Jump to content

Harry Beynon

Members
  • Posts

    77
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    5

Everything posted by Harry Beynon

  1. I have to admit I did not go to the OLM but today I made my first trip into the city since it opened. What made the most impact on me was the appalling traffic situation. When I came into town at 15.30 hrs traffic was at a standstill from the Newtown Road roundabout along Newtown Road and Widemarsh Street as far as Newmarket Street. The situation was equally congested along Edgar Street as far as the Tesco roundabout and beyond. On my return journey at 18.00 hrs the situation was exactly the same in reverse! If our magnificent Council are right and the OLM is drawing in 10% more shoppers to the city centre, how on earth did they expect it to work without the slightest improvement to the transport infrastructure?
  2. An unfortunate choice of words! As far as I can see, there are a couple of City and District Councillors on the BID Steering Group. However, they do not come with any Council mandate - nor is it certain they will feature on the BID Board. The 'partnership' element extends only as far as the Council must carry out the BID ballot and collect the additional rates generated by a BID. After that, the Council must hand the funding (believed to be in the region of £250k) to the BID Board who are legally required to spend it in line with the BID manifesto.
  3. There are Councillors (City and District) in the BID Steering Group. However, they are simply acting as individuals with an interest in the city's future and are not representing the Council. If the BID election is successful, the money generated by the BID is ring-fenced and can only by spent by the BID Board in line with the Business Plan outlined in the BID prospectus. There is zero chance of the Council being able to interfere or dominate.
  4. @herefordBID is the official Twitter feed. Web-site to follow.
  5. Because the OLM is a managed centre, it is possible to have ' a woman with a dust-pan' keeping it pristine. That is why we need everyone to support the Hereford Business Improvement District scheme (BID) then the wider centre can also have cleaners! Frankly, if something costing £90m didn't look good then someone has really messed up!
  6. Attended the launch of the Hereford Business Improvement District (BID) tonight. This is the only way forward for the city centre. OLM is not big enough to offer a destination shopping centre - it only has 20 shops. The historic centre has 300 and those businesses need to thrive in order for the whole of the city to develop successfully. BID funding enables local businesses to decide their own projects over and above Council services. A successful BID would enable a co-ordinated approach to marketing and promoting the city's retail offer. We all need to get behind this initiative. See www.surveymonkey.com/s/herefordbid
  7. The shredding of paperwork is a red-herring. In this day and age, unless somebody has scratched all this down with pen and ink, there will still be a computer hard-drive somewhere. It just needs someone with the will and determination to tackle the Council, impose an injunction and get the documentation retrieved.
  8. The Officer in charge of this debacle is Andrew Ashcroft aashcroft@herefordshire.gov.uk I have been badgering him for two years to get some action on this site. In fact, he promised work was starting in July 2013. As we can see, all that has happened has been a tidying up operation. The Council have enforcement powers but are refusing to use them. Instead, they are trying to 'encourage' the owners to rebuild. That will not produce any results because all the potential tenants have been poached by the OLM development. Feel free to try Mr Ashcroft yourselves!
  9. Biomech - The ground is prime development land but does not belong to HUFC. The Edgar Street ground is owned by the Council who, in their infinite wisdom, have granted 250 years' Leases in order to allow development at each end of the stadium. Sound familiar?! However, if the club goes bust, these Leases will revert to the Council. In the Peter Hill years, the Leases were assigned to the BS Group in return for a £500k loan (now repaid) and the plan was for the football club to move to a new ground at Grafton. However, the OLM scheme scuppered that because the Cattle Market was seen as the more desirable site for retail development and Edgar Street lost its attraction.
