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00:00Greetings once again people of Somerset and welcome to another live stream with Daniel
00:05Mumby your local democracy reporter. You join me today on a cool but so far clear-ish Saturday
00:13morning on Carnival Way in Bridgewater, appropriately enough I suppose considering we're now officially
00:18in autumn. I am within the Bridgewater Gateway site just off the A38 Taunton Road. We're
00:24right on the boundary here between Bridgewater and the neighbouring town of North Petherton
00:29and only a stone's throw away from junction 24 of the M5. Like I say I'm on Carnival Way
00:34but I'm not here to talk about the carnival which is coming up on the first week in November
00:40tying in with bonfire night of course. What we're talking about is the Bridgewater Gateway
00:44site which stretches behind these industrial buildings all the way in that direction towards
00:51North Petherton. Now I was hoping to get a little further down Carnival Way but as you
00:54can see from these concrete blocks in front of us and this rather angry looking privacy
01:01notice we would probably get arrested for trespass if we attempted to go further down
01:06Carnival Way. But essentially what we're talking about today is the housing development which
01:11will be carried out in the coming years behind these commercial units which are phase one
01:16of the Gateway site along with the Premier Inn and the Costa Coffee drive-through that
01:21you can see in front of you now. And what we're going to do for the next 20 minutes
01:24or so is to walk from the Gateway site using the existing cycle paths and walking paths.
01:32We're going to go through the Woolstock Country Park skirting past the motorway junction and
01:36end up at the Somerset Bridge Primary School off Stockmore Drive in the middle of the Woolstock
01:43and Stockmore developments which are next door to these houses. We're talking 511 homes
01:49being delivered by two housing developers and we're going to see how easy it will be
01:54for the new residents of these homes as and when they begin to walk to school and access
02:00all the other local facilities on this southern edge of Bridgewater. You know the drill by
02:04now with live streaming. If you have any comments or questions please do drop them in. I'll
02:09get to as many of them live as possible. I'm particularly interested if you live in North
02:14Pertherton or within the existing homes in the Woolstock and Stockmore estates in Bridgewater.
02:21Let me know your thoughts on this major development and like I say we'll get to as many of your
02:27comments live as we can. Any that I don't manage to get round to I will respond to once
02:31we finish broadcasting. So a bit of background first of all. If you're not familiar with
02:36the Bridgewater area, if you haven't been following the numerous deliberations surrounding
02:42the Gateway site, like I say, many of the commercial spaces that were delivered in
02:48Phase 1 have been open for quite some time and this section of the route benefits from
02:53having wide demarcated pavements and cycle paths along with good crossing points over
03:01the A38 towards the Holiday Inn, the White Willow and the Dentist. But the Gateway site
03:07behind me as we just look back, you can see Compass Avenue just stretching away in the
03:13distance there towards the Quantock Hills or certainly the foothills of the Quantocks.
03:19This will deliver 511 homes driven by two different developers. 361 of those properties
03:28will come from Bocock Housing Ltd which is part of the IKEA group. They will deliver
03:34homes on the eastern side of the house, of the development site, so essentially the area
03:40up to the edge of Willstock Way which you can now see. You might just be able to see
03:45the Stockmore Estate telescoping off into the distance. We'll be getting closer to that
03:49in the next few minutes. And the remaining 150 homes on the western side, so back in
03:55that direction towards North Petherton, they'll be delivered by Vistry Partnerships which
04:01is one of the firms involved in the Orchard Grove Development Consortium just down the
04:06road in Taunton. Now, planning permission for those two developments was granted by
04:12Somerset Council's Planning Committee North back in March of this year. We're now in late
04:19September going into October. We've been blessed with a sunny day even though it's been very
04:25autumnal here over these last couple of weeks and with all the heavy rain and storms and
04:32flooding and so forth. Localised flooding we should say. Now, there were concerns raised
04:40at the time that those plans were approved about how easy it would be for individuals
04:46living in the site and particularly for children and young people to access the local facilities.
