Author: Mike

There was a good turnout of local residents this afternoon at the Redhatch Drive entrance to the Reading University Sibly Hall – Halls of Residence.

Local people are concerned about the onsite security company having locked out residents from accessing the grounds at Redhatch Copse, a designated Ancient Woodland.

A petition has been signed and collected to see what can done about getting full access opened up again. If Reading University was hoping for ‘understanding’ by local residents about the proposed re-development of the Sibly Hall site, then I am sure that they have shot themselves right in their own foot by this overt action.

Could it be that they have done this so that they can proceed with the felling of a number of trees that back on to the Sibley Park residential area? We will post some more information when it becomes available. In the meantime lets us know what you know or find out.

Note the use of the singular! Finally I am rid of Talk Talk! Never in my whole life have I come across such an incompetent and totally slothful company as Talk Talk.

If Charles Dunstone – the founder of Carphone Warehouse – is still connected with them, he must be totally embarrassed at the being the head of such a woefully bad company. I could write reams and reams about my experience with Talk Talk, but I’ll put in in another post. Suffice to say that I an rid of them and now back to BT for both my phone lines.

My 2nd BT line, upgraded in June to their “Up to 20Mb” (don’t get me started on that marketing con!) service continues to increase in speed (never, never, ever turn your router off!) and now gives a consistent speedier connection for the same price as I was paying for their ‘Up to 8MB’ service. Anyway to the figures for July/August.

It appears that problems are arising even before the main redevelopment of Reading University’s – Halls of Residence – Sibly Hall have begun. See my previous post.

Although still at the planning discussion stage, the sites agent’s have closed off access to the general public in what appears to an attempt to claim that there is no right of way over the land. This is despite that the Sibly Hall ‘enclosure’ includes the designated Ancient Woodland of Redhatch Copse which has been used by the public since the 1800’s!

Local residents are incensed, particularly those in Sibley Park Road (which backs on to the proposed development area) who have also been told that they face to loss of long established trees that will shield them from the new development.

Residents have organised a public meeting for 3pm on Sunday 12th September outside the now locked Sibly Hall gates in Redhatch Drive (http://bit.ly/9Pvc73) to voice their concerns. It is understood that local Press, TV & Radio will also be in attendance.

Join in the public meeting and show your support to find out why we are suddenly denied access to land that has been used by locals long before there was a Sibly Hall! Want to Tweet about this? Use the Hash Tag #siblyhall

See you tomorrow.

Some local commentary:

• Earley Environmental Group
• ‘Shocked’ by ‘uni’ hall plan – GetReading Comments
• Plans for Sibly Hall site go on display
• University homes plan to go on show – GetWorkingham Comments

As Reading University nears the consolidation of its ‘on campus’ students accommodation, changes are planned for the existing Sibly Hall student accommodation.

It is (providing planning permission is given) to be demolished to be replaced by a housing development of some 100 new homes!

Reading University organised an recent exhibition to explain to local residents the sort of impact that the redevelopment might have on them.

On a warm day this was transferred to the lawn outside of Sibly Hall due to the numbers in attendance and the heat inside the meeting room.

It was interesting to talk with the University representatives who also included, Landscaping, Tree & Environmental experts who seemed to be well prepared and really & willing to answer as many questions as were asked. I spent about 90 minutes at the exhibition and found it very informative.

There were also some interesting presentation boards at the exhibition.

View Full Album

Listening to the ‘buzz’ during my visit, I picked up on some interesting topics of conversation, my impression of their importance seemed to be:

• Security for existing houses when the development was completed – this seemed to be of more concern to the residents of the houses to the south of Sibly Hall and those to the north of Redhatch Copse.

• Schooling seemed to be high on peoples list of concerns and how the new residents in the development would impact on school places for existing resident looking to place their children at Radstock Primary and Maiden Erlegh schools.

• The impact on local roads of the increased traffic. The University is saying that they have allowed for 1.5 cars for each of the 100 proposed homes when planning the layout of the redeveloped site. I and other at the exhibition thought that was a big underestimating and many people voiced their opinion about it. More like 2.5 per new house would be a better estimate. That’s a lot of traffic feeding into Redhatch drive!

• I raised the question about what would happen to the communications aerials currently on the roof of Sibly Hall. These will be transferred to a new 30 meter mast to be built and located just inside the boundary of Redhatch Copse – which will retain its classification as Ancient Woodland. Apparently a test has been carried out to see what a 30 meter mast will look like. I have been told that a video of that test will be made available on the University Local Community pages soon.

My understanding is that the initial planning application is to be lodged with Wokingham  Borough Council in September following the feedback that the University receives from the public exhibition.

It will be interesting to see what are the main concerns from the day when it is published on the Reading University Local Communities website pages at the end of July.

More to follow and watching this with interest.

Might this be the end of this view as we know it?

Reference Points:

• Reading University Local Community pages
• Download the Colour Brochure of the Above Display Boards
• Download the Feedback Form
• Earley Environmental Group – Home Page
• Earley Environmental Group – Sibly Hall Page
• Write to your local your Councillors, MP, MEP
• Wokingham Borough Council Planning Page

Great news, I was upgraded by BT during June to their ‘Up to 20Mb’ service, although not expecting to get anywhere near to the offered 20Mb, I have seen a good increase in the speed, including an upload speed increase from 385 kbs to nearly 900 kbs.

BT Support have said that after a few weeks and with now using the new BT Home Hub 2.0 I should see a steady increase towards 10Mb.

