Tories to change Blyth Town Centre into ‘what you don’t want or expect’

 

Altered Labour Plans will lead to travel chaos on our streets?

 

The long suffering public of Blyth have at last received the news that the Boris Johnson Government has decided to steer a limited amount of cash towards a Blyth modernisation project to improve its high street’s popularity.

Projects to improve Blyth have been planned for decades in some cases in order to deliver a greater both day and night time economy to give the Town the boost it needs and requires.

Labour were planning to develop a new Leisure Centre on the bus garage site, a new Phoenix Theatre on Dun Cow Quay and a Cowpen Road bypass to help speed traffic into the Town Centre through extensive signage and regular advertising. Linking the whole town together as one through a number of well designed cross town highways.

These prime changes, largely ignored since 2017 when the Tories gained hold of the projects rudder, were required to ensure that the lifetime of Blyth as a commercial Town centre was extended and not become another catalyst for the further commercialisation of Cowpen Road, a ‘High Street’ much preferred by wealthy business conglomerates due to the ease of drawing in ‘outsider’s’ from the the A189.

Possibly made much more attractive as money chases the travel potential of the new battery plant being planned for the river Blyth peninsula at Cambois, as Blyth residents who may be some of the 8000 workers required to meet the wider battery industries requirements place Cowpen Road in their personal travel to work plans, hardening in the new ‘High Street’ as the place to be.

Since 2017, year seven of the national Tories fiddling with planning laws, we have noticed a growth in homes of multiple occupancy in and around the Town Centre area which is leading towards further degradation of the Town as a place of interest to mobile shoppers who can travel anywhere to shop.

And also there has been a growth in the number of planning applications on Cowpen Road for night time economically viable food outlets that will further suck the life blood out of the traditional Town Centre. These have struck a chord with us here at the murky desk, but the biggest mistakes with the current and about to be hoisted on the unsuspecting Blyth traditional shopping public of the Tory Town Centre plan is the changes to bus routes required to deliver traditional shoppers into the about to be redeveloped as the Tories ‘look what we have done for Blyth’ project.

Without a Cowpen Road bypass and with a potential widening of Laverock Hall Road on page 10 of the Tory storybook, (designed to pollute the South of the town bringing it line with Cowpen and Kitty Brewster), without a planned growth in the development of an increased night time economy other than a Art Centre that looks on paper much like another Community Centre reliant on room rental for survival and without the retention of a Bus Station, it appears that sympathetic travel planning has been written out of the former Labour plans for the Town of Blyth. 

All of this when looked at with the reopening of the AB&T Northumberland Line on the Tories regular story list at the same time as the Town Centre is being remodelled, we believe this new Tory plan will ensure Commerce will want to move even further out of Town to build two new commercial centres at South Newsham and Bebside and have the Tories asked residents their feelings on these major changes, NO THEY HAVE NOT! and they haven’t told the unsuspecting public which residential street the new out of town busses will travel on as the traditional town centre plan dwindles and the heart of the town as we know it pales into insignificance.