NEW HENGROVE HOUSING HORROR

More good news for South Bristol as a planning application before Bristol City Council’s Planning Committe ‘A’ today proposes to demolish Hengrove Leisure Park and build 350 homes in its place.

This latest housing site is conveniently nestled between Hengrove Park, where 1,500 homes have planning permission, and the new private equity development ‘Urban Quarter’, where 250 homes are being built.

A few hundred metres east of the site, on Hengrove Way, is Barratt Homes’ recently completed Filwood Park, a development of 150 homes and next to that is the emerging Skanska/IKEA ‘Boklok‘ abomination built on the verge of Airport Road with 173 homes.

The existing facilities at Hengrove Leisure Park – the cinema, bingo hall and the majority of food outlets – which only opened with much fanfare in 1998, are all proposed for demolition to make way for housing. Because, according to the planning application before councillors, the existing facilities are ‘not viable’.

Residents of Whitchurch, Hengrove, Hartcliffe and Knowle West are furious at the news that some of the last leisure facilities in the area are being thrown into the dustbin of history under the cover of “the housing crisis”.

A slogan that, in the hands of the property industry, is nothing more than a populist ploy to extract large profits from overdevelopment. Is it any surprise that as house prices in south Bristol head north of £300k, the international private equity industry is taking an interest?

Residents also complain that they have been fooled by Bristol City council and its planners as the 1,500 home development on the hugely popular Hengrove Park was only signed off for planning permission on the basis that there were public facilities, like the leisure park, in the area to support new housing. The leisure park is even listed as part of ‘Phase one‘ of this new development by Bristol City Council.

This proposal is also another major disaster for the credibility of Bristol City Council planners who, 25 years ago, foisted this car-friendly development – a large car park with some large retail sheds – on south Bristol as their vision of the future for the area.

Indeed, so enamoured were council planners and politicians with their exciting new corporate-leisure-in-a-car-park future, they even granted the privately-run operation an unprecedented 1,000 year lease on the council-owned open space of Hengrove Park to realise this dream.

Whether this ludicrous 1,000 year lease to a corporate allows the new owners of the leisure park, AEK UK, to demolish it and build housing remains to be seen.

OSBORNE OFFSPRING MAKING GRIME GRIM

CLIMATE EMERGENCY BALLS: ROUNDABOUTS

PRIVATE EQUITY CASHING IN ON ‘HOUSING CRISIS’

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The quick sale of Kier’s half-finished ‘Urban Quarter’ development on Hengrove Lane, adjacent to Hengrove Leisure Centre to Terra Firma, a European private equity outfit, operating under the brand Tilia spells trouble for locals and increased profit for financiers.

The first thing Terra Firma have done is go back to Bristol City Council to alter the planning permission. Their request? That they can add two storeys to a couple of the proposed blocks of flats there.

While this will increase the amount of people and vehicles on a crowded site, it will also increase profits for a shadowy group from Europe’s financial elite.

This is also, of course, a profitable little private equity trick that can be pulled off elsewhere in South Bristol where the amount of unsustainable housing development on their open space, accompanied by few new public services or facilities, already has locals up in arms.

The housing crisis is turning out to be a nice little earner for some isn’t it? And a new kind of hell for others.

DEFLATING MAYORAL EGO LIVE!

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A seemingly harmless question from posh Green councillor Carla “The Green Princess” Denyer at Tuesday’s council meeting got the Reverend Rees in a bit of an emotional state.

The painfully liberal member for the Royal Borough of Clifton East asked the Reverend a seemingly harmless question. Was it reasonable to refuse to support the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, a Private Members Bill currently going through Parliament, just because it was likely to fail without Tory support?

Back came a rambling response from a visibly emotional mayor: “I just anticipated this. When I see your name, my heart often sinks because it’s just the usual, kind of, you know, chess game trying to get a tweet or a blog out of the answer that feeds that line that, you know, Labour Party don’t care about the planet.”

This is despite the dull Green Princess not running a blog (unlike the Reverend) and running the most boring Twitter account imaginable! Could the Reverend’s response have anything to do with Ms Denyer’s efforts at present to become leader of the national Green party and the amount of press and attention she’s receiving locally and nationally? Press coverage that currently eclipses the thin-skinned jealous Reverend’s by a considerable amount?

It was obvious to many on Tuesday that our emotionally insecure mayor needed to constantly underline his own importance. He spent most of the meeting basically saying “Look at me. I’m a very important person” and boasting about the national and international corporate non-entities-in-suits he has been meeting with lately.

At one point he even told councillors that they lacked the integrity of the people he had had a highly important Zoom meeting with just that morning. Those people being merchant bankers and financiers. A profession popularly regarded for having, er, zero integrity.

Take cover! The Reverend’s fragile ego has crash landed in the dodgy international finance sector!

PLASTICENE MAN BAMBOOZLED BY NIMBIES

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A successful council motion last night to preserve the city’s greenbelt and wildlife areas such as the Novers/Western Slopes from the Reverend’s looney housing developer mates really upset the developer-friendly Labour Group.

