Planning a Disaster Area

Reading the recent JEP, and having looked at the Waterfront "Masterplan", I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that planning in Jersey - once for those of us with old memories - called Island Beauties Committee - should be renamed the Ministry of Island Uglies. Freddie Cohen can join the ranks of the Ugly Ministers who have preceded him - Nigel Querree, who soon lost his Green credentials, and John Le Sueur. The only one not to "go native" was Norman Le Brocq, who produced the Island Plan, an excellent piece of work which his successors are dismantling piece by piece.

Points in case:

a) Swansons site - one of those charmless glass, steel and concrete very rise (7 stories) office developments, towering over and completely at odds with the style of the neighbouring buildings. As usual, safety considerations are neglected - try asking the fire service how to deal with a fire on 5th storey and rescue people above! I did a study of high-rise buildings and fire safety in a submission to the present Minister for Planning regarding the high residential buildings, and it was completely ignored. Equally, as an example of exemplary design, it is lego-pseudo-Corbusier, the kind of pot-boiler architecture that passes for office building these days, and completely bland and featureless.

b) The Waterfront "Masterplan", otherwise known as the Town Sump, because of its ability to drain water and prevent Gloucester Street from being flooded. A document replete with images of various pleasant architectural facades, often in classical styles, from around the world, and leafy avenues of trees, with the rhetoric that asks the question "Wouldn't it be nice if Jersey was like this?". Well, indeed it would! I would love to see a Stockholm style facade. But I fear from the available evidence that it will be the kind of functional building of glass, concrete and steel noted in the previous paragraph. The icing on the cake is the section of a far of St Helier plan from above, with the suggestion that Jersey - as an international finance centre - needs a Waterfront office centre commensurate with that status. And then compares this with the other major centres such as London, New York, etc. Delusions of grandeur! I think I might send Freddie Cohen a copy of E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful", inscribed with the message - "It is better than Big is Boastful". It is not so much a masterplan, as a way of planning a disaster area!

c) Portelet Holiday Camp site - the previous plans were passed, but then having one foot in the door, the developer flung in a bigger set of plans, and gave an artists impression from the air, to minimise the impact that it might have on the unsuspecting planning minister.

And one success story....

Nothing to do with Freddie Cohen. The planning meeting at St Aubin rejected wholeheartedly the idea of reclaiming land for car parking as a bad idea. One of the arguments I liked the best - we've looked across the bay and seen the Radisson Hotel as an example of what might be expected with land reclamation, and as far as we are concerned, that is the kind of distance we want to keep that kind of development! Thank goodness this was a Parish matter, settled by the Parish, and not by the Ministry of Island Uglification.