pumpkinstrokemarrow

The one in what was Horton Hospital is now left marooned in the middle of a housing estate, the developers having failed to have sorted out what to do with it before they built the houses. The Liberal Democrats, to whom I am grateful for this illustration, are hot on the chase. They share my own view which is that, while it might once have been both possible and appropriate to incorporate a restored tower into some tasteful townscape, that moment has past and the best that can be done now is to knock the thing down. However, there are plenty of people out there banging the heritage drum - most of whom do not live anywhere the thing, or the building works which would be needed to do anything more positive with it than knocking it down. So, being civic minded, we keep an eye on the thing.

Last week, we happened to notice that it was covered in scaffolding and the site sported a planning notice which talked of 'change of use of water tower (sui generis) to landscape amenity space (sui generis)'. A fine example of 3rd millennium Planglish.

A few days later, having cast my vote for AV (not any more, to mind, a great solution to our political woes, but a strong vote would have been a signal that change was needed. Cameron, presumably, having cunningly conceded to the LibDems a vote on a bad option), continued to exercise my democratic rights by visiting the town hall and asking to see the papers relating to this planning permission. What is the application reference number please? No idea. This caused a bit of a delay, but the helpful lady behind the jump persevered and after quite a small number of minutes appeared with a large buff envelope full of fascinating papers about the redevelopment of a water tower, the wrong one as it happens, St. Ebba's rather than Horton. This rather shorter water tower has been caught before they finish work on the site and is a better candidate for conversion as the thing has a clutch of almost heritage buildings around its base which can be incorporated in the proposed flats. Sensible report from heritage folk which recognised that finding a remunerative use for the tower was a necessary condition for preservation. It also crossed my mind that the advent of cheap word processing and cheap colour printing made making this sort of material publicly available a lot more of a proposition than it would have been in the olden days.

Anyway, did not like to upset the helpful lady by explaining that it was the wrong tower, and went off. A day or so later we went back to the Horton Tower to get its application number, meeting on the way someone who explained that it had finally been agreed to demolish the thing, amid some pushing and shoving about who was going to pay.

Back to the town hall, brandishing the application number to be told by the same helpful lady (who clearly remembered my previous visit but equally clearly knew little or nothing about hospitals or their water towers) that this application did not exist. This time I persisted and after a confab. with a colleague it turned out that the approval had been withdrawn because of something or other and that all the papers were in consequence invisible to the general public until such time as the matter was resolved. The scaffold might indeed be up, but execution had been stayed.

We shall continue to watch this bit of liberal democracy unfolding.

PS: more serious, there was an interesting piece in a recent issue of the LRB about Libya, a country which until fairly recently was two provinces of a decaying Ottoman empire, rather like the much bigger Iraq. The current stand-off between legitimates and rebels is very much along the lines of those same two provinces. What have we got into (again)? A couple of other factlets. First, there were some 40,000 Italian settlers in the western province at one point. What has happened to them? Second, Ghadafi, like Castro, was once a young, handsome and popular rebel himself. But also like Castro, he lived and/or stayed on well beyond his sell-by date.