Preserve Huntingdonshire

We’ve had a pretty wet summer - if you can call it a summer. Inevitably we’ve now hit an environmental extreme and this time it’s the amount or rain that we’ve received over the summer months. See [BBC] Where has the UK’s summer gone?, [Met Office] Record-breaking June rainfall figures. It seems that this has been caused by the position of the jet stream which is much farther south than it normally is leaving us exposed to low pressure systems travelling across the atlantic.

This last week there’s been terrible flooding along the stretch of the severn from Worcester down to Gloucester - something I’ve had personal experience of in getting in and out of Malvern. Not to be outdone it seems that in our part of the world there are now predictions of doom and pestilence arising from the great ouse flooding - see [Town Crier] ‘St. Neots Still on Flood Alert’.

Now any flooding is a bad thing but it does seem nowadays that everyone is so afraid of being sued that warnings are pushed out at the slightest risk of getting ones toes wet. I can remember travelling to on the school bus to St. Neots that the river often flooded at Offord or near what was Samuel Jone’s mill at Little Paxton. It wasn’t a big deal - everyone just got on with things. It is an occupational hazard of living near rivers.

It is probably the case, however, that people have forgotten where to build and where not to build. It isn’t an accident that Ely is built where it is - and that it is dry! You can see this around you when looking at the sites of old building such as churches. The architects and builders in the past took time to site buildings and they rightly figured out that it isn’t a good strategy to keep fighting natural forces. Of course now we live in a part of the UK that has been experiencing some of the fastest growth in house-building. If Gordon Brown is to be believed this is probably going to get a lot worse ([Times Online] Brown Pledges Three Million New Homes by 2020. See [BBC] Proposals for New Town Go On ShowJust how many new towns can we take?

This inevitably encourages short-sightedness and folks taking shortcuts. After all - if the builder can take the initial profit he probably isn’t too worried about your long term prospects or the facts that you can’t get insurance cover (another gripe here I think ). It’s the poor owner or resident that bears the full cost every time.

How many examples do we think we have in the county where buildings have been sited on flood plains or ancient beds or run-offs? There must be loads.

We really ought to build with water in mind - both conservation, re-use and looking at the dynamics - as they do in Germany, for example.

The site as you see it is just the tiniest part of a bigger plan.

The first part of this plan is to try and provide a space in which to capture and present events going on within Huntingdonshire and a mechanism to provide feedback on these. Whilst invisible to the world at large we’re at work building the architecture to allow this to happen. It will also capture external event feeds where we can find them (providing there is a mechanism to automatically keep these up to date).

Apart from brain power (all too precious ) this has involved a fair amount of tedium, like the compilation of a list of all the hamlets, villages and towns that comprise the county in order to eliminate errors when entering event data and to ease searching and re-use of the same on other future parts of the site.

To precis this, work is underway, so don’t lose faith!

Happy New Year

Huntingdon Community Radio is a temporary community radio station serving the area on 87.7 MHz FM. It is available from 4/11/06 to 11/12/06 and re-appears every year.

It not only provides an opportunity for local folks to get on air but also to help in the production as described in the Town Crier article.

For further information see the HCRFM web site.

Huntingdonshire Primary Care Trust is responsible for Children’s Services at Hinchingbrooke Hospital.  A New Children’s Unit is currently being built due to open in 2007.  The Dreamdrops “Helping Holly care for children” fund-raising appeal aims to make a real difference to children and families who attend Holly Ward. Donations will buy play equipment for children and teenagers, specialist facilities for disabled children and will raise money to provide facilities for parents who need to stay in hospital with their baby or child. None of this is provided by the NHS but it would all make being in hospital and away from home more tolerable for children and their families.

For further information, see the attached newsletter or contact:

Maddie Chisholm
Huntingdonshire Primary Care Trust
The Priory
Priory Road
St Ives
Tel. 01480 308222
Fax 01480 308234
Email maddie.chisholm@hunts-pct.nhs.uk

Thought I’d see if I can get the letter published on the Hunts Post - after all they’re getting enough links from this site!

