Dear Brian and Nataly Clifton, and also your colleagues, Sandra Thomas and Kevin Newton,
As a resident in the area I was interested to see your own comments on the plans for Burgess Hill on your website, which I saw in the local paper, after we had by chance seen the "Public Exhibition". We were in fact lucky that as we were shopping and passing the Martlets Hall, the Town Crier was doing his useful rounds and was just announcing the exhibition as we passed., shouting out that visitors could come in and look at the plans and say if they liked the scheme or, aptly enough, if they thought "they were dreadful"!.
Having seen the build-up to this in the press and how the plans time-and-time again never seemed to be quite ready to show to the press or the citizens of Burgess Hill, we dropped the immediate shopping plans and went in, expecting like most other people to see a big display, and amazed to find just a few tables to one side, with a milling crowd trying to see the small sheets outlining the plans.
For an such an important Public Consultative Exhibition, we were very surprised to find that unlike other similar previous displays we have seen elsewhere for other major schemes, there were no large-scale scale colour coded Plans, nor a Model, nor an Aerial Perspective, nor any Elevations or Sections. In this computer age, there was no audio presentation showing the scheme and its development principles, main ideas, evolution of designs, or "Virtual Reality" 3-D walk-throughs, all easily done nowadays and to be expected if one really wants to involve the public in a democratic design process, if that was the intention really was.
Visitors did not appear to be pleased with the limited display, and even less so when they saw what it was actually showing, leading to some lively exchanges with the Council Members present.
When visitors had time to carefully take in what was proposed, and all this with just a week to make any representations, it could be seen that the proposals amazingly were actually showing the removal and wholesale demolition of the following:-
- 3 main supermarkets, Waitrose, Iceland and LIDL.
- One entire wing of the only just built covered shopping Mall, with numerous shops to go, plus the indoor market area, its popular café, and a major furniture store
- The town's main performance space and library including the new extension, other cafes, night-club, the present popular own square and its market, and the adjacent shops and pedestrian precinct.
- The town's double cinema, the Salvation Army Hall, and the premises of most of the town's dentists, plus a large office block.
- All the town's present reasonably generous car-parking areas which attract shoppers and visitors to the area.
It seemed to many visitors to be an irrational move to demolish so many new or fairly recent buildings and to lose in doing so most of the town key enterprises, commerce and functions, simply to build it all over again anew, and then simply propose to re-house the same functions in a different layout, losing many attractive and practical features of the present layout, such a covered shopping etc, to replace this by large windswept spaces. Many of those amenities once gone may not come back and may simply re-locate with better facilities elsewhere.
The new scheme shows no virtually no provision for safe landscaped user-friendly ground-level car-parking, as at present, but only some limited underground parking, inadequate and dangerous and a discredited form of parking, that most other towns are trying to rid of. Even on the basis of the designers' apparent aims, the underground car-parking would have to be a good three to four levels deep to accommodate anything like the existing amount of car-parking, which has proved attractive and preferable to the much more limited parking facilities of other nearby towns such as Lewes or Haywards Heath. Many people including ourselves choose to shop in Burgess Hill in preference to elsewhere for that very reason.
Shops will rapidly realise that, and be wary of the new limited shopping facilities being offered here. Far from attracting new big shops to come to Burgess Hill, there maybe difficulties even in retaining the existing level of shops, with shoppers preferring to go elsewhere. Certainly Tesco's will benefit, with generous free parking available, and where the expensive-to-build underground car parks will need high parking charges to cover their cost, another deterrent to shoppers. On top of the unpleasantness of using them.
The new "Town Square" has been oddly placed on the high level windy ridge on the existing Civic Way slip road, which traffic will then have a more tortuous route, bringing traffic pollution to St Wilfred's School. The Aerial View (not part of the exhibition, but usefully featured on your website), shows the sites as all being flat, whereas there is a substantial difference in level up from Queen Elizabeth Avenue and then even more steeply down to the St Johns roundabout. The roads shown replacing this area will not therefore be flat but quite steep. The 4 storey buildings around the new proposed square will be visually very high seen from behind as one climbs up to the square level, an effective six to seven floors high visually.
That main office block is admittedly a fine feature in itself as a landscaped free-standing block, as at present, but does not seem to really lend itself as a façade to one side of a square. This building, fine as it is, was never conceived as being simply a façade onto a square
The Council obviously decided not to commission its own planning strategy document, but preferred to go to a developer, who has, true to their profession, naturally chosen to develop....to re-develop what is already there to the maximum, by wholesale demolition of the heart of the town, and a massive rebuilding programme to follow, with row upon row of housing blocks like a 1950's New Town scheme.
The developers naturally instructed another London-based firm, an architect's office, to draw up something to conform to their development needs, and where the designers, sited 100 kilometres away, could not ever be familiar with Burgess Hill, or even Sussex, and would not at that distance have any chance of getting to know the area, its history or evolution.
The new "gateway" feature stuck isolated at the far end of Queen Elizabeth Avenue appears rather like a left-over from 1960's eastern-european planning, where the roadway is turned into a grandious Avenue of Socialist Revolution, or similar. The only redeeming feature seems to be a fairly sensible new station and adjoining squares, although the plan does seem to feature the station platforms, bridge over etc.
In all, the plan seems to look like being a potential disaster, not just in turning Burgess Hill into another Crawley, but in practical financial terms could ruin the town in the cost of a building programme, which is in many instances unecessary anyway, and by the long-term effects of businesses and shops deserting the town due to lack of parking, and inevitably even higher commercial rates.
We have known Burgess Hill for many years. Our son lives there, in Church Road, ironically in one of the worst buildings which this plan intents to retain. We come in very frequently by choice, though in fact we live in Plumpton Green, and so are technically outside the Mid Sussex District Council area, and are not actual residents of Burgess Hill, though we had been considering moving there, but this does not stop us have active feelings about the changes being proposed. So, forgive us as outsiders for stating our views to you who actually live there, but it shows that the state of Burgess Hill does matter to an even wider group of people.
We know in fact of other people who by choice come to shop and spend time in Burgess Hill who live well outside, some coming even from Crawley, because they like the town, its facilities, and how refreshingly different it is at present from other bland shopping-centres based towns. They will certainly be disappointed by these proposals which would turn Burgess Hill into that same characterless mould.
We can only hope that the Burgess Hill residents who were so shocked by what they saw and your organisation will be able to get this current proposal withdrawn, so that a more user-friendly, evolutionary approach can be adopted for the long-term benefit of all. A different approach is possible. It is not as the Council seem to think, that "doing nothing is not an option", but a slower moving approach of gradual change, in the context of the historic evolution of Burgess Hill, and a "lighter hand on the tiller", controlled by the people of Burgess Hill rather than an outside developer, must be the right way forward so that the people of Burgess Hill can appreciate and enjoy the evolution even as necessary improvements and upgradings take place.
Peter Lennard