04:53Aside from the Premier Inn, the Costa and the industrial units which you can just see behind
04:58us there, there aren't any existing facilities within the Gateway site and in order to actually
05:06get out from the farthest reach you have to still go the long way around past the Costa. There is a
05:12little cut through here but for reasons that I don't entirely understand it's chained off. Hopefully
05:17when they start building homes that section will be unlocked. And if we go back to March,
05:24Bill Revans who is the leader of Somerset Council and also one of the division members
05:30for the North Petherton division in which all of this new housing is being delivered,
05:36he raised serious concerns about how easy it would be to get between the Bridgewater Gateway site
05:43and the neighbouring estates at Wilstock and Stockmore on foot. This is what he said back in
05:49March. There is no access from Stockmore and Wilstock onto Wilstock Way so it creates an
05:55isolated community. Is this the Bridgewater Gateway site an extension to Stockmore, to Wilstock or to
06:02North Petherton? Nobody seems to know. At the moment there are eight primary school places at
06:07North Petherton Primary and 14 places at the Somerset Bridge School. This development will
06:12create 164 primary school children to accommodate. The two schools which are currently there do not
06:18have the spaces. I'm really concerned about the reduction in affordable housing as well.
06:23This is deeply disappointing. So that's Bill Revans, the leader of Somerset Council and one of
06:29two division members for North Petherton in which the Gateway site along with Wilstock and Stockmore
06:35primarily lie. North Petherton itself, the town, lies about a mile or so in that direction but
06:44there are plenty of concerns from people that the two settlements will end up merging
06:50as a result of all this new housing. You could put lots of green space as a buffer in
06:55to your heart's content as we seek a safe time to cross.
06:59But it does create the feeling of urban sprawl. If you're not careful,
07:05it's very easy for those two areas to merge. I'm just going to quickly cross here as well.
07:12This is the busy Junction 24 roundabout that we've just managed to negotiate. As you can see,
07:19although there are traffic lights on every entrance, there are no
07:22push pads for pedestrians and cyclists to signal their intent.
07:26Fortunately, there are quite light lanes but even here on a Saturday mid-morning,
07:30it's very busy with people going into town to do their shopping, with people using the motorway
07:34services, getting onto the motorway to travel north to Bristol or south towards Exeter, and of
07:40course people coming in to North Petherton itself. So imagine how busy this will be. 511 new homes
07:47over a number of years, average of two cars per household, that's around a thousand more cars,
07:52and with all of those primary school children having to brave that main road to get to school.
07:59You can see here on the left-hand side of Wilstock Way where we are now,
08:03there is a wildlife buffer in place, a kind of bunge designed to take noise
08:08from this link road away from the surrounding area. But what that means in practice is that
08:13there's no scope, unless you build a tunnel, to get a route onto Wilstock Road to get to school.
08:21Wilstock Road to create a direct pedestrian access, and if you build a link road straight
08:26through from the top of Carnival Way, you create rat running, and that's something that planners
08:31and house builders try to avoid at all costs. This is not of course the first time that Bill
08:37Revens has been a critic of these proposals. He also criticised the plans going back to
08:472022 when he was a district councillor, also for North Bethelton on Central District Council,
08:53and he described those plans when the master plan was originally published as
08:58a ghetto at the end of a cul-de-sac. And I don't know how people living on the Wilstock and
09:06Stockmore estates feel about how the infrastructure has been piled on as they've moved in, but
09:12certainly it is an ongoing issue for lots of housing estates up and down Somerset and across
09:17the southwest. The homes are built, but the infrastructure takes a while to arrive, whether
09:21it's safe paths, doctor surgeries, new schools, or whatever else it may be. It's getting very
09:26blustery out here. We are quite exposed as we go over Wigeon Road, at least I'm hoping that's
09:34pronounced the right way, and again you can see there are sort of bunds and landscaping and
09:39attenuation pond over there in place so we don't get huge surface water runoff from the top of
09:46Carnival Way. You can just see the end of the, what I suppose we'd call the Spine Road, that's the
09:52area that we couldn't access without trespassing, but hopefully in the future you'll get a more
09:57accurate picture. If you've only just joined me, it's Daniel Mumby, your windswept local
10:02democracy reporter. We're out technically in the division of North Bethelton, but on the southern
10:08edge of Bridgewater. We started our journey today at the Bridgewater Gateway site, where 511 new
10:15homes will be delivered in the coming years, in a joint effort between Vistry Partnerships, who are
10:22providing 150 to the west, and Bowclock Housing, which is part of the IKEA group,
10:27which will provide the other 361 on the eastern side behind the existing commercial units on
10:34Compass Avenue. We're just going to pause here to allow these cars to negotiate the junction safely.
