Brighton & Hove's REGENCY Magazine » Environment

Communal Bins Overflow

REGENCY — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:14:43 +0000

I cannot claim to be surprised by the stacking up of refuse around the communal bins all over the centre of the city. Councillor Gill Mitchell, who was Labour chair of the environment committee which forced through these refuse changes several years ago, Councillor Geoffrey Theobald, the current Tory cabinet member for the environment, and CityClean assistant director Gillian Marston have all at one time or another categorically assured residents that such an overspill scenario could never occur. They argued that the communal bin collection truck only required one driver, and so this person would be easy to replace should a problem arise.

The sight and smell of the overflowing bins is truly disgusting and a serious health hazard – some residents have already spotted rats amongst the torn sacks. Let us not forget that many communal bins are sited directly outside people’s homes. What I find truly amazing is the dire management decisions taken by CityClean. Whilst the filth has been piling up around the communal bins over the past few days CityClean caged trucks could been seen driving around the central area, but only collecting the waste from litter bins. Would it not be more intelligent to task these workers with collecting the hundreds of strewn sacks around the communal bins? One would have thought that would be common sense.

Perhaps it is time for CityClean and our council to follow the lead of Jersey Council who disposed of communal bins as a failed and costly experiment. Furthermore with the lower ranks of the CityClean workforce threatened with massive pay cuts it might be more appropriate for our city council to dock the over-inflated salaries of CityClean management, who have clearly demonstrated their hopeless lack of competence and propensity for creating city-wide problems.

Some good news is that the strike has been delayed by 28 days, apparently after the personal intervention of the new chief executive, John Barradell. We shall have to wait and see if they can hammer out a long-term solution.

Brighton & Hove’s  New Broom?

REGENCY — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:35:07 +0000

This month marks the arrival of John Barradell, the new chief executive officer of Brighton and Hove. Mr Barradell was previously the deputy chief executive of Westminster City Council, which boasts the second lowest council tax in the entire country, and has an annual turnover of £1 billion. Whilst at Westminster he led organisational restructuring programmes designed to cut bureaucracy and focus on essential front-line services, and sought to restore the public’s confidence in both the police service and the council. He also worked in formulating the council’s response to the 7/7 attacks on the capital, as well as ensuring public safety after the mysterious poisoning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

Mr Barradell’s appointment was unanimously supported by a cross-party committee of councillors. With this impressive background you may think that Mr Barradell has some very definite views about how our city should move in the future. It seems not: he was very firm about his belief that he was there to implement the decisions of the city’s elected representatives, not to pursue his own agenda. One thing that has emerged from the meeting from council leader Mary Mears was the desire to improve the Queen’s Road section of the city being, as it is, a “gateway” into our city from the train station. “At present when you walk out of the station you really don’t see the best of Brighton and Hove”, Mr Barradell observed.

The need for family homes was also discussed, as at present the numerous conversions of family sized properties into multiple flats are driving many families out of the city to places such as Newhaven and Peacehaven.
Mr Barradell does seem to have been somewhat thrown in at the deep end, right into the middle of union arguments over pay cuts for CityClean workers and a government inquiry into a major development on the Marina, housing issues, and general problems associated with the credit crunch, but his background and demeanour indicate he is a man who should weather these problems with relative ease.

Letters: Citizen Power Over Marina Appeal

REGENCY — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:52:22 +0000

Early in November Explore Living’s appeal, to try and overturn Brighton & Hove City Council’s decision to refuse Planning Permission for their development in the Marina, begins at the Brighton Centre.

At the beginning of September a local citizen, Bill Impey, started a petition against the potential loss of the views of our white cliffs, the downland coming down to the sea and the settings of the Listed Regency buildings, should these towers be built. He, and a small group, stood on the pavement collecting signatures from passers-by, both locals and tourist with amazing results. Petition forms were emailed out to a network and REGENCY magazine delivered them in relevant places.

