Watts the Truth?

The campaign to safeguard Watts Meadow and surrounding areas from Conservative Councillors and their building developer colleagues is moving at pace.

A petition to the local community is due shortly highlighting the history of Watts Meadow and the Tory U-turns

Did you know for instance that

1. In 2002, Medway Conservatives claimed to be concerned with protecting green spaces in Rochester and joined moves to take Copperfield old allotments site and Watt's old flower nursery out of housing local plan.

However after 2002 elections Copperfield was amazingly put back onto the housing plan and sold for £5,000,000. The Tories rubber stamped the development of153 dwellings.

At that time no development of Watts because council found an inconvenient truth. That the site owners had left the land in protected trust.

2. In 2004, Tory council bought out the convenant from Watt's charity to allow access and sold the land. Plans for Watt's showed 24 dwellings. Housing plots in this part of Rochester worth £100 - 200,000, site worth £2,000.000 to £4,000,000. A huge local protest was more or less ignored.

3. The Open Spaces Society expressed concern with footpaths in Rochester One of the footpaths that needed to be protected by designation on to the "definitive footpaths" map was this footpath through Watt's meadow.

Except there has been no action for years on the issue despite a great deal of action by OPS. How interesting given the current development!

4. Without any consultation Medway Council built a set of concrete steps at end of Southfield "for better access to Watt's Meadow".

5. This year the fence around the building site went up without any warning to local people reducing access to Watts meadow.

Builders were allowed to use part of Watt's Meadow to build soakways for the houses and this meant that the Fence was extended well into the public area of Watt' Meadow with no consultation and again no warning.

6. Today we still have no clarification on public accessibility on the site and we have incorrect legal notices being put up.

It is clear that Rochester Conservatives have an agenda for the site which is not that of the local community.