Sadly the same can not be said for my Talk Talk connect (I’ve explained why I have two connections in an earlier post). I am still waiting for a ‘Bar’ to be lifted from the line that has been their since early May! I have given up waiting so have today cancelled it, but of course we are now arguing about termination fees etc. Will update the outcome in another post.

TalkTalk is really the worst company I have ever come across.

Here’s the graph for my May ISP figures. Major issue at the moment is the TalkTalk has reduced its ‘Free’ broadband to 768Kbs and it will not connect past a single ‘contact us’ error page.

Despite many many telephone calls to their Customer Services, Sales and Customer option teams, nothing is resolved as of the writing of this post. This all stems from a cock-up with the direct debit payment Talk Talk being taken twice in one month and when reset, it did not take in the following month (May 2010)  and Talk Talk then put a bar on the Broadband service.

Although I rectified this two days later – when I found out about the Bar, it remains in place and now I’m in that ‘limbo place’ of being passed from one office to another with no one taking responsibility to remove the Bar and fix it. I could write pages about this, but why waste more time on the issue. so I have told Talk Talk to cancel my contract under non-delivery of their service.

Thank goodness I could not cancel my BT broadband on my second line, it had five month left on the contract – which I use for business when I got the ‘Free’ Talk Talk broad offer on my main line.

It’s a mess and I wish I had never heard of Talk Talk!

I’ve been away for a while and was in fact was also away last week working at a large Printing Exhibition (IPEX) at the NEC so did not get to see any of this years State Opening of Parliament.

So when I got back yesterday and saw some of the reports about the Queens journey to the opening I was staggered to hear that she was doing this for the 56th time!

How time fly’s by and you really don’t notice until something like this is mentioned and then you realise the years are passing  along. Someone at the NEC asked me which IPEX I had first came to, typically it is held every four years and when I had worked that it had been 1980, it dawned on me that this was 30 years ago!

I suppose these ‘regular’ events do provide some degree of stability over the years as they occur, especially with the Queens annual appearance at the State Opening and her other ceremonial events. Though I do have to say, they do seem to come around far to often!

I got a bit behind in posting these reports on my Broadband speed. I now have two Broadband connections into my house – how decadent!

The second one is curtsey of moving my domestic (I have always had two – one for business – lines into the house) line rental from BT to TalkTalk and as well as saving me over £6.50 per month over the BT costs, they also included ‘free’ broadband. The fact that it took over three months to have it activated is another story!

I have six more months to run on my BT contract and if the TalkTalk ISP runs okay without any issues I may cancel BT and rely on TalkTalk as the ISP provider – time will tell. Anyway it now gives me a chance to make a valid comparison text between the two lines and companies.

So here the March and April figures.

While the politicians work out their deals, the good old British system of First Past the Post (FPP) has thrown up yet another abomination of a result. After all the debates, poster campaigns and door knocking ( I actually did get a knock from John Redwood this time), we are still no closer to having a definitive new government.

For me two big issues, 1) again the Liberals are denied a fair result for the number of votes cast and 2) the sight of hundreds of people denied the right vote.

Surely this skewed election result finally proves FPP does not deliver a true representation of what people want and that a Proportional Representation system must be adapted for all future General Elections.

With regards to the queues of disenfranchised voters who could not cast their vote, yes the Electoral Commission have said that they will launch a full enquiry. But last time I looked, we were supposed to be the mother of parliaments as well being a country that  sends Election monitors over the world to check on other Countries elections. So how come we couldn’t seem to run what everyone knew would be a very important UK election. I hope that the report from the Electoral Commission does find out what went wrong and we never see these sorts of sites on the streets of the UK at election time again.

With regards to the way the vote went and what how many votes got what; I created this table. It shows very well what is wrong with the FPP system.

Interestingly if the turnout was 65%, that means 35% of eligible voters did not cast their vote, which in actual ‘person’ terms means that 15,900,000 people did not or could not cast their vote.

Also, if the Liberals only got 3% less number of votes cast than Labour, then how come they got 201 less seats! That means that 1.8 million votes cast (the difference between Liberal & Labour brought in 201 more seats for Labour!

Further, as can be seen from the votes cast, it seems that Conservative seats come cheap at only 34,967 votes per seat, whereas to gain any of the 57 Liberal seat over 119,000 votes were needed for each seat!

FPP seems a very wrong system to me and the sooner it is changed to give a better representation of truer voting in the UK, then the better democracy will be for it.

I’m going to look in more depth at the figures, the Guardian newspaper has been collecting a lot of interesting information about this election, which I think I will delve into later.

I caught up with some TV tonight by watching the final episodes of the BBC’s Five Daughters TV Drama. Stephen Butchard had a tough task on his hands to to take this sensitive subject interjected with actual TV coverage of the real live incidents and make a watchable TV drama. What a really good job he did.

This was without doubt one of the best home produced TV dramas that I have seen in a number of years. It brought together the circular world of drug addiction and how users raise money to pay for their habit – in this case by prostitution and the risks (fatal in some cases) that the girls take when going out at night.

It really is tough viewing and contains many upsetting scenes as well as contributions from a number of the families involved in this very sad tale.

However, I was glad to see that although these events ripped apart five families, this tragedy has resulted in a number of local projects involving many agencies that between them claim to have almost eradicated drug related prostitution off the streets of Ipswich.

Well done the BBC for tackling a really tough subject and making such a milestone piece of TV drama.

A number of reviews have been written here and here and in case you still want to watch it on the BBC-iPlayer click here.