
Some years ago a dial-a-bus service ran from (I think) Lambourn to Hungerford via Great Shefford.
I found it very useful when I needed to get the train from Hungerford to London as the bus called at Shefford at around 8.20am and reached Hungerford in time to catch the first off-peak departure at 8.46.
Sadly this service closed down after I had only used it a couple of times.
Perhaps the service I am now proposing is something the new Ridgeway Council should seriously consider.
Roy Bailey
Great Shefford
Charging from the grid is the best way forward
Barrie Singleton sensibly asks whether the number of electric cars charging up in Walton Way was the reason why the area lost power one sunny day last week (Newbury Weekly News, July 3).
Can I reassure him. Grid modelling has shown that even with every car on the road being an EV the extra load on the grid is only around eight per cent.
Probably significantly lower than the new power demand from ChatGPT.
Most EV drivers are able to charge at home, usually overnight, when there is significant over capacity generated by North Sea wind turbines.
The last time I charged from the grid during the day was last weekend when my supplier Octopus gave their customers free electricity for an hour in the afternoon.
On this particular sunny day over capacity came from solar generation.
In the summer my solar panels top the battery up on my car most days.
So worry not, Mr Singleton.
In fact the opposite is the case.
I’m awaiting a new home charger so that I can dump my surplus battery capacity to the grid at the peak demand of dinner time and recharge at a cheap rate overnight.
That’s the way forward for this country to meet peak demand. Load balancing, not nuclear power.
But this Government stuck in a 60s mindset is happy to throw good money after bad and has given Sizewell C the go ahead.
They’ve conveniently overlooked the fact that Hinckley is £31bn over budget and currently 13 years late and in due course will supply the most expensive electricity on the grid and they wonder why they can’t properly fund the NHS.
Adrian Foster-Fletcher
Adbury
Solid proof we are in an ecologoical emergency
Since you published the article last week headlined ‘Wedding venue plans blocked by tree team’, in which I was quoted extensively, The Guardian published research last Saturday in a piece entitled ‘Missing saplings prompt fears for Britain’s ancient woodlands’ which is very relevant.
It is based on a longitudinal study by researchers at Birmingham University of many woods in a variety of types of soil.
I quote from it: “Sapling mortality rate increased by 90 per cent, from 16.2 per cent of saplings a year on average dying before 2000, increasing to 30.8 per cent in 2022.”
There are several reasons, say researchers: “Global heating, disease and overgrazing by deer could all be causing the loss” but what this means, when coupled with the fact … “that one in every 125 of the largest trees die every year instead of one in every 200” … is that ... “the rate at which the woodlands are removing carbon from the atmosphere has started to fall”.
Not good news and proof we really are in a climate and ecological emergency.
It so happens that my son Ben, who began his career in forest science with Eling Estates when a student at Douai in the 1980s, is now project managing a six-year rainforest conservation project involving several hundred millions of pounds of aid money via the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation in Malawi, Africa.
He was visiting us after a family wedding in Netherlands the day the Welford weddings item was confirmed as being on next week’s planning committee agenda.
In Ben’s last job, over five years he carried our scientific audits on over £1bn-worth of nation-scale rainforest conservation bids for the Global Climate Fund.
He’s spent 25 years in agro/community forestry and what he says is that the people who know best what is needed to conserve forests everywhere are those who manage them.
What the authorities need to do is build a trusting relationship with local land and forest managers.
In a changing climate, for all our sakes they must be helped to find sustainable sources of income from their land.
Otherwise they will be obliged to let others with unsustainable objectives – loggers and clear-felling cash crop planters – take their land and they are then forced to move to cities.
That way both the forests and the rural communities that support them die.
It is, says Ben, no different in Britain than in Nepal or Malawi.
Our planning service and our Government may have ‘expert’ advisers on tree health and forest ecology but ecological science – about healthy guts and healthy ancient woodlands – is still in its infancy.
It was said in something I heard on the radio last week that we know about as little as there is to know about ecosystems today as our ancestors knew about our solar system and the universe 2,000 years ago.
So what Ben said about this planning application is that it is more of an opportunity – to carry out a five-year research project locally on the causes of decline in ancient woodland health – than it is a threat from ‘development’.
Dr Tony Vickers
Liberal Democrat councillor for Hungerford and Kintbury ward
Chairman of West Berkshire Council and vice chairman of the North Wessex Downs National Landscape (AONB) Council of Partners
Great memories of the Road Club and cycling
I am one of your older readers and I enjoy reading a paper copy of the NWN when my family have finished with it.
I was particularly interested in the June 19 edition with the article about 100 years of the Road Club and the photo of the start of the ride in West Street.
My father, Tom O’Dell, worked for the Halford Cycle Company setting up new branches throughout the country.
When the Camp family left the premises on the corner of West Street and Northbrook Street, he took it over for them and there they stayed until they moved to their present site.
Father had had a difficult war (1914-18) as a war photographer, and vowed to do something completely different.
He went to Nottingham and learnt to build cycles.
He had real talent.
He had a flat over the shop, which he retained until the next war, and here I was born in 1934.
I was brought up in the shop and workshop, with its doors on West Street.
Father’s skills were much sought after and he welcomed the Road Club’s members and their problems – anything from wheel truing to the gears.
To my great sadness I was not able to be a member as I had had an accident leaving me with a damaged arm and shoulder.
But I was able to help in other ways and spent many a cold Sunday morning on Theale roundabout recording 10-mile time trials.
I can remember Arthur Frost, the Lawrence brothers, Jim Bailey and many others testing their repairs up and down West Street.
I am proud of my two sons who are ‘distance’ cyclists.
Congratulations to the Road Club – long may they continue.
June Milsom
Regnum Drive, Shaw
Mother (and Father) Nature at work at golf course
One of the nicer memories of 2025 so far has been the pair of Egyptian geese at Deanwood Park Golf Club who are regular mating visitors there.
They produced10 goslings in spring and over the next three to four months we golfers have witnessed them thrive.
The most heartening thing has been the absolute dedication the parents have shown their offspring which has meant that all 10 survived rather than being predated upon or hit by flying golf balls.
The more adventurous golfers attempted to get near to take photos, but mum or dad caused us to make a swift retreat.
Two Canada geese were around them most of the time and were tolerated by the parents as they seemed to be acting as additional guardians.
Anyway it all worked and recently the flock has flown away.
Will they return later in the year and if so, how many?
Richard Jones
Longacre, Newbury