The Reverend, naturally, had one of his regular and embarrassing hissy fits in public at councillors after not getting his own way and being stopped from concreting over any more of our open spaces. But also joining him was our dear friend Tom “Plasticene Man” Renhard, the city’s new Cabinet member for housing, tasked with reading out crap speeches badly written for him by the Reverend’s PR sideman Kev “Slo” Slocombe.

After the Labour defeat, Plasticene Man, Labour’s latest ridiculous working class voice of the people, was heard privately dismissing campaigners, insisting that none of the Western Slopes campaigners lived locally and that they were all “posh nimbys”.

For starters, how can you live out of an area and be a Nimby?

A READER WRITES:

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Hello Bristolian,

I have heard from a very trusted source that the great anti-vaccination activist, Youtube VLogger and Bristol resident Dr. Jon Rogers, of Windsor Road, was admitted to Bristol hospital ICU on 2 occasions in the past month to receive oxygen as he and his wife had contracted Covid.

I do hope his wife recovers soon.

CENSORED!!! TRUTH ABOUT FAKE NEWS AT BRISTOL 24/7

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A recent article in mini roundabout Bristol 24/7 about ‘engineer’ Paul Lloyd, now apparently relaunching himself as a ‘social media influencer’ with the help of the self-styled ‘independent’ media outlet, caught the attention of one of our readers.

Mr Lloyd is probably best known in Bristol as the former boss of the Bristol office of Camelot Property Management, who encountered a few legal problems a few years back. Indeed, under cross examination in court, ‘engineer’ and ‘social media influencer’ Paul Lloyd proved himself something of a thick, fat, ignorant retard of the highest order.

However, should we really be surprised that a media outlet owned by landlords, small local business and various petite-bourgeoise interests is keen to rehabilitate the reputation of the type of boss class liar and bully these people love to favour and promote?

Here’s a comment our reader left below the 24/7 article that was immediately removed without explanation. A letter to the editor has also been ignored – so far.

What a bunch of tossers!

There’s a few problems with this article in terms of truth and honesty…
For starters, Paul Lloyd is NOT an engineer. He is a disgraced former property manager for ‘Camelot Property Management’. He was sacked for gross misconduct, including illegal and abusive treatment towards residents.
I lived at a property Paul managed in Broomhill. He was the manager of the Bristol office. I was part of a group of residents who took him to court in March 2017.
I’m surprised the writer didn’t do a basic fact check. It was a high profile court case, covered extensively by the Bristol Post, The Bristolian, BBC local news and Radio 4’s ‘The Today Programme’. You only have to do a basic internet search of ‘Paul Lloyd’ to discover what he did.
We went months without any hot water or heating and people were getting electric shocks from the shower. Paul sent us a threatening email saying we would face immediate evicted if we dared complain to the Environmental Heath Department or the Council.
Paul Lloyd was a bully who made our lives a misery. He seemed to target vulnerable young women most of all. He tried to force a young woman to move out by telling her she would be ‘ripped apart by bailiffs dogs’ and ‘have all her belongings tossed into the street’ if she didn’t move out before her notice period ended.
He illegally evicted a 22 year old women from a property in Speedwell. A group of men forced their way into her bedroom at 10 o’clock at night and physically threw her onto the street in her night dress. She suffered from a chronic health condition, and they wouldn’t even let her go to the kitchen to get her medication out of the fridge.
He would often perform unannounced room inspections late at night (without the legally required 24 hours notice). Sometimes we would come back from the shower to find one of his employees going through our stuff. They would repeatedly break-in to the room of a young woman I lived with at Broomhill (still to this day I don’t understand why they kept picking on her). She would come home from work to find her door smashed open and all her belongings strewn about the room. I remember one night after this had happened for the third time, she was in floods of tears, and it took about 2 hours to calm her down. She said it was making her feel extremely low and she was having suicidal thoughts.
He was so arrogant and narcissistic, he thought he could get away with his abusive behaviour. But he got found out. Eventually all of this got back to the Camelot head office – and he was sacked. In this article he says he’s ‘taking some time out’. This implies he left voluntarily. That is not true.
Paul Lloyd says he has mental health problems, so we should all feel sorry for him. But what about the mental health of the people he victimised? We suffered domestic abuse at the hands of Paul Lloyd. Some people were diagnosed with PTSD and are still getting treatment today. He was like a lurking threat – always there. He acted like our legal rights didn’t exist, and the UK housing laws simply didn’t apply to him.
This article is a cover up. It is fake news designed to re-write history and cleanse Paul Lloyd’s rotten reputation, so that he can make money as a ”social influencer’. I find it sickening that he’s using ‘Mind’ – a mental health charity, to absolve himself, when in reality he wrecked the mental health of literally dozens of people.
You can see from the way he’s tried to cover up his past that he holds no remorse or regret for the people he wronged. He also shows no concern or respect for the journalist Martin Booth, whose professional integrity is put at risk with being associated with these lies.

REVEREND’S SEMI NAKED PRAYER CIRCLE IN FRISBEE FROLIC SHOCKER?

