Category Archives: Trees

Where has Chichester’s Civic Pride gone?

Environment, Pavements, Trees, Walkways

If you get off a bus outside Chichester Cathedral, what do you see?
Dilapidated flower beds with a sign proudly displaying the fact that they belong to Chichester City Council.  There’s also another weed-strewn flower bed nearby beside Phillip Jackson’s statue of St Richard.  Why isn’t this flower bed maintained by the Cathedral’s works team?

Uncared-for trees on West Street
Uncared-for trees on West Street leave littel room for buggies and pushchairs. Photo Brian Henhan

Let us return to our hapless bus passengers, residents or visitors to Chichester leaving their bus, who will have to squeeze (this is late July), beneath and between untrimmed over-hanging lime trees, negotiate rubbish on the ground.  Across the road is another eye-sore, the once proud Army and Navy store (and later House of Fraser) now seemingly abandoned for the past four years waiting for its Guernsey-based owners to decide its future.  If our bus passengers get as far as the Cross, they are just as likely to fall over one of the trip hazards on our pavements.  When is our highway authority, West Sussex County Council (WSCC), going to do something about the parlous state of the paving?

We live in hope!  Chichester District Council (CDC) has commissioned a Regeneration Strategy for Chichester, agreed at Full Council in mid-July – but this city is in dire need of action now!  Could our City Council better maintain not only their flower beds but also pay for sweepers to keep pavements in front of the Cathedral clean?  Cannot the interminable
discussions about paving in the city centre – and who pays for what – be concluded at long last by WSCC?  And we must ask CDC to publish their Regeneration Strategy and deliver it as soon as possible.  In the meantime, our ‘Councils’ should do their bit to improve the dilapidated state of our city centre now and not later.  If they can’t do it perhaps we the
residents should form a work party to tidy the place up!

Peter Evans, Chairman

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Sussex Local Nature Partnership’s Natural Capital Investment Strategy is endorsed by the WSCC

Environment, Land, Planning, Trees, Water

The Society has an interest in preservation, protection and improvement in the City of Chichester and its environs and to this extent the natural environment is is an area of concern.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The term ‘natural capital’ describes the parts of the natural environment -‘stocks’ of waters, land, air, species, minerals and oceans – that produce value to people. The capital generates ‘goods’ such as clean air and water, food, energy, wildlife, recreation and protection from hazards.

Locally, in this context, the Sussex Local Nature Partnership (NLP) was established “to work across sectors and organisations to secure the healthiest ecological system possible thereby protecting and enhancing the natural environment and all that it gives us”. Its Memorandum of Understanding of February 2014 brings together a wide range of interested parties from farming, local and national government, agencies, businesses, NGOs and research organisations represented on an Executive Committee “formed in such a way as to encourage conversations and interactions to promote the emergence of ideas, thoughts and interactions which will then lead to actions”.

The major output from the NLP has been the Natural Capital Investment Strategy for Sussex 2019-2024 adopted on October 2019 and published in December that year. This Strategy was endorsed by the County Council on 19th February who see it as providing “an important part of the evidence base for the development of the Local Industrial Strategy, the emerging West Sussex Climate Change and Environment Strategy and the East Sussex equivalent”. The strategy comes into effect at the end a call-in period which ends 28 February unless the call-in procedure is activated.

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