  10. In my humble opinion, the present construct is finished. The club is principally owned by David Keyte and Mike Roberts who have treated their investment in the same way they regard their horse-racing interests. Indeed, David Keyte, the Chairman, famously said when buying the majority share from Graham Turner - ' if it costs me £300,000 and I have ten years of fun, it will be worth it'. In other words, HUFC has been his plaything. However, unfortunately for DK, it has cost him £600,000 and he has had nothing but grief! Successful ownership these days involves much more than swanning around in the Directors' box, smoking cigars and glad-handing visiting dignatories. It requires very deep pockets and an astuteness sadly missing among the present Board. Well-meaning supporters are now scratching round trying to pay an outstanding HMRC tax bill. Even if they achieve it, there will be another one along soon. The Club acknowledge that they need £300k just to survive until the end of May. Administration would mean certain relegation and cannot work because the administration has to be exited by a CVA requiring agreement from all creditors, including HMRC. On top of this, all 'football creditors' - the players - have to be paid in full. The money just does not exist. This dire financial position was well known to the Board when they took £60,000 from loyal supporters last year in return for totally worthless shares. At the same time, existing shareholders had their shares rendered worthless by the Directors voting themselves a loans for shares swap which swamped all existing interests. Incidentally, the loans for shares swap granted the present Board a greatly increased proportion of ownership so that they would be in a better position to benefit from the recently granted new Leases on the ground and adjacent development land. So, unless someone with far more money than sense chooses to invest, the present company will go bust. All shares will be worthless and all loans written off. It will then be in the gift of the FA to grant a licence to a Phoeonix club (AFC Hereford?) and for the Council to grant new leases to the fledgling club. The Hereford United SupportersTrust would be the ideal vehicle with which to launch this new club although the new baby would find itself in a league only marginally higher than Westfields and with part-time football a reality.
  11. Before all the big cranes are taken off the site, McAlpines should fix five projecting gibbets from the five roof 'peaks'. On each would be suspended a life-size fibreglass effigy of the five 'culprits' responsible for this Nightmare on Edgar Street. My nominations would be: Jonathan Bretherton, Roger Phillips, John Jarvis, Stanhope's Managing Director and the senior partner of designers Allies & Morrison. Let's not forget Blackadder himself - Councillor Adrian Blackshaw, one-time Cabinet Member for Economic Development!
  12. Council Leader Phillips will very soon have his own monument. It opens on April 17th!
  13. Just a word in defence of landlords. I very much doubt that FIT pay £100k a year in RENT. Since 2008, commercial rents have fallen by over a third. What has not changed in that period is the extortionate amount charged in BUSINESS RATES. The irony now is that by building the OLM, the Council have destroyed local rental values but by maintaining the level of Business Rates, landlords are powerless in their attempts to attract new tenants - even at reduced rents.
  14. With respect Councillor Chappell, this is not a renewal. This is the grant of a 250 years Lease - a virtual freehold. As we are are led to believe, certain areas at each end can now be sold off to developers, leaving the sports area intact and meeting the requirements of the covenant you quote.
  15. Simple. Once again, Herefordshire Council have given away public assets (remember OLM?) by granting a virtual freehold free of charge. Club can now sell off development land and Directors can get paid out of proceeds. Or have I missed something?
  16. If there was any doubt that this Council were totally out of their depth when dealing with the smart city-kids of Stanhope/McAlpine/British Land, latest news is that Stanhope have bought up the H & M Lease in Commercial Street - no doubt using the £500k they were gifted by the Council following their least-minute brinkmanship - with a view to closing the store and moving H & M to the Old Livestock Market site. Further, we will be looking at scaffolding in High a Town for a great deal longer (it's already been 3 years!) because the anchor tenant, River Island, has also been poached by the OLM. Whatever happened to the ring-fencing of existing city centre businesses promised by this Council?!
  17. Highlights the poverty of the Greyfriars design. A quick look at the TJ Preece web-site reveals why this dreadful scheme is no surprise!
  18. Looks like 1970s Easter European Social Housing!
  19. I believe the subject family is Lively and not Lifely.