10:41This is the top of Shara-Lei Drive, which if you follow it down through the wiggly lanes, leads you
10:46straight to the primary school, but we're not going to take that route. Instead, we're going to go
10:51through the country park, partly because it's more car-free, partly because it's a great green space
10:57that we should show off. You might have seen the live stream that we did of the newest paths that
11:02were installed back in November last year, but also because it provides a kind of safer green
11:09route straight to the front door of the primary school, without having to wiggle around all the
11:15twisty bits of Stockmoor Drive. I'm sure if you've got pupils there already, at pick-up and drop-off
11:22times, that can be catastrophically congested. They never build these relief roads or estate
11:29roads wide enough to account for parked cars and all the rest of it. Now, one of the reasons that
11:35we are doing this stream today is that, like I say, it's been six months, give or take, since
11:43the Council's Planning Committee North, that's the body that handles major applications in what was
11:49the Sedgmore District, it's six months since they voted to approve, albeit reluctantly, the two
11:57different elements of the Bridgewater Gateway site residential area. And in order for development
12:04to start, all the legal agreements between the Council and those two developers need to be in
12:11place, but six months on, Vistory have told us that they still haven't been signed. And until they're
12:17signed, not a single brick can be laid, and it also means that any improvements to the pedestrian
12:25and cycling infrastructure, to make it easier for people to walk to school and access local shops,
12:32including those in the Woolstock Estate, where we'll be finishing in about five or ten minutes,
12:37none of those improvements can be made, because the money has to be provided by the developer.
12:41The money is often done on the basis of a series of trigger points, such as
12:45after how many homes are built or occupied, they can't just stump up the money up front
12:51without raising viability issues. So in the meantime, this is the route that pupils will have
12:59to choose between, either walking along the busy A38 Taunton Road all the way to Shara-Lei Drive,
13:09or doing what we're doing, which is ducking in here. This is one of many entrance points to
13:15the Woolstock Country Park, this network of paths and reeds and reams and various other
13:23ecological and biodiversity improvements, which has been set aside to provide a buffer
13:29between the Gateway site in that direction and the Woolstock and Stockmore Estates over there.
13:34You can see some of the houses and maybe even just pick out the children's play area in the distance.
13:39And there will be other improvements carried out to the park as the rest of the remaining
13:44Woolstock and Stockmore homes are delivered. In total, the estates will number about 1,400, so
13:521,400 here, plus 511 over the road. This area of Bridgewater Shore is growing quickly.
13:59Of course, one of the reasons that the house building in Bridgewater has moved so fast,
14:04aside from the natural demand created by a growing population, by the influx of
14:11workers up at the Hinkley Point C construction site needing accommodation,
14:16on top of what EDF is doing with its campuses and all the rest of it, is that Bridgewater
14:22is one of the few parts of Somerset that is not affected by the phosphates crisis.
14:28We've done lots of stuff on phosphates over the last couple of weeks, some lively disagreements
14:33about following agricultural land versus having Wessex Water do their job, but in a nutshell,
14:41because Bridgewater does not lie upstream of the Somerset Levels and Moors Ramsar site,
14:49this area that's protected by international law, developers do not need to deliver
14:56additional mitigation to stop phosphates getting onto that protected area.