Used their feedback form to place a request to the Site Team.

We’ll see if the feedback system works .....

A couple of weeks ago I electronically submitted an article about this site to the Hunts Post. It was a short promo with a plea for volunteers to help. Thinking that it would appear last week the pressure was on to get the site ready to go live. Last weekend was therefore more than a bit hectic. As it happens nothing appeared in the paper. This coupled with the request in the Hunts Post for folks to submit ‘blogs’ to them seemed to suggest that there might be a motive - competition, for not publishing the letter.

It is reassuring therefore to see that I was wrong. This week (Wednesday October 11th edition) the letter appears on page 3 under the title ’Blogging to Save the Old County‘ - in bold type and very much “in your face” at the top. Can’t miss it It’ll be interesting to see whether this publicity helps and/or whether there’s anyone sufficiently interested to join and help.

The only slight downer in all this is that for some reason the letter doesn’t appear electronically within the letters part of the Hunts Post online site. This means that I’m unable to provide a link to it. It does, however, appear within the e-Edition - an electronic page - by - page version - but this cannot be linked to nor the text selected. Not knowing whether all letters normally appear on the site I can’t tell whether it’s policy or a drop-off.

It is disappointing

Still, any publicity is good publicity.

I’m after a picture of the Huntingdonshire county sign - the one that marks the border. Even if it is one with ‘District’ in small letters!

The thought is that I can then use this for the site - possibly doctored....

Today there was a massed protest against the proposed downgrading of Hinchingbrooke Hospital. There have been plenty of column inches on this in the local paper - The Hunts Post - see Hands Off Hinchingbrooke . Returning from the Music School there seemed to be an almost continuous stream of people so I’m hoping that the turn-out was good - we need to ensure that the message gets home.

Is there anyone out there who actually took part who would like to contribute their thoughts and observations and perhaps a picture? What was the mood like? I’m hoping that amongst the many who attended we might be able to find a newshound or blogger.

I suspect part of the difficulty is finding out who is responsible for making the decisions - health authority, government - and getting to them. Whilst it is always good to get folks on the streets this also needs to be backed up with lobbying the local and national politicians.

It’s going to be a long haul.

I’ve been working on trying to unify the style of this part of the site and that of the discussion forums. The theory is that they at least have some appearance elements in common. This has been a very empirical exercise and it’s not fully complete.  Providing that no corkers have been dropped (and I’m looking for feedback) then the next phase will be to develop the structure for the wiki and to then fit this into the visual theme.

By its very nature this is an intermittent activity - I’ve spent most of the morning, as every Saturday, at (Huntingdonshire Music School in California Road - so it’ll happen gradually.

If this is to be sustainable over the long term I need to find local volunteers to help with the running and maintenance of this site. It needs to be more than a one-man band.

I’m happy to work on the infrastucture and the architecture of the site but I’ll need others to help contribute content in certain areas and to moderate or keep an eye on parts of the site as it develops. This might include the wiki - which will capture information about the locality and its inhabitants, the forums or being a news-hound blogger.

You don’t need to be computer expert. Enthusiasm, committment and a sense of humour is much more important!

Any sensible offer considered.

Welcome!

This is the first in what I hope will be a lively area for news and debate concerned with the county of Huntingdonshire - technically obsolete and subsumed by Cambridgeshire - in the east of England (UK).

The purpose of the site is to provide a focus, a meeting point, a nucleus around which information concerned with Huntingdonshire can coalesce to form something useful for everybody.

In the years in which I’ve lived in the county I’ve watched the gradual erosion of the visible signs of the county and its infrastructure in the name of ‘advancement’ or whatever the bean-counters try to sugar-coat it as.  It’s been a very slow decline, each change being almost imperceptible, but the cumulative damage has been significant. With the recent announcements about the downgrading of Hinchingbrooke hospital (to what?) this has got out of hand. What never surfaces is the cost to the residents who bear the brunt of the changes.

Before everything disappears completely I wanted to provide a means for like-minded folk to communicate and also to capture information on the county - a resource to be used.

Please contribute and make use of it.