In less than a month many thousands of signatures have been collected and the word spread across the country – even to the USA from where a former resident airmailed a petition form. Forms were posted in from all over the country. We honestly didn’t expect such an overwhelming response.

Several delegates from the Labour Party Conference signed and were amazed that this development had ever been allowed to go forward. They obviously preferred our lovely seafront on a warm sunny lunchtime to the Conference Centre.

All the forms have now been sent to the Inspectorate to meet their deadline and I would like to thank everyone who helped make this important Petition so successful. We hope it will make a difference. Our views are our heritage.

Stella McCrickard
 Lewes Crescent

Letters: Feedback From Last Month’s Feature On Seafront Developments, Written By  Valerie Paynter

REGENCY — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:49:57 +0000

As a local resident and member of Brighton Sailing Club, I cannot but agree with Valerie Paynter’s case against ”i360″ and “Brighton O”. Brighton & Hove City Council has gone on quite long enough with central government’s accent on alcohol-fuelled “cheap and nasty”. It has brought no benefit to the nation at large and certainly not to this city. The process has run its course and councillors should understand that ”i360″ and “Brighton O”, even before they get off the ground, belong to a decaying era whose buzz words like “pro-active” and “joined-up thinking” will soon go the way of T-Rex.

These tacky and meretricious developments, the one resembling a bog-standard pin and the other a rolled-up condom minus the teat, do not even have the merit of being aesthetic. They do not even begin to approximate Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower for looks.

In passing, I should like to wish Stella McCrickard of www.savebrighton.com the best in her fight to conserve our chalk cliffs at the Marina from the commercial intents of Explore Living.

Dr. Yen-Chung Chong 
Ship Street, Brighton

The Facts About Homeopathy

REGENCY — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:42:18 +0000

When I told a friend of mine that I was going to write an article about homeopathy he suggested it might be more effective to just write a few lines about it. I chuckled. At this stage many of you will be scratching your heads wondering where the joke is, but hopefully by the time you reach the end of the article you will be able to appreciate it too.

It’s amazing to me how popular homeopathy is — in the UK alone it is a multi-million pound industry. Remedies are stocked in many pharmacies and even high street chemists like Boots and Holland and Barrett. It has legions of loyal followers who will swear blind that homeopathy cured them of whatever ailment they happened to be suffering from. It is also popular in Brighton and Hove, where not only do we have homeopaths plying their trade, but also a registered charity called Dolphin House devoted exclusively to the treatment of children with alternative medicine.

Surely all these people can’t be wrong? Surely they wouldn’t spend large sums of money needlessly? Well, as a sceptic you very often find that just because quite a lot of people believe something it doesn’t make it true or right. I’m sure there are many absolutely sincere homeopaths — people who genuinely think they’re helping, and thus have no qualms taking money for, as they see it, a job well done. When you ask most advocates of homeopathy how it works it’s really quite remarkable how few know the procedures involved.

The first stage in creating a homeopathic treatment is to do what is called a “proving”. This involves taking a perfectly healthy person (if you can define what that is) and giving them a substance – we’ll pick dandelion leaves in this case. Homeopaths will give this to a healthy person and wait for symptoms to develop. Let’s say this person develops symptoms of nausea, a high temperature and dizziness. Of course there’s no real proof that eating dandelion leaves has caused this effect in the person, but we’ll play along. This gets noted down and then passed around to other homeopaths.

Now, a patient goes to visit their homeopath with symptoms of nausea, a high-temperature and the constant feeling of giddiness. “Ah”, says the homeopath, “The ideal treatment for you would be a preparation of dandelion leaves”. You see homeopaths believe that whatever caused the symptoms can also cure the symptoms, but only when ingested in small quantities. Up to now you’ve probably not read a thing in this article that made you exclaim to yourself “What?!”. In fact injecting people with a small quantity of a virus, thus helping with their body to produce immunity to a full onset of the disease, has a basis in modern medicine. There are just two little problems when dealing with homeopathy: firstly introducing a virus into someone already suffering from that virus would have absolutely no effect whatsoever, and secondly homeopathy demands that the active ingredient be diluted to such an extent that not even a single molecule of the original substance remains.

