Our Friday miscellany

of the week's

news and events

In a gallant attempt to tell us that things aren’t as bad as we think, Boston Borough Council announces that the latest figures show that vacant ground-floor shop units in the town have reduced from 37 in 2010 to  28 compared with 32 in 2009 and 48 in 2008. The council adds that Boston has the best shop occupancy rate of any similar-sized town in the county. Presumably these latest figures – which we assume are from the Local Data Company and do not tell us what percentage of shops they represent - don’t take into account the closure of two  more Boston shops announced last week. Whilst the trend is welcome, we have to say that although 28 empty shops won’t stand out in the High Street of a large town, they are infinitely more noticeable in a place like Boston. We hope that the figures won’t be taken as excuse for complacency.
After we mentioned the dilapidated state of Wormgate the other day we decided to take a closer look - and noted that the street has no fewer than twelve listed buildings, which is no mean figure, and ought to be used to advantage.

Of course, we all know that Boston is littered with listed buildings, but one problem is that most of them are barely recognisable. A good example is the one-time McDonalds eatery - which became the YMCA charity shop, and which will now become a local branch of HSBC. Reports say that the borough’s planning committee were pleased to approve plans to erect signage and a new shop front, as that corner of the Market Place had been a thorn in their side for some time. Plans to render the front of the building, alter the windows and add cash machines would make it fit in with the rest of the area, they added. Councillor Michael Brookes was quoted at the time as saying: “I think architecturally it’s as good as we’re going to get and it’s a lot better than what was there before. I think it will fit in well in the Market Place as it is now.” But now is not then– and surely how buildings looked then is what makes them important and therefore listed.  So much for the borough’s professed enthusiasm for heritage! And has anyone considered what will happen to the HBSC building when it is vacated. Give it 100 years and it will be another 116 High Street disaster. Don’t forget that a former Boston Borough Council of 50 or so years was singled out by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner for its enthusiastic destruction of historic buildings which today would be pulling in the crowds.
On Boston’s roads and footpaths there are so many potential danger spots that it comes as no surprise to hear of yet one more. A reader asks: “Has anyone else has noticed or commented on the new cycle lanes on Sleaford Road? On the westbound carriageway towards Taylor’s (Lister’s Garage) the northern side of the path has a new cycle lane marked  - which in places can’t be more than a foot wide, and is close enough to the road for any cyclist in it to be clipped up by passing traffic. Also it is interspersed with vertical poles set into the footpath that would need to be swerved round in order to avoid them into the pedestrian zone, surely an accident waiting to happen!"
Until recently visitors to the  amusingly named Council and Democracy pages of Boston Borough Council’s website were initially greeted with a list of who’s who in the  cabinet. Not any more. The section now starts with a list of meetings and agendas. Although the list of cabinet members can be found elsewhere, it is not so easy to locate. We wonder why the change was made. Perhaps after due consideration, the cabinet recognised that it is beginning to follow the same fault lines as its BBI predecessor - and decided that an early dissociation from democracy was a forward thinking step that would avoid future criticism!
Is Boston under some sort of financial curse, we wonder? At the start of the week, we reflected on the bottomless money pit known as the Princess Royal Sports Arena. We mentioned that the management company Bladerunner  was paid £540,374 in 2009 and £556,086 last year - which more than swallowed up the respective incomes of £472,450 and £482,226 - effectively creating losses before they even started.
Yet a look at Bladerunner’s accounts for the year ended 31st December 2009 shows that income before interest, tax, depreciation and all that sort of stuff was £678,000 – an increase of 61% over the previous year. Perhaps the PRSA it that business item known as a loss leader.
It is said that we are never more than a few feet away from a rat, and the borough council has issued a timely warning of the dangers of disease to people who enjoy angling, boating or perhaps nothing more prosaic than a walk beside one of our many local waterways. However,  such activities create problems caused by two-legged creatures as well. The writer of this blog has lived beside one of our waterways for many years, and has seen a rat just once. However, the amount of dog fouling, litter, illegal cycling and now, more frequently, alfresco drinking parties is a real cause for concern – but no-one other than local residents seem to share those concerns. We have heard them voiced at several locations around the town - and nothing is ever done to assuage the problem. This is a pity, as so many of the great and the good tell us what an asset our waterways are - yet stand idly by whilst they decline.
We note that townspeople now have a chance to meet their PCSO  if they can take the trouble to pitch up at the Community Room every Wednesday afternoon, when an officer will be in attendance for an hour and a half. Call us old-fashioned if you like (it will make a change from some of the things we’ve been called recently) but we think that the place to meet a police community support officer is in our neighbourhood community, where he/she should be walking the streets and getting to know the people on the patch. Again, whilst we have spotted just one rat near our home in the past decade,  that is one more than the number of PCSOs we have seen. When this new tier of law enforcement was introduced nine years ago this month we were promised that they would provide a very welcome additional presence that would also free experienced and highly trained police officers to tackle crime. As it happened they merely followed their police colleagues indoors, and after an initial  PR photo opportunity have seldom been seen again.
Having watched the sedentary progress of the work in Boston Market Place to date, we can easily understand why it is going to take so long to complete  – even though we are sure that it could well be done in half the time. Earlier this week, we came across a gallery of photographs of how the Japanese tackled their damaged infrastructure after the earthquake back in March.

The picture above shows a stretch of the Great Kanto highway after the quake struck -  and how it looked six days later after repair teams had tackled it. Now of course, we realise that a project like the Market Place is much more complicated, and would probably need at least ten days to complete  at Japanese rates of working – but it set us to thinking … perhaps we should have advertised for workers in the jobs pages of the Asahi Shimbun.
Yesterday we mentioned the 15-question survey seeking opinions on the Market Place improvement works that we are being asked to complete on the internet. One of the first to respond to the call was Wyberton Parish Councillor Don Ransome, who apparently agrees with our assessment that the survey doesn’t actually seek to find out what we think about the refurbishment at all. “I filled in the 15-question survey online yesterday and have left myself with another question....why?” he writes. Answers on a postcard, please …
One of the pitfalls of buying stories from agencies or similar sources that newspapers face is that they tend to accept them at face value. So it is that two almost identical stories in our two local “newspapers” carry almost the same headline – to the effect that a man had been acquitted of strangling his girlfriend. The five definitions we checked on the internet were universal in their verdict that strangling ends in death. As the young woman in question was very much alive and giving evidence, could we suggest an investment in a dictionary in our local newsrooms.
Finally, we liked this line from the latest Boston Bulletin. “The very best, cheapest and environmentally-friendly way of dealing with your garden waste is… to keep it in your garden and turn it into nutritious compost.” As this is Boston, and the report doesn’t say who compost is “nutritious” for, we anticipate a run on the Pilgrim’s A&E department!

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