15:00So if you are trying to build in Bridgewater or further downstream of the Parrot, including other
15:07places like Highbridge, then it's relatively easy to get permission and to start pretty quickly.
15:14And there's a whole very lively discussion to be had, I think, about whether Bridgewater is
15:20growing too fast at the expense of the other towns across our beautiful county.
15:25And those issues are only going to become more prominent as a result of the changes in the
15:33planning law that the new Labour government will be bringing in. We're expecting the white paper
15:39on that sometime around the budget at the end of October, maybe sooner, and then there'll be
15:46various consultations and we'll take it from there. If you've only just joined me, it's Daniel
15:54Munby here, your local democracy reporter. We've started our stream today from the Bridgewater
15:59Gateway site where 511 homes are planned to be built. They've got planning permission,
16:07at least in name, though the legal agreements haven't been signed as of the date of this live
16:12stream, and as a result we don't yet have a start date for not just the homes but for any of the
16:20improvements that will come on stream in terms of walking and cycling in this part of Bridgewater.
16:29And all of these improvements, both to the route along the A38 to and from the school where we'll
16:36be in a couple of minutes, and the improvements to the park, which I'll just give you a slightly
16:41broader view of stretching off into the distance there towards the other end of the Woolstock
16:45estate, all of these improvements tie in with the Bridgewater local cycling and walking infrastructure
16:53plan which we've discussed a fair bit on these streams. We've talked a lot about the Purple Route
16:58which runs all the way from Cross Rifles up along the A39 along the River Parrot past
17:05the Tidal Barrier site and up to Dunball, eventually over to the Gravity site. The route along the A38
17:11here is part of what's called the Green Route which is designed to eventually run all the way
17:17from North Betherton through the town centre and up Bristol Road, and parts of it are at various
17:26late stages of delivery. There are a few missing links here and there and I'm sure our good friends
17:31at the Bridgewater Area Cycling Campaign, if they're watching, will drop a comment and let us
17:37know which areas they would like to see delivered. But we're now walking along this stony but
17:44otherwise decently laid path. It's not tarmac, it's much more the sort of strawberry line
17:51greenway style of path that you may have seen on some of our other live streams and
17:55we're starting to come into a built-up area. Fortunately we're doing this live stream at a
17:59weekend so we don't need to worry about bumping into reams and reams of school children
18:04having to point the camera this way and that to avoid identifying any of them.
18:07But you can just see Somerset Bridge Primary School peeking through that fence
18:13and so far it's been a relatively safe and flat route but there are always improvements
18:21that can be made to not just make the existing route safer on paper but to actually encourage
18:26people to to get out of their cars and walk and cycle so that the roads leading from the
18:32new Gateway Estate are not snarled up every morning and night. Those of us who need to drive
18:40can use our cars, our lorries, our vans, our ambulances,
18:46safe in the knowledge that those who have the option of other routes, certainly when the
18:51weather's like this, can take advantage of that. And here we are as we just take another short
18:58little journey past these fences coming out onto Stockmore Drive where this particular route
19:08blends into the rest of the pavement. You can see the co-op and the other
19:15little businesses including the fish bar just stretching off into the distance there next to
19:20the bus stop and we have come to the entrance of Somerset Bridge Primary School. It's about a mile's
19:26walk, maybe just over a mile from the Gateway site to this particular facility. I don't know
19:34exactly whether they've changed the legal requirements for how far they can expect primary
19:38school children to walk to their place of education. I think it is still around a mile, it
19:43can be further if you're a secondary school pupil. Please do let me know if you have that information
19:48but in any case I hope that has been informative and useful. Thank you very much for everyone who's
19:52joined me here this morning. If you posted a comment and I didn't get round to it for whatever
19:56reason I do apologise, we'll respond to that after the event and join me again next week.
20:02We don't know exactly where we'll be streaming, we might be back here in Bridgewater if we've got
20:06the start date for the Dunball Roundabout work which we've been talking about for months if not
20:12years. But in the meantime this is Daniel Mumby, your local democracy reporter, desperately fighting
20:18the urge to go and get an ice cream.