News & Comment

Bury Road Park & Ride to be buried?

The County Council's Scrutiny Committee has confirmed that the Bury Road P&R is to close. The various extra car parks in the town, mostly on development sites, are said to provide a disincentive to use P&R (as described in the October Newsletter). But these are mostly temporary and, once lost, P&R will also have been lost. Moreover, visitors to the town from elsewhere who are also familiar with P&R in other towns appreciate the quality of the Ipswich services, and these are some of the people the town needs to attract in larger numbers. Coming off the A 14, they won't want to find their way to temporary car parks along unfamiliar streets!

So, we hope Ipswich Buses can find ways to make some modified use of the Bury Road site, which belongs to mc. There does seem to be a wish by mc to make good the loss which the County is so blasé about. It's ironical, to use a polite word, that the £25m to be invested in improving transport in Ipswich is meant to encourage people to use public transport rather more (see page 9). Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing? Wouldn't a unitary local authority have prevented this anomaly?

Tesco and CABE

The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) has acclaimed the development by Tesco of their Tesco Extra plus 129 flats and other facilities in Commercial Road. "The design team present a compelling case for a Tesco-led mixed use scheme on this under-used site on the southern edge of the town centre." The Ipswich Society would draw attention to that word "edge". Surely this giant Tesco is not in the town centre at all but it is close enough to harm retailing in the town centre. Yes, the site on the river near the station does need re-development and if the architecture looks good, as it should do, that's fine. But questions remain about the traffic it will generate and what it will do to the real town centre.