Tag Archives: PRSC

TALES FROM TURBO ISLAND

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CONFUSED COUNCILLORS

Confused councillors have pointlessly delayed the Turbo Island Town Green application for three months on the advice of their clueless legal team.

At a Public Rights of Way and Greens (PROWG) meeting in April the applicants and objectors presented their evidence to the committee and a council lawyer admitted he had no idea how to decide the issue.

Normally, an expert inspector would be appointed by the council to look at the evidence and provide the way forward. Instead the council have decided to take three months out to figure out what the hell to do.

However, it seems unlikely the council’s legal team can produce a recommendation without landing themselves in the hot water of an expensive judicial review. That means they will need to appoint an inspector.

Why didn’t they just do this in April?

sofas Turbo Island

SECRET OWNER SHOCKER

The Nazi Post and Bristol 24/7 breathlessly assured us in October that Turbo Island had been sold by owners Wildstone Investments to ‘a mystery buyer’.

This ‘mystery buyer’ was reputed to be Bedminster printing company Out of Hand, a claim vigorously denied by the Nazi Post who won’t identify the actual ‘mystery buyer’ of the land.

This ‘mystery buyer’ mystery becomes more tangled in the bundle of documents for the Turbo Island item at the PROWG in April.

It includes a letter from Merret & Co solicitors who say “we act on behalf of the local freehold owner of the Property” and the council lists Out of Hand as the firm represented by Merret & Co.

Who actually owns the land and why’s it being disguised by local press?

**UPDATE: papers released this week by the council for a PROWG meeting next week have confirmed Out of Hand as the owners of the land.

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DEAL OR NO DEAL?

Campaigners for the Town Green, led by the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, are pushing for a deal where the landowner – whoever they are – voluntarily registers the land as a Town Green in exchange for concessions on public access to the site.

Councillors on the PROWG, allegedly concerned about costs being run up, appeared blissfully unaware that a deal could be on the table.

Instead, they opted for the expensive option of funding their own legal team to look at an issue they know nothing about for three months before appointing a barrister as an inspector to decide the issue.

Bizarrely, the council’s PROWG lawyer quoted a cost of at least £1,000 for an inspector.

It will be, at least, ten times that.

BATTLE OF THE BEARPIT

As the dust settles on the Reverend’s underwhelming and overpriced ‘BATTLE OF THE BEARPIT’ eviction assault on the city’s street homeless, People’s Republic of Stokes Croft and Bearpit Improvement Group stalwart, Chris “The Pot” Chalkley should allow himself a wry smile at the council’s thinking behind this latest turn of events. The Reverend Rees unleashed his PRIVATE STORMTROOPERS to clear the Bearpit of squatters and the homeless on 19 June after what he called “escalating public fears” following a low-key statement from the police that a man had suffered a minor facial injury in the Bearpit.

The Reverend’s assault led by ineffective community worker turned ‘Street Czar’ Kurt “Wendy” James appeared to be devised as a HIGH PROFILE MEDIA EVENT and troops were piled in ready for a headline-grabbing scrap with the squatters of the Bearpit. Although things didn’t go quite to plan when just one man was arrested for a non-violent offence while the rest just drifted away from the Bearpit with a “fuck you” to the Reverend’s para-military bailiff team. Within a few hours bailiffs were stood around with the press in the middle of, possibly, THE MOST EXPENSIVELY SECURED ROUNDABOUT IN HISTORY.

The Battle of the Bearpit took place after an eviction hearing at Bristol’s Court of Justice where the city council arrived with a swanky barrister on top-dollar who proceeded to fail to prove the council owned the Bearpit. The court, instead, had to make do with a statement from ‘Street Czar’ Wendy claiming the council did own it but just couldn’t prove it at the moment. The barrister also blustered to the court that there was “AN URGENT NEED FOR “REDEVELOPMENT AND REGENERATION” at the Bearpit.

Really? An urgent need to expensively redevelop and regenerate a concrete underpass beneath a roundabout? This is why Chris The Pot should be pissing himself laughing. When he announced ten years ago that he intended to turn this ABANDONED, UNLOVED and UNDERUSED underpass popular only with the street homeless into an important cultural quarter, vibrant public space and open-air art gallery there were gales of laughter. Followed by a shrug of the shoulders from anyone in authority who had spent years pursuing a policy of “TARGET HARDENING” and “DISSUASION OF USE” in what studies had discovered was THE MOST FEARED SPACE IN CENTRAL BRISTOL. Certainly, no mention then from snooty bastards about “an urgent need for redevelopment and regeneration”.

So what’s changed? When did the Bearpit become valuable real estate? Who changed it and how? And who gets to cash in?