Tag Archives: Wellington Hill Playing Fields

“WE ARE WINNING!” HOW CONFIDENTIAL SOURCES, TIPSTERS & WHISTLEBLOWERS HELPED ‘THE BRISTOLIAN’ BREAK THE BIG NEWS IN THE CITY…

It’s been a bumper few months here at The BRISTOLIAN as we’ve set the city’s news agenda. telling you the stories no one else would. Our successes include:

HORSEWORLD

We originally exposed £80k-per-year HorseWorld boss Mark ‘Not That One’ Owen’s madcap plans to fund his ailing equine charity by building on the greenbelt back in May.

We’ve subsequently reported how his plans were rejected by a BANES planning committee and how the overpaid and under-performing charity boss now plans to stay put – despite his DISASTROUS MANAGEMENT – whilst making dedicated animal welfare staff redundant, closing the revenue-generating Visitor Centre, and generally running the whole operation down.

Hopefully this story will not end on that note, though…

CITY ACADEMY

Also in May we revealed that a row over racism was breaking out at the city’s most multicultural school.

This was confirmed in January when an employment tribunal found that a black member of staff had been refused a management post for a project to raise attainment among black kids at the school due to INSTITUTIONAL RACISM. The £43k job instead went to a white teacher – thus maintaining an all-white management team at a school, 70% of whose pupils come from a BME background.

HOLMWOOD HOUSE

We exposed this privately run for-profit ’HOME OF HORRORS’ back in December.

Since then the care home’s multiple problems have been reported by BBC Bristol, the Nazi Post, Bristol 24/7 and now nationally on BBC Radio 5.

WELLINGTON HILL PLAYING FIELDS

Following our report in November about council managers using outright lies to try to block this open space in Bishopston from being protected as a public amenity, the council has executed a rapid u-turn and registered the land as a ‘Town Green’.

Clearly senior council bosses decided that sending junior managers in to a quasi-judicial setting to tell porkie pies on their behalf was not going to work any longer.

We have also learned that hold-ups in the voluntary registration of land at Laundry Fields in Fishponds have vanished since The BRISTOLIAN highlighted them.

…So a big THANK YOU to all of the whistleblowers, well-placed sources and tipsters.

Without your inside information we would not be able to EXPOSE Bristol’s bent bosses, incompetent council chiefs or hypocrites in high office.

Together we CAN make a difference and build a better city for all!

RED ALERT! GREEN SPACE SELL-OFF..?

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Open space campaigners tell us that part-time council property boss, Robert ‘Spunkface’ Orrett has OPENLY ADMITTED that he sees his role as obtaining the maximum cash sale value of all council land in Bristol – including any local green or open space.

This was why Spunkface endlessly delayed voluntarily registering council-owned open space such as Wellington Hill Playing Fields as ‘Town Greens’.

Locals should therefore be on alert to protect their green and open spaces not protected by town green law, as the man in charge considers it all up for sale for development and he DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK. This applies to all parkland and allotments too.

At least what we have always suspected is now confirmed: that Bristol City Council sees open spaces primarily as financial assets for itself and not as spaces of value for Bristolians.

BRISTOLIAN #4.9 NOW ON THE STREETS!

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The BRISTOLIAN #4.9 – hitting the streets NOW!

It’s been another busy month in Bristol, with no shortage of graft, payola or all-round incompetence to cover – but the latest paper (The BRISTOLIAN #4.9) is now on the streets, featuring…

» BRISTOL’S NEW HORROR HOME
Holmwood House care home is like something out of The Munsters. Except it’s really not funny.

» YOU’RE FIRED!
Skinner booted as the Curse of 100 Temple Street claims yet another management victim

» RED-FACED RED PANTS DOESN’T GET THE BIG PICTURE
Mayor ‘Now Fuck Off’ Ferguson loses his cool over The BRISTOLIAN in his Berchtesgarten

» AUDIT LATEST
Financial farrago at City Hall as fraud and non-compliance continues

» MARKET FARCES
They seek it here, they seek it there, they seek that damned elusive £165k everywhere…

» PRIVATE LAND, PRIVATE GAIN?
Why is a corporate property developer calling the shots at Wellington Hill Playing Fields?

» IS CITY OF BRISTOL COLLEGE BROKE?
City’s largest supplier of skills & training to youngsters on the brink

» JUNKET GEORGE UPDATE
Millionaire Mayor signs partnership deal with Chinese Communist Party bosses!

PLUS: BRISTOLIAN BITES!!!

Tantalising titbits including…

THINK OF THE CHILDREN! – barney between Fergo’s true believers & Labour at charity bash
PRIMARY FAIL – IndyRedpants election strategy off the rails already?
UNIFORMLY BAD – what’s going on at popular Totterdown school?
THIEVES IN THE TEMPLE – £90 million budget cuts not affecting the consultancy gravy train
BEDROOM TAX LATEST – Council prepares to boot poor families onto street for Christmas
LEGAL NEWS – panicky BCC misrepresents own consultants’ findings on Mem impact
HOYT’S GOURMET JOY – ‘Assistant Mayor’ fills his face with food & reneges on ‘No Evictions’

…And all that for FREE!