Ah … there’s the “What?!”. It’s true — homeopathic preparations contain none of the so-called “active” ingredient, due to the preparation methods they use. To make a homeopathic preparation you take one part of the active ingredient, put it into 10 parts of water and apply a process called “succussion” (that’s their fancy word for shaking it and whacking the container against something). You then take one part of that diluted solution and add it to another 10 parts of water, and then the shaking ritual begins again. But there is no way you would give that to a patient … it’s far, far, far too strong (or is it too weak? You see how confusing this all gets.) This process continues many times until there is not one single molecule left in the dilation, and homeopaths insist that at every stage the solution is getting stronger and more effective.

Physicist Robert L. Park, former executive director of the American Physical Society, has noted that “since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth”

Homeopaths make it clear that it’s very important that you also have consultations with the qualified homeopath (it’s rather difficult to define what that is as well), for just as the right homeopathic preparation is said to aid your recovery, the wrong one could make your symptoms worse. Now if we follow all this to its logical conclusion it would mean that no one who believes in homoeopathy could ever drink a glass of water, bottled or otherwise, as the number of substances those water molecules have come into contact with is so vast and varied. Proponents of homoeopathy should either be suffering from a vast myriad of symptoms or so dehydrated that they resemble human prunes.

Many might argue that there is nothing wrong with all this — if people want to spend large sums of money on something which demonstrates nothing beyond a placebo effect in certain people, then what is the harm? To an extent they have a point, but what concerns me, and this is the case with much of alternative medicine, is that people who have legitimate, and sometimes serious, medical conditions are avoiding going to a proper doctor. I’m sure most reputable homeopaths would send someone to a doctor if it was evident that they were suffering from something more than the minor ailments that plague us each and every day, but I also suspect that some wouldn’t: — for example, there are companies on the Internet which offer homeopathic anti-malarial tablets, treatments for exposure to anthrax and several serious cancer related conditions. And, sadly, it’s all too easy to do. There is very little legislation on homoeopathy as, superficially, it does very little, and it is that loophole that allows charlatans to exploit people.

So why do so many believe in it? It is because it exploits a human characteristic, and that is to constantly search for patterns and explanations. Our bodies are the most remarkable machines, evolved over millions of years, and most ailments our bodies can overcome with no help whatsoever. However they seem to disregard this fact, and search for a reason as to how they came to be better. Whatever activity they happen to be doing at the time will end up getting the credit: if they use a homoeopathic treatment they’ll sing its praises, if they’re rubbing themselves all over with magnets they’ll declare them to be the best thing since sliced bread. This is what’s known in science as anecdotal evidence, and it is the very thing that science has learnt that we cannot rely upon. That is why scientists set up test procedures to evaluate the authenticity of claims. Sadly for homoeopathy it falls very short in this regard. Just look at the image below, a photograph of the back of a homeopathic cure sold in Boots. “A homeopathic medicinal product without approved therapeutic indications”. If indeed it did work so spectacularly it would be comparatively easy to prove, and would be in the interests of any homeopathic companies to do so.
For several decades now James Randi of the James Randi Educational Foundation has been offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can demonstrate homeopathic treatments having an effect different from water. The foundation still has that money, and I don’t think they’ll be parting with it any time soon.

Bonus: Tony’s Homeopathic Hangover Remedy

Take one drop of pure alcohol.

Add it to a weight of water the size of the North and South Atlantic.

Shake.

Take a few random drops from this solution and place them on your tongue.

Wait a few days.

