Category: Winchester

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20s plenty Environment Speeding Winchester

Best place to live in England

I’ve just watched the ‘Location, Location, Location’ programme about the ten best places to live in Britain – and Winchester has dropped to number two behind Edinburgh.

However, we’re still the best place to live in England so I guess we shouldn’t feel too down!

I watched the show and we lost points for our carbon emissions and our road safety – two areas we’ve been campaigning on for quite some time.

Aside from our national commitments to a zero carbon Britain, I’ve already offered my time to Winchester Action on Climate Change and will be continuing with our campaign for proper 20 mph speed limits outside schools and in residential areas that want them.

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Litter Winchester

Sometimes it’s just better to just get on with things…

At the meeting of North Stanmore Residents Association on October 8, several residents mentioned problem with litters on the path between Waynflete Place and Selbourne Place.

Alexis Fall and Lucille Thompson are pushing the council to clear the path regularly. I went along with them to have a look and we all thought – why wait – let’s clear it up now! Twenty minutes later it was all done.

Alexis Fall and Lucille Thompson litterpicking in Stanmore

(Despite the picture, I can promise that I did my share too – it’s just that one of us had to take the photo!)

The first time I went out with Winchester Litterpickers, I ended up buying my own litter picker (it costs a fiver), and it’s very useful for this kind of thing.

It doesn’t mean that we won’t be pushing for the path to be cleared when the council clears litter in the surrounding areas – but it also made no sense to leave loads of litter in place when we had the tools to hand to get rid of it!

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Environment Winchester

Winchester Action on Climate Change

Excellent meeting of Winchester Action on Climate Change on Saturday. There were all kinds of great people there from all kinds of different backgrounds – and real energy to get stuck in and do some real work to build awareness of climate change and what people can do about it. My background is in high technology and communication, so I’ve offered to help build a website with useful local information. Watch this space…

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Darfur Homophobic bullying Tuition Fees Winchester

Great response at Winchester’s Freshers’ Fair

We had a great response to the University of Winchester’s Freshers’ Fair on Saturday.

Over 650 students walked out wearing ‘Scrap Tuition Fees’ stickers – and we had great support for our Youth and Student Group’s campaigns on Darfur and against homophobic bullying. We also got a good crowd of new members!

I remember campaigning against tuition fees as a student union officer in the 1980s and there was huge opposition then – and so I wasn’t too surprised when so many Winchester students responded so vigorously to our campaign.

The response was so strong that we had to reprint the petition forms after only an hour. We got nearly twice as many signatures as last year.

I know that some people think that Winchester students aren’t political (presumably people who haven’t heard of Winchester’s new Politics and Global Studies course). Our experience was quite different!

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Tower Arts Centre Winchester

Tower Arts campaign progress

As you may have read in the Chronicle, the decision to end the Tower Arts arts programme now looks likely to be delayed to December 7 with a full ‘options appraisal’ and an extension of programming for Spring Season

The original decision was amazingly bad – premature, half-baked and made without any consultation. There should have been a full options appraisal at the start of the project – it’s good that finally there is going to be one. We now need to ensure that it is genuine. It must rigorously explore all the possibilities to maintain or improve arts provision in Winchester and not just be a paper exercise or a fig leaf to justify continuing with their current plan.

It’s great that John Tellett will be able to continue programming in the short term, although it’s essential that the new plan ensures proper programming for the long-term.

The Tower Arts campaign group have done a brilliant job. Our county council team has also worked very hard to get this decision changed. At last there’s a chance that local people may be listened to and that the original, extremely poor decision will be reappraised.

Martin Tod joined local campaigners to protest at the closure of Tower Arts