Tag Archives: Old Market

OLD ROPE GAP

Old-Market-gap-image-Bristol-City-Council-4-1200x675

A gushing press release from Bristol City Council announces that “a gap in a major cycling route through Bristol city centre will be filled in over a nine-month project, which is about to start. The £1.2-million plan to fill in the ‘Old Market gap’ begins on Monday, September 11, and is expected to be completed next April.”

The ‘Old Market gap’ will be a length of cycle path about 20 metres long. That works out at about £60k per metre for tarmac, kerb stones and white paint.

If you’re wondering why you pay so much tax for so few services, maybe blame the corporate civil engineering industry? They’re robbing us blind with the assistance of our country’s idiot political class.

Are they laying gold-plated kerbstones?

FEELING THE HEAT

Strange goings-on at Housing Association Curo’s new social housing in Old Market.  A few lucky new residents were all set to move in October when suddenly the whole thing was called off.

The properties were meant to be connected to the new Old Market Heat Network, currently owned and run by Bristol City Council but being secretively handed over to Swedish energy giant, Vattenfall, at a knockdown price.

Residents now have been told they can’t move in to their new homes until January at the earliest because of “a disagreement about the heating with the council”.

Let’s hope the disagreement is nothing serious and that our city’s public assets are still on the way to a global corporation to make a fat profit from.

CITY LEAP SELL-OFF LATEST

Simple District Heat Layout

The ‘Permanent Energy Centre’ on Castle Park will eventually generate some of the energy for the wider ‘OLD MARKET HEAT NETWORK’. This is a plan to supply low or zero carbon heat to connected buildings around Old Market at a cost equivalent to, or lower than, mains gas. To this end the council has now agreed to spend £9.4MILLION (plus £8.8MILLION of government money) installing a heat network around the Old Market area.

However, rather than the people of Bristol and council tax payers DIRECTLY BENEFITING in lower bills from their PUBLIC INVESTMENT into CHEAP ENERGY, the council say, “these projects are important parts of the Bristol Heat Network system and will be important assets under the CITY LEAP INITIATIVE“.

In other words, once this network has been completed at PUBLIC EXPENSE, it will be FLOGGED to the private sector so that they can extract a PROFIT from the cheap, clean energy infrastructure we’ve paid for. A similar heat network at Redcliffe, directly serving SOCIAL HOUSING, has also been put up for sale to the private sector as part of the Reverend’s energy fire sale (surely the billion pound City LEAP Prospectus? Ed).

Why can’t these heating systems REMAIN IN PUBLIC HANDS to deliver any financial and social benefits directly to the Bristolians that paid for them? Why are they being SOLD, before they’re even built, to make PROFITS for a group of global shareholders? Why are Bristol Labour Party using public money to build assets that are already on the market to global corporations?

Who voted for this corporate scam?

READER’S LETTER

I would like to say thank you for being the voice of small business owners like myself and my husband. We’ve suffered tremendously over the past year and found ourselves in ridiculous amounts of debt. Our shop is on west street in old market and since the introduction of these evil pay and park machines business has slowed down to almost a halt. And it isn’t just us, everyone on the street has suffered.

To top it off, we got a visitor from the council last month inquiring about where we send our waste. So I informed the gentlemen that we have a license with our supplier to take all our recycling to them. He asked that we  provide evidence of that which we did. But he wanted to know where our supplier sent their waste. I said I didn’t know and that was something they should go and talk to them about.

Anyway, we got a letter saying if we don’t provide a sufficient paper trail we’ll be fined £300 and we’ll have 7 days to do it. It was Christmas. These assholes are trying to run us out of business. That’s what they want.

I wonder why they complain that people don’t work hard enough and depend on the welfare system?

OLD MARKET THE TWATS ARE COMING

hipster

Look out OLD MARKET – the hipsters are coming! Beards, fixies, overpriced coffee, skinny jeans, organic food, high rents and low IQs may be heading to one of the few shopping streets left in the inner city not yet captured by THE TWATS.
However, the formation of a new company – the OLD MARKET ASSEMBLY Ltd – by the gentrifying goons behind Stokes Croft’s Canteen and No 1 Harbourside, including Mayor Greedy Pants himself, surely spells the end of Old Market as we currently know it?
Although we’re not able to state exactly what ‘The Old Market Assembly’ thinks it is yet. You might as well assume it will involve some artisanal marketing waffle and a craft beer bar furnished with old tat flogging locally sourced food and featuring sub-standard jazz musicians most weekends.
A funeral for Old Market will be held soon.

SMASH & GRAB IN EAST BRISTOL

The sun’s been a bit been beating down on Bristol recently – but be warned… It might soon be beneath the shadow of the WRECKING BALL if profiteering developers threatening some of the charms of Victorian East Bristol get their way.

First under threat from demolition is the old Ebenezer Chapel on Midland Road in St Philip’s. A friendly and familiar face greeting passers-by at the end of the Bath-Bristol cy- clepath, Bristol’s first ‘Primitive Methodist’ chapel has been around since 1849, but now FACES THE CHOP thanks to a landlord and developers who want to replace it with some boring, globally uniform apartments.

Ebenezer chapel

Ebenezer’s good – for demolition

All of the original fittings have already been ripped out to sell on, with Bristol City Council claiming it’s powerless to prevent the chapel’s destruction. Locals, backed by the Civic Society have pledged to fight on.

Next up for the ARCHITECTURAL KNACKER’S is Avonvale Board School in Redfield, now home to BCC Children’s and Young People’s Services. There are dastardly plans to replace this school, which has years left in it, with a ‘bespoke’ modern building with a much shorter life expectatancy.

Built in 1898-9 by Victorian architect Herber J. Jones – who in his time notched up a few Methodist chapels of his own – its head was once Thomas MacNamara, one of the first teachers to become a government minister.

So why not give the kids of the future a school with a bit of history they can learn about – instead of condemning them to study in an identikit box to satisfy greedy developers and weak-kneed planners who have forgotten the battles to save old Bristol from the bureaucrats in the decades after the War.

We all know the Regency and Victorian heritage of Clifton or Southville wouldn’t be flattened and replaced.

And it shouldn’t happen in working-class East Bristol either!