(This would produce quite a weak homeopathic solution, but it’s really not practical to use a container the size of the solar system in order to make a stronger remedy)

Letters: Homeopaths Get Dose Of Real Medicine

Letters: Public Sector Workers

REGENCY — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:04:21 +0000

Molly of Arundel Terrace wonders about the calibre of people running CityClean (Letters, Issue 12). I can tell you this much, headed by the ghastly Gillian Marston, with their perks and pensions sewn up a treat, these people are not in touch with the real world. Certainly wouldn’t have got through the door of the major private companies where I used to work at senior level.

If the persistent rumour that jobs in the public sector are at risk, all I can say is “bring it on”.

I wrote a personal letter to Gillian Marston on 30th March this year after asking for help and advice from Ian Denyer, the senior highways enforcement officer, when I met him at a recent Neighbourhood Action Group. Needless to say I never even had the courtesy of a reply, which I now understand is par for the course in her case.
Quite frankly I find the incompetence and arrogance of some of the members of this council completely unbelievable since I returned to Brighton 26 years ago, and a direct insult to the “official” figure of 2.4 million who are now without work in this country.

In conclusion we can only hope that those public servants who are unashamedly on the gravy train may soon join their ranks.

Gilly Armstrong
 York Road

Letters: Developments On The Marina

REGENCY — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:01:48 +0000

How many citizens of Brighton and Hove, and the many tourists who visit our seafront, realise that the famous White Cliffs of Dover start right here in Kemp Town?

The views of the cliffs with the South Downs rolling down to the sea are enjoyed by motorists, bus passengers, cyclists and walkers who travel along the A259. They are our largely unspoiled heritage.

Xplore Living’s large proposed development in the Marina was turned down by the Planning Committee of Brighton & Hove City Council last December but they are appealing next month against that decision.

If the Appeal is upheld we will no longer see any of the beautiful cliffs as we look east and instead there will be densely packed concrete tower blocks coming up over the height of the cliffs. To prevent this please download our petition which you will find at www.savebrighton.com and which must be returned to the address given no later than the 4th October.

Help Save our Seafront both for our citizens and tourists.

Stella McCrickard 
Lewes Crescent

Letters: Recycling Heaven

REGENCY — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:56:28 +0000

I just wanted to write to express my irritation about the amount of negativity towards fly-tipping often expressed by your readers, by these people who have nothing better to get upset about than communal bins (lucky them!).
Let me inform these people that half the furniture in my house and my girlfriend’s house was obtained from other people’s fly-tipping – it’s called recycling, and for people on low incomes, of which there are many in Brighton, it’s often the only way to obtain furniture. Not only furniture but kitchen utensils and often electrical equipment too. Would these people rather we bought everything new – as if we could afford it – therefore using up yet more natural resources and creating more junk to be dumped? Would they rather all this went to landfill?

What to them may be an ‘unsightly’ bookcase in the street is to many people the only means of obtaining such an item. In any case, where I live at least, any item dumped next to a communal bin is gone within hours, such is the need for re-using items.

I urge these people in future to think before they write.

Simon Davies 
Oriental Place

Developments On The Seafront

REGENCY — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:30:37 +0000

Most residents know that a viewing pod on a pole, cunningly labelled the “i360” to suggest it is cool, is scheduled to be built any time now, on the seafront, up where the West Pier kiosks moulder. In fact, planning consent for “the i360” expires on October 25th and they have still to cobble together the last £20 million needed to proceed (one has heard). Unsatisfied Conditions of Planning Consent (one of which involves the Brighton Sailing Club) will further block a start any time soon. And the West Pier cadaver crumbles on.

Replacement vultures are circling, however, directly threatening the future of the last of the organised boating activities still allowed to occupy and use Brighton beach between the piers – sailing.

Over the summer The Argus splashed with news of a 60 metre, spoke-less steel ring with observation capsules which developers propose putting on the seafront, right alongside the Brighton Sailing Club & just below the boarded-up West Pier kiosks (24.7.09). This glorified Ferris wheel would, either on its own, or in tandem with the “i360”, create disturbing and surreal visual noise right in front of our prized Metropole and Grand hotels. Who in their right mind would still book expensive, prestige rooms in either hotel once sea views are blocked by vast airborne gewgaws, supported on the ground by bulky, noisy fairground mechanics?

