Town centre development

For 6 weeks now I've been having discussions via the Macclesfield Forum about what was wrong with the town centre. In addition to this there is a petition doing the rounds, calling for more appropriate and quicker action to be taken with regards to the Macclesfield Town Centre which has gained a good number of signatures, but not what I'd call a groundswell.

Therefore I'd started to think that the group that had formed around this website were alone on the issue. Why had no-one else from the Town thought that there might be another way?

Yesterday it turned out that there was. This story details a group of people, including a couple of architects, that have been coming up with a "Plan B" for Macclesfield. This really is excellent news as they've taken the same positive approach as us. We know this is wrong, but we're going to work to show what's better rather than just being a negative complainer.

I've scheduled a meeting with them early next week to talk about how we bring the two streams of thought together and get more publicity for the new scheme. It's still not too late.

I know that a lot of residents agree that something needs to be done, but they leave their involvement at that. After all, if MBC think that Debenhams is the best bet to renew our public space then why disagree with them? But I urge all of you to consider if a plastic, reproduction town centre is really what is right - and if by the time it's delivered in 6 years time when the town is dead it'll be any use.

Furthermore, why are we not considering our town centre as a place for social activity? Why do we only consider it somewhere we go if we want to be a consumer (ie, spend money eating, drinking, or shopping?) We say that we want to have a european style culture, but how many people are willing to pay to park just for a quick game of chess or petanque in the town square?

And so, predictably, I'm back to parking again. Some interesting news on this from the Council meeting on Tuesday - which I'll save for tomorrow.