Entries Tagged 'Maidenhall Estate' ↓

There’s no meeting of the Maidenhall Residents’ Association today as the second Thursday of the month clashes with a South West Area housing panel meeting.

It really should go without saying that a three year old should have more sense than a Labour MP.

The Evening Star have a very funny story about a young boy trying to give the sagest advice that Chris Mole will ever get about what his election campaign should do with Gordon Brown.  ”Oh no.  Hide“.  Or perhaps he was just advising the Labour group on the council what to do with Chris Moles “personal vote”.

It’s a good thing that John Cook has a new job, because this kid could have saved the Ipswich Labour Party a fortune, and considering how much the taxpayer funds them – that would mean us.  And the boy’s leaflet design skills are better as well.

I’m proud to say that it happened in Bridge, at the Hillside Sure Start in Maidenhall Approach.  I doubt anywhere else in Ipswich would have had this robust approach to the robbing Scotsman.

Addedndum:

Considering all the coverage that Ipswich Spy did on the visit, and considering that this is what they’re supposed to specialise in, isn’t it odd that they haven’t picked it up.

Ipswich Council is in talks to sell off Ipswich Buses to the Go Ahead group.  No doubt certain councillors who never use the buses (or live in the ward) are preparing their leaflets now.  It’s a good thing I’m not standing as a Conservative in the next Borough elections. Oh wait, I am.

The truth is that subsidising just about anything, and that includes Ipswich Buses, is impossible in the current economic climate and all three parties know it.   We are the last of the G20 countries to climb out of the recession.

The most important thing that concerns this ward is whether the bus services in the Maidenhall Estate will keep at their current levels and whether the progress that is slowly being made with coordinating the bus services on the Wherstead Road is continued.

I will continue to be looking at this and report back.

Just a reminder that Ben Gummer will be addressing the Maidenhall Residents’ Association this Thursday 12th November at the Bowls Pavillion off Halifax Road (opposite the Bourne Vale Social Club).

Ben Gummer will be addressing the Maidenhall Residents’ Association on Thursday 12th November at the Bowls Pavillion off Halifax Road (opposite the Bourne Vale Social Club). Here’s the map on Google and if you have a sat nav the postcode is IP2 8RE. The meeting will start at 7pm, and Ben will be speaking some time after that.

If you wish to see him and you are not on the Maidenhall Estate, please note that this is a normal committee meeting of the Residents’ Association, and so there will be the normal committee work, such as reading the last meetings minutes, and Ben will primarily be addressing issues that are important to Maidenhall Estate. If there are questions then priority will be given to residents on Maidenhall. He will be discussing the port noise, but there are other issues affecting Maidenhall.

I was at the Maidenhall Residents Association yesterday and they have been a victim of typical bureaucratic heavy handed over-reaction.  Essentially due to out of area drug users sheltering in the flats in Station Street they’ve cut the trade access to all the flats across the ward.

This makes sense near the town, for example Station Street and Vernon Street, but the Maidenhall Estate is not in the same position.  It’s a decent walk from the town and there have been few complaints of drug users sheltering down there.  This means that there’s no post, no milkman, no visitors.  If you are out in Station Street you have around twenty neighbours to buzz you in, in Maidenhall Approach you only have three.

The solution – to petition separately for each group of flats – is not practical.  So Station Street has a genuine problem and the housing department did the right thing there.  But Maidenhall Estate was happy with the current set up.  Can’t they just get it back?

This sort of one size fits all knee jerk solution is what Labour specialises in.  A Conservative led administration should do better than this,

Our councillor Phil Smart appears in the Evening Star saying that “The solution to traffic congestion is through better traffic management and the reduction of demand through better public transport.”

This is all very worthy.  However when I was at the Maidenhall Residents Association there were only two people who did not walk to this very well attended meeting, and Phil Smart was one of them.

So here’s a strategy for reducing demand – represent a ward that you live in.

Another photo of Bridge, this time it’s the Stoke Green Baptist church, where Maidenhall Hall approach  meets Halifax Road:

One thing that is fascinating about this congregation is that they are one of the oldest non-conformist cogregations in Ipswich, but unlike the Unitarians in St Nicholas street it doesn’t get on the tourist trail.

Right at the beginning of April 2007, intrepid local historian Simon Knott (of the Suffolk Churches website) decided to build a site devoted to the Ipswich Railway Station.

There are pictures of Halifax Quay, which is near the Bourne Bridge on Wherstead Road:

I do think Simon made one mistake, which was to ascribe the following to St Matthew’s underground station rather than the EUR public house in Croft Street, which closed a couple of years ago:

If you are wondering why it no longer exists, indeed why so few people talk about it the answer is in this link:

Simon Knott we salute you!

I was going through my statistics today and noticed the search Ipswich Noise Abatement Group (this blog comes first).  I rarely take these things that seriously but I thought I’d find out who’s looking at this, from the web address 80.34.174.215, and what do you know, it’s owned by Telefonica de Espana.

Looking further it seems that 11.05% of my web hits are from Spain.  Allow for the fact that this is getting low traffic (it’s a new blog, I say defensively) that’s still abnormal.  You’d expect a few people to be assigned wrongly (1.93% of my visitors are from the Republic of Moldova), but not this wrongly.

So the only people who would be interested are Uniland SA, the parent company of Southern Cement, the most offensive noise polluter in Ipswich port.

So a big Hola to all you Catalan cement makers, and please keep the noise down.