The Argus also informed us that no further Party Conferences are expected to book the Brighton Centre after this year’s Labour Party Conference (with fringe meetings and lodgings booked into and around the Metropole and Grand hotels). And the Brighton Centre alone is blamed. The identified need is to have it demolished with a mega-treat, connected to Churchill Square at the back, put up in its place.

I don’t buy that the loss of the seafront conference trade is just about The Brighton Centre facilities. Brighton itself is a contributing factor.

Drugs, alcohol, clubs and an over-reliance on transient youth & student culture have all left their indelible mark on Brighton (less so on Hove). Brighton is the destination of choice for the human equivalent of graffiti & there is an obvious gearing of commercial activity and investment that caters to them (and, sadly, I include the annual Pride carnival in this category along with Fat Boy Slim on the beach). Gotta get the kids in, right? Gotta stay on message and keep selling “vibrant” & “diverse”, right? I could write a whole essay on the disvalued diversity now lost to Brighton & Hove forever.

The economy now seems locked into vulgar, chav and “vibrant” mode. How are the “i360” and proposed “Brighton O” better than that? What kind of moneyspinners can they realistically expect to be? Are the views over the city really so special? When the sea air causes it to rust or crust, the “Brighton O” can be moved off (transportable) but the “i360” is to be driven into the fissured chalk to quite a depth to accommodate the 4-metre diameter & extremely tall central pole above ground with its pod going up and down, up and down. Planning consent did not ask for, require, or get any information on how the devil you decommission the “i360” when the time comes …
If Brighton per se and the Brighton Centre can’t deliver class, gravitas, culture, ambience, or whatever political parties need to hold their annual conferences here, why would the kind of person with the kind of money to book a room at the Grand Hotel come here either? What is the city per se, doing to sell itself as a good host to the kind of person these hotels need to bring in if they are to survive?

Brighton & Hove were once the destination of choice for royalty & the wealthy, dignified high rollers? What is offered now for the kind of visitor who reveres and wants to wallow in the grand Regency seafront Brighton & Hove possesses? If I may borrow from The Doors’ Jim Morrison: “what have we done to our fair city”?

And how does it change tack?

Directly below the Grand and Metropole hotels, based in the seafront arches, are a kayak club and the Brighton Sailing Club. By the club entrances the wall-mounted remains of Royal National Life Boat signs remind us this was once an RNLI station. Not so long ago, fish were sold direct from catches on this section of beach where fishermen also kept their boats. Moved along. Gone to the Shoreham harbour area now. Some are moored at the Marina. Not sophisticated enough, perhaps, for the City-by-the-Sea craving urban bling.

Looking at what Brighton & Hove City Council have done with the seafront over recent years, it is clear that a march of facilities and space-gobbling public art has steadily made its way towards the Brighton Sailing Club from the Brighton Pier (still the Palace Pier to many of us), whilst making no concessions to the long-held boating traditions around this spot whatsover. I’m told the boats keep getting moved further up the beach. Pesky boats. Tsk. And I sense that the Sailing Club is being left behind, that it too is in real danger of being edged out and pushed off the beach altogether.

One can count 35 catamarans and 5 other small sailing craft in a line along the pebbles in front of the arches clubhouse and changing rooms. The passing public sit on the “cats”, use them for photos, vandalise them. Even so, the Brighton Sailing Club has a waiting list of another 20 people looking to be based there.

Sailing is a class act. The healthy world of sailing should be good for Brighton’s tarnished image but there isn’t enough of it to over-ride the bad stuff. It is a discipline that offers physical and mental development, year-round pleasure & activity on the water with enhanced sea views for the rest of us. When sailboats are on the water, crowds form to look at them. Club members don’t even need to own their own boat. It is a sport, with a clean, respectable image, practised by men & women from all walks of life. Brighton Sailing Club members John Davys & James Parrott worry deeply now about what impact the proposed developments (“i360” & “Brighton O”) could have on the future of their sailing club.