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To keep us entertained over the summer holidays, the Reverend Rees has done an interview with ‘Premier Christianity’, which, it says here, is “the UK’s leading Christian magazine”. Possibly not the hardest crown to claim in this day and age.

Among the Reverend’s fascinating insights, we find that “we live in a complicated world” and that his version of ‘levelling up’, Bojo’s hapless policy for the red wall constituencies, “actually makes sense“!

Further gems include the Reverend explaining his jobs-for-evangelical-mates policy. “What we’ve seen over recent years is the churches really beginning to step into city leadership, because I’ve offered that challenge,” he explains. Carefully sidestepping any job offers or cash that might have accompanied his “challenge”.

Your caring, sharing BRISTOLIAN even gets a mention. “You get your trolls,” whines the Reverend. “Some rag started to call me “Reverend Rees” and all that type of stuff and said I was trying to introduce a theocracy. But so much of that trolling stuff is such nonsense. It just washes over you.“

Indeed. It’s washing over him so thoroughly, he makes a point of mentioning this “nonsense” in his keynote interview about his Christian faith.

He then continues letting it “wash over” in bizarre and considerable detail. “The way I see it is if there’s a 60-year-old man in his underpants late at night writing mean things to people on the internet, you just think: “What has your life come to?” [Laughs] I mean, you know, take up a hobby, pick up a frisbee, do something!“

“Something” like, maybe, swanking around the Council House in a spiv’s suit calling yourself a ‘City Leader’? Or bullying female councillors to boost your flagging ego and to hide your gross incompetence? Or awarding jobs and funds to your best mates, the all-male Hope Chapel Prayer Circle Loonies? Last seen in 2020 claiming their prayers had kept Covid levels low in Bristol.

Unfortunately we’re unable to confirm if the Reverend and his gang of boys in the evangelical band strip down to their kecks and play frisbee before they pray for us.

But the Reverend’s fertile imagination must find inspiration somewhere, surely?

COUNCILLORS CALL TIME ON CHILD ABUSE IN BRISTOL SCHOOLS

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If you’re ever looking for some visceral screen entertainment over the next few years, we suggest you take a look at Bristol City Council’s People Scrutiny Commission on Youtube. Finally, it looks like the gloves might be coming off against the council’s social care and education bosses for failures and evasions stretching back for years.

The Commission is chaired by Tim “Little Asshat” Kent who has a child with special educational needs in Bristol and has the scars on his back to show for it. He’s joined on the committee by Christine “Miss” Townsend, who has been accused in the past of being a ‘terrorist’ by local academy chain The Venturers Trust for complaining about their admission procedures, and Hartcliffe councillor Kerry “Rosie” Bailes.

Kerry has a child with special educational needs who’s been forced out of his primary school for three years now, because, as far as we can tell, his Hartcliffe school is run by some sort of Nazi freak fully backed by the council. Also on the Committee are Tim “The Ripper” Rippington who has family experience with autism and Bristol City Council ‘services’ and Geoff “Cods” Gollop who has a family member drifting around somewhere at the wrong end of the council’s adult care service.

All-in-all it looks like the focus of this committee might be on the human rights of children and service users. Rather than its usual business of blaming parents, covering up abuse and ignoring the systematic management failures of senior bosses and an embedded culture of institutional disability discrimination. An approach that bosses, for years, have tidily wrapped up in complicated bureaucracy and unfathomable technocratic jargon to give their ugly work a veneer of respectability.

The first meeting of People Scrutiny got off to a flying start with Kerry telling Hugh “Hell” Evans, the cheery, chubby Jacqui “Village” Jensen replacement as Executive Director Of Institutional Abuse (surely Executive Director of People? Ed), in relation to his ‘Building Rights: a review of Bristol’s policies and actions for people with learning disabilities and autistic people’ report:

“This all sounds really amazing. A lot of it should already be happening. The law was changed a very long time ago and we just haven’t seen it. As public forum said, there is no accountability. You know that I’ve been in the system nearly four years now and I’ve seen no difference. It’s still very much a you’ll do as you’re told or else system and when I say or else, I mean or ,else. It is awful.”

“My son was thrown into a car park at five years old. He was locked in an office for being autistic. This report talks about abuse in care homes. That’s happening in our schools under our noses. And when we complain about it, we are lied about. There is no accountability. What kind of consequences are there if none of this happens? You know it can’t go on as it is. This is our children, you know? What consequences are there? The people who abused autistic people in care homes went to prison. You know what? When are our children going to get justice. When is there going to be some consequences?”

Evans, unsurprisingly, didn’t offer Kerry a timeline on when council bosses and education ‘leaders’ might suffer any consequences for abusing children and ignoring service user’s rights. Instead a private meeting away from the public eye was offered by Education Director Alison “Burly” Hurley.

Kerry, not one to be easily distracted by useless private meetings with desperate arse-covering council bosses keen to keep a fat salary rolling into their bank account at the expense of abused children, has instead approached the Police and Crime Commissioner requesting a criminal investigation into the abuse of SEND pupils in Bristol schools.

Last week’s meeting is available on Youtube with more set to come

The BRISTOLIAN

“Smiter of the High and Mighty”