A big thank you to all those (over 250 of you) who visited our stand at the Packhorse Fair and told us what they liked and didn’t about living in the town. It’s going to take a while to digest all the comments that we received, but just to give a flavour some of the surprises included requests for a bypass, a municipal caravan park (like they have in France) and a pressure wash of the entire town centre. We also had the comments we expected about dog poo, speeding, pavements and lorries. When we have finished analysing the information (probably later this month) we will publish everything that everyone said on this website.
We really need people’s views to begin to build good evidence about what needs to be done to improve the town, and this is a great start. Over the summer we will be designing a more detailed survey which will be distributed to every household in the parish in October, to make sure that everyone has their chance to have their say, with an online version for those who prefer it. We are also planning a survey of local businesses, and a separate survey for young people.
Early next year we will hold a series of public meetings to discuss what should go in our plan, which we expect to publish in June 2017.
Once again many thanks. You can find out more about the plan on the town plan page on this site.
Finally if you happen to be the person in the photo and you don’t want your photo on our site please let us know and we will take it down immediately. (It is not illegal to publish a picture of a person taken in public, but we would not want to offend anyone). Get in touch via plan@brutontowncouncil.gov.uk
I want to raise the issue of facilities for our young people in the town. I am a resident of cuckoo hill and read a very interesting article when I first moved here that it was a conscious decision to attract families to the town as the average age of the Bruton resident was over 50. Well, we are here, but, there are NO facilities in the town for our children aged 5 to 18… We have no youth club, no gym, no cinema…. If we want this to continue to be a great place to live and combat anti social behaviour and the growing drug and suicide problem in young people, this has to be top of our priorities. We owe it to our community to put our young people first.
Voluntary organisations make a difference, but as a town we have to also take responsibility for growing our community in to one we are proud of.
Thanks Toni, and we will make sure that your comments are taken into account.
We probably won’t be able to reply to every comment relating to the Town Plan, but I thought I should mention that on Tuesday night the town council had a presentation from South Somerset District Council about their ideas for a play area at Cuckoo Hill. (As you may know money was given by the developers for this purpose as a condition of the development going ahead).
The ideas will be shared with local residents later this summer. The play area will primarily be for younger children rather than teenagers, but it should help.
Cllr James Hood