Two basketball courts (with smashed night lamps on poles), two different areas of “public art” and two inflatable soccer pitches now encroach from either side of the little patch of beach where boats and sailing are still tolerated. The glorified Ferris wheel proposed for the area where the cheap and nasty inflatable soccer pitches currently rest would overhang the sailing club’s space, squeezing them still further. Walking along this area, one feels hemmed in by a lot of different objects & activities, all there, jumbled up too closely. On a warm summer’s day it is heaving with visitors. But what about when it rains or in winter?

And what’s in it for the Metropole or Grand Hotel visitor just above them? People do not spend hundreds of pounds a night to stay in hotel rooms overlooking a basketball court with broken lighting round it, “Brighton O’s”, a viewing pod going up and down or feral night life. We need to raise our game to attract the serious leisure spenders to these wonderful hotels. Does Brighton & Hove City Council really care – or will we see those hotels fail and attract developers who will convert them into flats? Sailing, directly overlooked by The Grand Hotel and The Metropole, if promoted and expanded into the adjacent areas would surely also promote the long-term survival of our flagship hotels quid pro quo and generally raise the tone of the area.

I somehow don’t believe that Brighton & Hove City Council has a year-round beach strategy that involves the Brighton Sailing Club or that it is valued or particularly welcome to remain on the seafront any more than the fishermen were. Why is this? Eastbourne has an internationally famous tennis tournament. Classy. Cowes has an internationally famous sailing week. Classy. The Henley Regatta. Classy. Brighton has……what? A mania for encouraging developers to erect huge blocks of flats along the seafront “that will put Brighton & Hove on the map” are all I’ve seen so far this century along with a wannabe wish to be labelled a Capital of Culture. Development strategies that are about throwing up huge buildings and “attractions” all over the seafront betray a lack of confidence and a kind of egotistical bluffing about culture.

Where is sailing on Brighton & Hove’s calendar of feted events to put the City on some part of anyone’s map? Why do the surfers at the Marina have to compete with developers to retain their bit of sea activity? Why is the Marina being turned into a housing estate? The city has filled the beach with petanque rinks, basketball, volleyball, etc. – all of which are constrained in their use by the weather, all of which one would like to see inland in parks and open spaces dedicated to play and sport for people of all ages. None of what is on the beach (Sailing and Kayak clubs apart) is in any way connected with the sea itself – our unique selling point!

Why hasn’t the Council enlisted sailing as a way to help counter the drug-death capital of England tag and the view of Brighton & Hove that got us featured in a guidebook called “Crap Cities”?

Development should be about retaining and ‘bigging-up’ worthwhile, permanent community asset organisations like the Brighton Sailing Club. Clear the seafront, I say, and bring on the windsurfing, sail boats and regattas. Quid pro quo, the city, the sailing club membership, the Metropole and Grand Hotels could all be doing each other a few long-term image and economic favours. And it counts as culture, dont’cha know!

Letters: The Secret (Sex) Life of Cyclists

REGENCY — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:27:46 +0000

I wonder if anyone could explain to me why Brighton & Hove City Council need to know my personal sexual preferences in order to decide on a Cycle Link Scheme along Madeira Drive?

It asked the usual questions of my postcode, disability and gender, but then went on to ask “Are you Heterosexual, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Other (please state)?”.

Whatever can this possibly have to do with cycle lanes? My reply was that it is none of your business!

In any event the survey was mailed out too late to visit the exhibition of the scheme in the Town Hall, but in my opinion anything that keeps the fast moving cyclists off the pavement on Madeira Parade is most welcome regardless of my sexuality – or theirs.

Molly, Arundel Terrace