Cotham Lawn Road

After being contacted by a number of residents over the weekend, I spent a chunk of today trying to get the road diversion due to the closure of Cotham Lawn Road sorted out.

The plan was to redirect cars from a busy two-way road onto one which is narrow, with few passing points. Clearly this was going to cause problems. When I went to have look around, I found that things were made worse by a rash of illegal parking and diversion signs which couldn't be seen from the road! One was neatly placed between two parked cars so that you could only see it on foot!!

I have been in touch with the Council and the Police to (a) get the diversion sorted properly and rerouted via Cotham Park and Hartfield Avenue, and (b) address the parking problems, especially where people were blocking corners. Would be keen to hear from anyone having problems...

Pop and politics

On Saturday just gone, I spent the day and evening at the Dot-to-Dot music festival, which was held across a number of venues in the city including the Academy, Thekla, Trinity and the Louisiana. It was a really good event, but what struck me most were two brilliant young singer-songwriters who use politics as part of their music and message.

Sam Duckworth (aka Get Cape Wear Cape Fly), a 22 year old from Southend, uses pop music to expose the dark side of globalisation and press for a fair trade settlement with the developing world. Natty is 25, living in North London. His unique blend of guitar-led reggae deals with day-to-day life on our inner city estates. Both, in different ways, engage with the failures of Blair's Britain to address issues like poverty, crime and exploitation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1KPvY7_gXg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiLShwa46TQ

I first became politically aware in the 1980s through the music of people like the Smiths, the Clash and Billy Bragg. It's great that this tradition is still alive and going strong. We need it now as much as ever.

Cleaning up The Arches

I think that The Arches on Gloucester Road should be a focal point entranceway into the city centre. At the moment though, the area is a bit of an eyesore. The bridge itself needs a good clean up and the graffiti removed - maybe even a repaint.

The other major problem is litter and rubbish, especially around the fast food outlets. I have been asking council officers to look to see what can be done to improve the situation. There was a bit of a clean-up about two months ago and things improved for a while before getting bad again.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the businesses dispose of their waste from the street. They obviously have to handle it somehow, but it often gets kicked around and once an area starts to look dirty and full of litter then people are less careful about how they throw things away. It's a vicious circle.

I've just heard back today that a number of businesses have now been fined for failing to dispose of their waste properly and legally. This is really good news and should help quite a bit. Also, more effort is being put into helping the residents of the flats above the shops to have sensible systems of putting their rubbish out.

The wider issue, of course, is how you reduce waste of all sorts. I'm very proud that residential recycling improved massively under the 2005 to 2007 Lib Dem administration (from 12% to 40%), but most businesses could do much, much more...

Student/resident relations

I attended last night, along with Cllrs Simon Cook and Brian Price, the six monthly meeting of the University of Bristol's residents relation group, which is intended to help foster positive relations between students and long-term residents in the Clifton and Cotham area. The local residents groups were all in attendance, along with the Students' Union and the Police.

It was quite a positive meeting, although there are some expectations on all sides which are difficult to reconcile. The two best bits of news from the evening were :

1. that the University has published a new booklet for students about living in the community, covering things like waste disposal, noise and so on. I thought it was quite good - helpful and friendly, rather than preachy.
2. that the University is going to put some money in again this year to helping to get rid of the things which students dump on the streets when they move out in June/July. We talked about some ways of improving the system further, like having special coloured bags so that the collectors know which is to be picked up.
   

I was also reminded that students are currently eligible for free bulky waste collections in the rest of the year in the same way that other low income groups are. This is something which needs to be rectified as I think it will help to deal with the phenomenon of students leaving things in the street in the hope that someone will take them away.

Neighbourhood Partnerships

I've just had my first meeting about Neighbourhood Partnerships. This is the new idea about getting all the councillors, agencies and residents groups in an area to meet and work together to solve shared problems. Cotham is going to be twinned (or maybe that should be tripleted!) with Redland and Bishopston.

I'm a big supporter of this idea. It's about shifting power downwards to communities rather than being held centrally in the Council House, which is really positive. To start off with it will be more about problem-solving and lobbying than real power, but I am hopefully that it will prove successful and that more responsibilities (and maybe even budgets) will follow.

I'm sure I'll return to this topic again in the future...

Whiteladies Pubwatch

After being approached by one of the local pub landlords, I met yesterday with the Police about the possibility of setting up a Pubwatch scheme for the Whiteladies Road area. It's not exactly a trouble hotspot at the moment, but there are occasional instances where there are problems.

The starting point is probably going to be to set up a forum for the local pubs so that they can exchange information and agree on how to deal with things like excessively drunk customers. From my perspective, this might also mean that I have a means of linking with the pubs on other issues, like noise.

Let's see how it goes!

I've decided that I'm going to give this blogging lark a go, but you'll have to bear with me for a while until I get the hang of things. We're going to be under construction for a few days until I figure out how all the settings work!

The main intention is to be able to keep people up-to-date with what we've been up to locally in between our two-monthly Focus newsletters. However, I'm a bit worried that this sort of thing can be a bit of a time vacuum, so I'm going to see how things go and whether anybody out there is interested!