During his visit to the East of England in mid-September 2009, the RTPI President, Martin Willey, visited Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford to meet with senior lecturers and students. 

Later the same day, Martin travelled to the joint RTPI East of England/IHBC East Anglia conference in Norwich on "Place Making in Historic Cities" to make a presentation, meet with delegates and participate in an afternoon walking tour of the city.

The following day, Martin had been invited to visit the former airbase of Bentwaters in Suffolk by Chris Stratton OBE and Steven Bainbridge of The Landscape Partnership. 

This is the 2009 President's blog from his trip to the East of England:

Fewer trainees sponsored in university
Firstly I visited the Anglia Ruskin University campus - an excellent collection of well designed modern buildings - to meet staff on the planning course, led by Senior Lecturer Ann Hockey. The staff were very lively, but the numbers on the post-graduate part-time course had suffered, because of local authorities sponsoring fewer trainee places.

Nonetheless the students were engaged and, while concerned about the public sector spending climate, were clearly being very well taught.

Jim Page, a planning stalwart in his 80s, then chaperoned me on the train to Norwich, to address the RTPI East of England Urban Design and Conservation Conference in the beautiful Queen Ann Assembly House. I was in very good company, with presentations from ex-Norwich DoP Michael Loveday and Ben Webster, current master planner at Norwich, making particularly pertinent presentations.


A walking tour demonstrated the huge success of Norwich planners in making a difference to the economy and environment of this great city. Michael showed how a public investment of some £400 K had generated £16 m investment in the environment.

At the end of the conference I had the great pleasure of presenting Regional Chair Rob Hobbs with the EE Tomorrow’s Leader award.

To complete an excellent day I met representatives of the Greater Norwich Partnership Planning Sub Group who described the extraordinary progress they were making in delivering a 4 authority supported LDF. They were so impressive that I will be using their work as an exemplar for other sub regional planning models as part of the RTPI’s work in addressing the possible demise of regional arrangements.

The next day Rob accompanied me to Ipswich where I met Christopher Stratton and Steven Bainbridge of The Landscape Partnership planning consultants to visit an old airfield site Bentwaters. Bentwaters Park Ltd consists of a group of business farmers who currently manage some 20,000 acres of land in Suffolk and related businesses.

The primary reason for visiting was to look at the scheme for a Bio Mass plant that used agricultural “waste” as the raw material. The process of preparing vegetables to super market standard leaves much surplus material that has to be ploughed back into the land.

The Bentwaters scheme involves the vegetables being transported to the site prepared, stored to season the product, and then distributed. The surplus material that emerges from these processes is now stored and will be used to generate electricity for the process and other uses on the site, a truly sustainable process that should be working next year. There were many others activities going on in the site which are the subject of a master plan being taken forward by the consultants and some of the surplus buildings are illustrated here.

Richard Chillingford the EE Regional Secretary then kindly took me back to the station for my trip home after an eventful visit for which thanks to all involved.

Martin Willey

Author:

Tina Jessup

Publisher:

The Royal Town Planning Institute

Date:

05-Feb-10

Categories:

Nations & Regions 

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