I’ve written already about the excitement at the bus shelter in Sheringham and how politicians have managed to throw a heap of money away on a muddled and confused project. Well, here it is now, boarded up for the summer as a little treat for tourists. They don’t want to start the work until the autumn, but they want to start the boarding up now. Makes sense…
The new plan is to widen the pavement and keep a bit of the old bus shelter that so many residents wanted to retain. They decided that they’d sleep in it for over a week to show their love for it. The argument is that the pavement needs to be widened, but as cars are king, they’re going to encroach on the public space and the old bus shelter is in the way of that.
Well, the pride of north Norfolk.
I can’t see the point in keeping half of this shelter, it loses its meaning, relevance and integrity. Although I very much wanted to keep the shelter, I’d personally just pull it down now. It’s either worth saving or it isn’t, it’s like saving the facade of a building and knocking the rest down.
It’s entirely unclear to me why they couldn’t build the new bus shelter next to this one, leaving this one intact but not in the way of anything or anyone. Or, they could have been radical and made this road one-way and narrowed it so that they didn’t need to fiddle with anything.
But, if this is what the residents of Sheringham want, who am I, as a former resident, to comment…. I wonder what Ralph Howell would have done.