  20. There will be no bridge and there will be no subway. As I have said, the whole OLM scheme was sold to the Hereford public on two premises - a cinema (and this is the most quoted reason for support among the public); and connectivity. The current scheme for connection is a dumbed-down version of the original Hamilton-Baillie plans which would have reduced Newmarket Street and Blueschool Street to a 'leafy boulevard'. The only link we will get now will be by crossing over massive 'sleeping policemen' and negotiating traffic-lights to avoid the trundling 20 mph limited traffic. I fully support Amanda's reference to the Netherlands' approach but would make the point that the OLM will have dozens of trees and that High Town has one. Widemarsh Street (the connecting artery) has NONE! Surely, one simple element enabling the OLM to read through into the original retail area would be an extension of tree-planting into the historic centre? In support of the alarm raised by the fact that the developers and the ultimate owner (British Land) have been granted a 250-years lease on the OLM site, please consider that this virtual freehold on a valuable city centre site of several acres was sold for just £1m - YES, one million pounds! I hope Messrs Philips, Blackshaw, Bretherton & Co are happy with their legacy for the city.
  21. We can only hope that all the OLM hype was true and that Hereford will magically enjoy 10% more shoppers. Just how these people will actually get in and out of town with no significant infrastructure improvement remains to be seen!
  22. There will definitely be traffic-lights allowing a right turn from Tesco and also lights offering a right turn from Blueschool Street to Widemarsh Street. There will be no need for the 20 mph speed limit!
  23. TwoWheels has it right. There will be no walkway in the sky. Two years ago I went on a trip organised by the Maylords owners to look at the glass link in Leicester. Various Councillors went along for the ride but there was never any positive follow-up from the Council. Why not? The answer is purely financial. The Council have convinced themselves that the OLM will work and that it will provide a thousand jobs (not counting, of course, the ones lost in the old centre); arrest the 'retail drift' to other centres; stimulate our youth by means of the new cinema and its restaurants to the point they will wish to stay in Hereford; and generate hundreds of thousands of pounds in business rates. All of this (they believe) can be achieved without spending on a glass walkway. The only considered concession to connectivity the Council are prepared to make is the down-grading of Newmarket/Blueschool Street to a 'leafy boulevard' with traffic moving at glacial speed. However, that cannot happen until the Council have the money to build The Road To Nowhere Link. Instead, we are now getting a dumbed-down, half-baked version of the original Hamilton-Baillie proposals in Newmarket Street. Let's face it, the OLM is here; it's happening. I am very fearful of the effect it will have on the historic centre but I believe the connection between the new retail mall and the historic centre must be made to work. The Council missed a massive trick by not forcing Stanhope to pay for a proper connection, implementing the Hamilton-Baillie design for Newmarket/Blueschool Street. So now we are left with the Council's own improvements to Widemarsh Street as the only gesture towards connectivity. This link can be improved and that is one reason why a huge number of people feel that the OLM tree-planting scheme must be extended into the historic centre.
  24. As a new member, I am not sure whether this has been aired before . . . but is anyone else sick and tired of looking at the scaffolding in High Town? It is now three years since the fire at the River Island site and there is still no sign of a re-build. This inertia is particularly annoying at a time when the Council continue to give their unstinting support to the Old Livestock Market scheme - a project which will in itself challenge the viability of the historic city core. I have repeatedly asked Herefordshire Council why they are not taking enforcement action in order to insist on the repair and refurbishment of these buildings but they are unable to reassure me beyond saying they are 'encouraging' the owners to re-build. It is clear to everyone that the owners will not re-build voluntarily. They have pocketed the insurance monies and have no interest in re-investing in High Town at a time when the Old Livestock Market development is sucking up all potential new tenants in the city. In fact, the owners have a further motive for not refurbishing in so far as the buildings will remain rates-free while ever they are unusable. This continuance of this eyesore is a scandalous dereliction of the Council's duty. At a time when the historic centre needs all the support it can get, the Council are allowing this carbuncle to remain while polishing it's new crown jewels at the OLM. Please, Please, Please try and shake our Councillors out of this nightmare!
×
×
  • Create New...