Bromley have uploaded 35 supporting comments on the planning portal for the Blenheim Centre redevelopment application, the origin of which is unknown, but which may be related to a door to door campaign in which unidentified canvassers attempted to gain support for the proposal at the beginning of March 2023. We don’t know who instigated this, but they were clearly attempting to mislead the public (and were also manifestly almost illiterate: Downloadable here ).
Example below.
- The amount of commercial space will be almost halved – so it’s not an increase on the existing provision. Also, Iceland MAY return after the construction period, but there are no guarantees.
- Much of the civic space being offered is Empire Square which is owned by the public, anyway. Burnham Road doesn’t exist – they probably mean Burham Close. The public already have a through route during Blenheim Centre opening hours, which is most of the day, so it’s not much of an improvement.
- Part of the pocket park already exists – much of the land is owned by either Bromley Council or Clarion on the Burham Close side – so it’s just a bit of landscaping.
- Affordable homes are 35% by habitable bedroom – in effect there will be 36 new rented homes which is a drop in the ocean. The rest are part rent part buy, where the purchaser is responsible for 100% of the service charges, and will eventually pay the full purchase price for the property if they wish to own it.
This sentence is using incorrect prepositions and is slightly bizarre: ‘help release pressure’ This is clearly not written by a native English speaker. I would expect a professional organisation to be less sloppy in their use of language. If they can’t string a simple sentence together, what chance do they have of managing a major building project? - 100 trees?? Where on earth does it state anywhere that they will plant 100 trees? There is no space to do this in the proposed development.
It’s interesting that Bromley’s Planning Department are prepared to upload these bizarre documents, even though they are clearly a crude attempt to manipulate the comments facility so that the ratio of objection to support improves.