Input to the Electoral Review of Warrington UA By the Local Government Boundary Commission for England July 2015 From: Philip Mart Scope I would have liked to address the whole of the borough in a proposal but I found that I felt I had insufficient local knowledge to do so in terms on recent community history. Instead I focus on the area generally to the West of Sankey Brook and North of the River Mersey. Context Almost all of the area considered was before 1974 in the Warrington Rural District. It is therefore now in the Parishes of Great Sankey or Burtonwood and Westbrook. The renaming of Burtonwood occurred when parish wards were amended following an unsuccessful application which I presented on behalf of Warrington North Conservatives to create a Westbrook parish in 1996. The old villages of Penketh, Great Sankey and Burtonwood form only a small part of the areas, which will be fully developed by 2030. The largest part of the new development was planned by the Warrington and Runcorn Development Commission and the area to the West of the Sankey Brook (hence the general term Westbrook) was planned by them. One of the constraints at the time of their master plan was that some of the former RAF Burtonwood and Domvilles Farm was not land which they owned. Additionally the Lingley Green estate which replaced an old isolation hospital was built outside the master plan of the WRDC. The New Town plans were a very successful mixing together of residential and employment land uses and, when scaled down, form the basis of the concept of urban villages. The big difference was that the scale was bigger for WRDC being four parts of Warrington, Westbrook, Birchwood, Bridgewater and Cinnamon Brow/Padgate. The work done by the Commission included adding filling developments as seen at Longbarn and Hood Manor where there were clear bounded areas. The main development was of former MOD facilities : RAF Burton wood (Westbrook), the training camp at RAF Padgate (Cinnamon Brow), RNAS Stretton (Bridgewater) and the Royal Ordnance Depot at Risley (Birchwood). The plan for re-developing these areas included provision of shops and schools which established the community patterns for these and surrounding areas. The development of new boundaries for wards should take the utmost account of these plans in establishing boundaries as these are historic and well understood boundaries in the memory of most people who live here. Turning back to Westbrook, the order of development was determined partly by settlement of mine workings from the former Bold Colliery but mainly by the construction of a complete new distributor road network including Cromwell Avenue, Lingley Green Avenue and Westbrook Way. The development of Chapelford was a later MOD led project but had to fit in with the New Town plans. 1 New Town planned areas. Great Sankey and Hood Manor The map below is based on a New Town progress report from 1988. The shaded areas were complete by 1988 and were started much earlier in the east with the areas not marked as HM being ready by 1978 complete with shops and school as well as community meeting rooms. The Liverpool Manchester railway line was taken as an impermeable boundary for the planning of facilities and at the time the area shaded in light blue was base accommodation for RAF Burtonwood. That base accommodation has now been replaced by private housing but still relies on the Great Sankey/Hood Manor facilities for community purposes. The area is actually cut off by the dual carriageway element of Liverpool road and has no easy access to the area east of Whittle Avenue. It does however have a dependency on the shops and other facilities on Liverpool Road and is closer to Penketh High School than Great Sankey High. The green lines are current polling district boundaries, S-JD to the east and S-JA to the west; both being part of Great Sankey North. This alignment should continue as it aligns with the planned intent. Whittle Hall The next map shows Whittle Hall development, from which the current ward takes its name. This was an isolated New Town development designed to be rather dependent on car usage with community centre but for everything else such shops, schools and pubs etc. it was dependent on the surrounding areas. Those surrounding areas did not include Chapelford which was not planned but pedestrian access to Shops on Barrow Hall Lane and Station Road Great Sankey were provided. 2 Access to the railway station at Great Sankey was also available on foot. The New Town design was for Whittle to be part of Great Sankey North. Just before the public hearing about a Westbrook parish, more details in the appendix, a Great Sankey North residents association was formed to oppose the plan. The reason was that it was claimed that a Westbook parish should include Whittle Hall. There only ever seems to have been one member of the Association active and at least later she was employed by the council. The Parish councils wish to prevent losing their precepts to New Town areas was won. After that the Residents Association seemed to form a notional consultee but I have never met anyone who attended a meeting The suggestion that Whittle Hall was ever anything other than a Part of Great Sankey is very weak current Whittle Hall ward. There are those who may argue that the 13 bus service links it with Hood Manor. The area was designed for access by car and the bus routes are transitory based on subsidies at the moment so the bus links do not change the underlying dependency on and linkage to Great Sankey. Old Hall The houses in Old Hall were sold using publicity material that included the map below. At the time the plans for Old Hall seem to include what is now the Westbrook Centre but the development parcel map tells a slightly different tale in that it shows some of the westerly housing is intended to be Westbrook. 3 However the reason for including the map is that it shows where the Old Hall Community was intended to be and that was on both sides of Cromwell Avenue. The Community facilities were built on the east of Cromwell Avenue but are intended to support housing on both sides of the road. 4 5 The following map shows the development parcels but still needs explanation. The areas numbers other than OH81/82 and OH901-OH906 were designed from the outset to be served by the community facilities on Twenty Acre Road. Although designed at the same time OH81/82 and OH901-OH906 were built as dependent on facilities at the Westbrook District Centre which was not built until rather later. Camp Road was turned into a foot path along the north of the RAF base and is used as the boundary between Westbrook ward and Whittle Hall ward today. Camp Road extended along the northernmost part of Twenty Acre Road and into what is now Shackleton Close by the entrance to Gulliver’s World. It is the logical boundary between Old Hall and Westbrook. The request for a Parish council also asked for the unfathomable boundary which still exists to be removed. It has gone through a parliamentary review and district reviews because the reviews were in an inconvenient order. This time with the hope of a district review, which can change parish boundaries and a possible parliamentary review perhaps we can fix the boundaries which follow a covered over field drain. They should be moved so the residents finally now what ward and constituency then live in, they have waited too long. Westbrook Westbrook itself is the development parcels marked as WB on the map above as well as the adjacent OH8X areas. The area around Ladywood road has a split personality where its older residents will say they live at Old Hall but their facilities are all based in the Westbrook Centre. 6 Kingswood Kingswood was designed from the outset to be completely dependent on facilities at the Westbrook District Centre. It was later given a Community Centre by the Commission for the New Towns but essentially it remains a part of Westbrook for shops, school and other facilities. Callands Callands is straightforward with those areas marked CA on the map above being designed to be served from a school, shops and community centre shown by the black triangle on Callands Road. There was intended to be a Northern Expressway from the roundabout to the north of Asda which forms a clear southern boundary for Callands and there are only foot accesses via what is now a Greenway between there and Old Hall. The dominant bus service is the 18, sometimes 17, which goes from Callands via the length of Twenty Acre Road in Old Hall toward Warrington. The remaining newly built areas were not part of the New Town Plan. New build but not New Town areas Domville’s Farm and Chapelford are adjacent and connected for pedestrians but not vehicular traffic whilst Lingley Green is remote and designed by WBC as a new part of Great Sankey. In the following map the area which was Domville’s Farm is shown shaded green. It has no road links other that via Lingley Green Avenue by the Thatched Cottage (part of the development) and close to Westwood Telephone Exchange. Pedestrian Access is via Westbrook by crossing Burtonwood Road which is a 7 no-through road. The area has no facilities at all and is dependent on the Westbrook Centre for shops and school.