Cod Almighty | Diary
What about the orange Wednesdays?
5 March 2015
Say what you like about the press – please, say what you like about them – but your original/regular Diary has just learned more about Fentydome II from one short Grimsby Telegraph article than from months on end of the surveys, petitions, and Official Club Statements coming out of Blundell Park. It's because I've got a short attention span, I know. But just the side notes in this thing in the Telewag about Brentford's and Lincoln's plans for moving are way more helpful than GTFC telling me "163,000 annual aggregate engagement hours" is an economic benefit to the area and expecting me to know what the blue blazes they are chuntering on about.
Cod Almighty has asked a couple of times on Twitter exactly what practical measures are envisaged by the Town fans urging North East Lincs council to "support" the club's relocation efforts. Nobody seems able to say. What are the next steps in the process? Fans will only get a clear picture about the Fentydome when they can see what's supposed to happen next, and then after that, and so on. Town – put a bloody timeline on your website or something, will you?
So in the absence of a timeline I've done a small bit of clicking to discover where we're up to. It looks fairly straightforward, but I've had to fill in some gaps with a bit of guesswork. CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG. I'm sure I will be.
First, today's Telewag thing says the council gave Town a six-month extension to their "exclusivity agreement" on the Peaks Parkway site back in December. The council said this would give the club "time to fully explore its ambitions for the site and to submit a planning application". So I'm guessing there's a planning application going in soon. Does anyone know when? The club might have said, but I've not seen it. Six months from December is May – so within the next three months?
I'll also guess that this planning application will be informed by the current 'consultation' exercise being undertaken over Peaks Parkway. And when I say consultation exercise I mean a ropey internet survey which oversimplifies a complex and deeply nuanced issue to a useless yes or no exercise, and non-chairman Fenty being heckled on a forlorn patch of damp soil by a truculent sexagenarian in a cagoule the colour of cabbage.
How long will it take for the planning application to be considered? Dunno. Anyone?
And then it's the Local Plan, which will clearly be a very significant and influential document in the future of our beleaguered region, because it has initial capital letters. It's not just a local plan. It's a Local Plan.
GTFC have made very clear that they want the Fentydome to be included in the Local Plan. We know this because they've asked us, in the above-mentioned minimalist 'survey', whether we want the Fentydome to be included in the Local Plan. What they haven't done, regrettably, is give us any idea what its inclusion in or exclusion from the Local Plan will actually mean for the Fentydome. Favourable consideration at the planning application stage? Financial support? Phil de Freitas being forced to muck in with a shovel and a hi-vis jacket? If we're being asked, we ought to be informed.
It may be, of course, that the club has explained this somewhere else, and I just haven't seen it – in which case I apologise for the oversight. But if I haven't been tempted to click on whatever link would have taken me to that information, the chances are that many other people haven't either. I'm not the only one with a short attention span. Apparently 87 per cent of respondents say yes, Peaks Parkway should be in the Local Plan. But how many of those yay-sayers are any less clueless than me about what that would actually entail? Surely if nobody knows what its inclusion in or exclusion from the Local Plan will actually mean for the Fentydome, then the part of the survey that deals with this is pretty much invalid.
There's a section on the council's website all about the local plan – sorry, Local Plan – and, joy of joys, this includes a timeline. It says the Plan will be adopted in November 2017. Does that mean that work on the Fentydome – should it be approved – could only begin after November 2017? Dunno. Anyone?
Oh, excuse me – there appears to be a large pachyderm where our coffee table usually stands. The question of who's paying, of course, remains unresolved. We're not even waiting for an "anchor tenant", as was the case with Fentydome I, because we don't yet know whether the development will be attached to a retail or a housing development. Watch this space… but don't hold your breath: you might asphyxiate.
And finally, don't get me started on Positive John's astonishing recent assertion that Blundell Park is not "centrally located in an easily accessible area". Call me a man with the perspective that comes from using public transport and living in a place where lots of people actually live, instead of out in the fucking sticks with horses in a stable out the back and a massive fucking car, but I fail to see how Blundell Park could be any more centrally located and easily accessible if you put it right on the nexus of the Grimsby/Cleethorpes conurbation, on the main urban arterial route linking the two with several major bus routes directly serving the location. OH.
As ever, I'm happy to be convinced that the Fentydome is both a sensible and viable idea, if the right information is presented to me. So far it hasn't, but you never know. And in the meantime we will all do well to remember that if this thing ever gets built, it'll be built in the image of John Shelton Fenty.