See the Distribution page for your local stockist – and if there isn’t one near you, let us know!

CAN’T WAIT TO GET HOLD OF A PAPER COPY?

Then you can DOWNLOAD a PDF version here:

» The BRISTOLIAN #4.9 – December 2013

COUNTING THE COST OF CITY HALL LIARS: BRISTOL COUNCIL BOSSES’ BEEF WITH WELLINGTON HILL TOWN GREEN

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Farcical claptrap from council managers is destroying our playing fields and open spaces while running up massive bills

That ‘No Trespassing’ sign – helpfully sited TWO MILES from Wellington Hill at Stoke Lodge!

For two years the Friends of Horfield Common have been fighting to get the WELLINGTON HILL PLAYING FIELDS protected and declared a TOWN GREEN. Ever since the landowners, Bristol City Council, included the fields in their notorious Green spaces strategy as a site FOR SALE to developers.

The playing fields meet all the requirements of a Town Green and all that’s needed is a rubber stamp from the registration authority, er … Bristol City Council! But Bristol City Council, the landowner, has other ideas. Why take a cheap, efficient, legal route supported by a whole community when you can engage in an expensive argument based on liEs and DoDGy interpretations of the law backed by a few shadowy managers at the Counts louse?

The fun and games started last autumn when BOB ‘THE BORING ONE’ HOSKINS, a council landscape manager, presented to the Public Rights of Way Committee some photos of “individual signs which were installed in Wellington Hill Playing Fields” that warned people not to trespass. All well and good – except the signs weren’t from Wellington Hill but from STOKE LODGE PLAYING FIELDS…Two miles away!

With this scam exposed, the council then decided to spend lots of money employing an expensive lawyer to present their ‘evidence’ about the land to a PUBLIC INQUIRY run by an independent inspector. The hearing is due soon. So step forward another council manager – this time area Parks manager, PETE ‘PANTS ON FIRE’ CLARK, who is presenting ‘evidence’ that the fields were gated and fenced in the 1990s, ‘proving’ the public hasn’t used the land ‘as of right’ for twenty years.

Unfortunately for Clark his claims are contradicted by his council’s own paperwork. A letter dated 1980 from Avon County Council Property to the Director of Education clearly states:

…the boundary fencing and gate which used to be along the public footpath in Wellington Hill has now disappeared which has the effect of opening up the playing field to the general public.

This confirms that any gates or fences, which may have once been there, were not there in 1980, while ‘Pants On Fire’ Clark’s ‘evidence’ says that both were still there a decade later!

This has caused anger among local residents. Says one:

We don’t know how Pete Clark has got the front to submit this. He grew up in the area and he knows as well as we do that this is TOTAL RUBBISH!

But when it comes to making up “total rubbish” and presenting it to inspectors at great expense, Hoskins and Clark are but mere beginners. During the seven year fight to get land at Whitchurch declared a Town Green, City Council Property Manager JAN ‘THIRD’ REICHEL gave no fewer than FOUR different explanations at different times for the legal status of this land! All of which, incidentally, turned out to be total bollocks. The cost of that particular pointless exercise went into six figures.

So why are big sums of our cash being forked out to back the doomed and pathetic efforts of COUNCIL MANAGER LIARS to block Town Greens?

RED-FACES & TOWN GREENS

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When is a NIMBY not a NIMBY? When a Bristol City Councillor decides it’s politically useful – that’s when…

Residents in Horfield fighting to save WELLINGTON HILL PLAYING FIELDS from development are increasingly bemused by the conduct of the landowners, Bristol City Council, who seem prepared to throw any amount of money around to prevent the land becoming a TOWN GREEN and preserved forever as open green space for the community.

“Our experience to date,” locals tell us of the council’s tactics, “is that as soon as one argument is demonstrated to be invalid, an- other is constructed…”

Green spaces are perhaps the one issue where grass roots groups of citizens can successfully take on the council. It’s telling that the council responds by fighting expensively, aggressively and often unfairly against its own citizens rather than compromising with them or at least responding in a constructive and honest fashion.

But then TWO-FACED, lying councillors are happy to support Town Greens in their

own wards whilst simultaneously declaring those who support them elsewhere are not- in-my-back-yard ‘NIMBY’ types. They’re also happy to approve spending on existing Town Greens – while claiming dubiously that new Town Green registrations will cause such payments to dry up.

In the TOPSY-TURVY world of local government, councillors know their decisions are unlikely to be judicially reviewed when they make a wrong decision.

Even if they are, those same councillors are among the first to criticise anyone applying for judicial review as ‘NIMBYs’! And of course the councillors never have to pay for the cost to the taxpayer wasted by their DODGY politicking – while at the same time they will insist that those who dare to challenge them are ‘wasting taxpayers’ money’.

Because politicians are mostly a bunch of hypocrites, our council run on behalf of wealthy landowners rather than ordinary citizens.

++ NEXT ISSUE ++ NEXT ISSUE ++ NEXT ISSUE ++ NEXT ISSUE ++ NEXT ISSUE ++ NEXT ISSUE ++ NEXT ISSUE ++

We’ll be covering the ’Town Green‘ issue in the next issue of The BRISTOLIAN (#4.8) – out soon and available from all the usual stockists!