A Letter from Nantwich

October 2005  

AN OPEN LETTER TO CLLR ARTHUR MORAN AND HIS COLLEAGUES   

This is a photograph I stole from the Nantwich Walled Garden Society. Not really - I took it to use on their website, along with some photographs of their own. Visit their website to see more.

LET me put my cards on the table and say that I am the webmaster for the Nantwich Walled Garden Society website. It is something I offered to do (and was accepted) and which I do in an unpaid role. As such I cannot suggest that anything should be written and all the contents come from the N.W.G.S. Committee. On this website, however, it is a different matter.

   Here I can say what I think - and I am doing so in this letter to Councillor Arthur Moran . . .   

Cllr Moran,

I am not usually minded to write and express views to local councillors, but after reading your comments in this week's Nantwich Guardian (October 1), I would like to make the following comment:

    While taking your point about the Nantwich Walled Garden Society having to compromise with the developers or end up with nothing, I would have thought that the "nothing" optional was preferable.

    My point is that the compromise would leave Nantwich with a well-preserved Elizabethan garden wall surrounding a modern apartment block. That is not the same - nowhere near - to the Nantwich Walled Garden Society's desired objective of a flourishing walled garden. 

   No matter how good architects might consider the building, the apartments would not be a matter of interest to historians.

   A better idea - and this could well be a hidden agenda - would be to demolish the wall and reconstruct a section of it somewhere else in Nantwich. Part of the proposed tourist centre on the banks of the River Weaver, perhaps. Far better that than the compromise proposed by councillors.

   The N.W.G.S. see the Walled Garden as a tourist attraction. How many tourists would want to come to see a block of flats? In any case, I have seen the garden site. It isn't huge. How will anyone get eight flats on it?

John H. Brough. 

What do you think, Reader? For more information about the Nantwich Walled Garden Society and its struggle to preserve the Elizabethan walled garden visit their website. Perhaps you would like to express support.

As a Footnote: the N.W.G.S. is horrified that there is plan to demolish part of the wall to provide access to the eight apartments. That access would be off the roundabout already constructed in this part of Kingsley Village. (See photograph).