Thread: The latest Tory bonfire of planning regulations has led me to make some hasty conclusions based upon living in, travelling througout for my living ... and loving most of England and it's small towns. It won't end well. Take the example of my home town, Abingdon ...

Abingdon wasn't bombed in the war ... but it might as well have been for all the respect the planners paid its history when it was redeveloped in 1969. A medieval layout had housing (deemed as slums) right in the middle of it ... along with a school and vibrant pub life ...

This was the street called Little Bury Street which went diagonally in the middle of a 4 road square comprising the town centre, market, cattle market and sheep market. People lived in the centre. It was the county town of Berkshire ...

The planners removed all housing, the school and all the little courtyards from Little Bury Street. They were considered outdated and rather than keeping the organic town plan and upgrading the housing, they erased the whole thing. They rebuilt Little Bury Street as Bury Street

... a pedestrian precinct of stale 70's/80's national chain shops. John Menzies, WH Smith, Woolworths, Superdrug, Clinton's Cards. But that wasn't the main crime. That was the changing of the 4 road square by creating a road which smashed it in half (Stratton Way) ...

Stratton Way created a one-way system which destroyed 2 of the old main roads (Stert Street and Broad Street) by cutting them in half. A sordid underpass which still smells of the same piss it did when I was a kid links the two halves of Bath Street...

Broad Street on the other hand was completely destroyed. It is now no more than an alley between the remaining fragment of Bath Street in the centre and the horrible Charter complex of 1969 which comprises the now decaying doctors surgery, library and multi-storey car park ...

It kind of made sense when Woolworths was still a thing ... this massive shop gave shape to the Charter complex even though the unpleasant brutalist architecture of the Charter was decaying such that stalagmites had begun to grow from the first floor walkways ...

... but today ... even stalactites grow up from the paving slabs next to where I watched goldfish swim in the pond next to the library as a child in the eighties ... too expensive to keep it became first a flower bed ... and then just a recepticle for ...

... the dog end of spliffs left by a generation which Abingdon has nothing to offer beyond being an unexciting dormitory with which to navigate a world via the internet. Abingdon is a once-proud town with an astonishing history ...

... If "radical" developers hadn't completely gutted the soul of Abingdon in the 1960s ... I am in no doubt that it would be in the same league as places like Bath as a tourist destination. If the desperation to keep up with progress hadn't been so keen ...

... it could have kept its original layout and adapted. As it stands ... it's a sub-town shithole with a few bits of historical interest on the side ... nobody wants to live there because it's Abingdon ... they live there because it's cheaper than Oxford ...

... people who live there don't do so because their lives are in Abingdon ... they do so because they live there. This is a massive failure of government ... Towns are not dormitories ... they are people who live close to eachother. Don't make the same mistake again.