Zeroing In

I am grateful to Tony Fittock (District Councillor for Althorne ) for letting me know that the process of creating a new Local Development Plan for Maldon District has begun. So my previous post on the matter revealed my own ignorance of the Maldon District Local Development Plan (LDP) Review: Issues and Options Consultation, which ran from 17 January to 14 March 2022.

Mr Fittock also shared a link to the report ‘Growth Options for the Review of the Local Development Plan’ [p.33 onwards] provided to the meeting of Maldon District councillors on 14 September 2023.

From this, I learned that ‘the Plan Period for the review of the LDP Review is going to be 20 years.’ As the current plan runs until 2029, this indicates that its successor will cover the period up to 2050. As noted previously, the UK government is committed by law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% of 1990 levels (net zero) by 2050. The next Local Development Plan will therefore set out a vision and a framework for the future development of Maldon District that must include complete decarbonisation.

If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail

Outside the Anchor pub, Burnham-on-Crouch after the 1953 floods

It’s now 6 years & 7 months since the Maldon Local Development Plan 2014-2029 [pdf] was approved (21 July 2017) and 6 years & 5 months since the Burnham Neighbourhood Plan 2014-2020 [pdf] was made part of the Maldon LDP by Maldon District Council (8 September 2017).

The period both these plans cover ends in 2029 – now just 5 years away.

Many Evenings

It’s seven years since we moved to Burnham-on-Crouch now, enough that we’re both more settled than either of us had been for many years before. We know the place and we know people, we’re wiser to the stories and characters of a five-mile radius. One or both of us have become involved in groups here, most often Claire leading the way: archaeological digs, the Burnham Art Trail, Covid mutual aid, the Dengie Hundred Bus Users Group, Maldon Greens, the Maldon & Heybridge Transport User Group.

East Atlantic Flyway

Migration over the River Crouch, 19th February 2023

I was pleased to see the ‘East Atlantic Flyway‘ among the seven sites recently backed by the UK government for Unesco world heritage status and the recognition of the ecological importance of the east coast wetlands that stretch from the Humber to the Thames.

This oriental margin is the terraqueous zone I wrote about in Managed Retreat #1, a fudge of ‘warpings, flats, carrs, fenlands, broads, salt marshes, intertidals, littoral zones and the drowned lands of the London-Brabant Massif’. In the tamed realm of these islands, it’s one of those places where the self-willed still pierces the fabric of the human superstructure, where civilization is thinner.

New Vernaculars

There was a heat dome over the north. It was in the news about the USA and Canada, but it’s also been in the Russian Arctic, Scandinavia, in the febrile crescent above the Arabian Sea arcing from Oman to Pakistan. A couple of weeks ago, during a Zoom call with a colleague in Milan she mentioned it had been 41°C there in the previous week. Temperature records have been broken in British Columbia, Washington, Portland, Moscow, Lappland, Helsinki, Northern Ireland. All this in a ‘cool’ La Niña year.

A brittle redoubt

Visualization of the proposed Bradwell B site by Bradwell B Group and amended by BANNG

The Dengie BioRegion continues to be threatened by the prospect of a new nuclear power station at Bradwell-on-Sea, a massive industrial plant that would dwarf the concrete tombs of the original and decommissioned Bradwell power station.

Tomorrow (Wednesday 1st July 2020) at 23:59 is the deadline for

Managed Retreat #2

The first digital version of the cover

After a few false starts, reconsiderations and revaluations since the first issue, work has commenced on issue 2 of Managed Retreat. The image above is part of the prototyping phase for the cover. The pink shape is the outline of the Dengie peninsula after

Back to the Strandline

This week Essex Live brought back the Climate Central Flood Map story that featured in the last post. This time around the story, and its associated maps, were accompanied by some welcome discussion of the implications and possible mitigation from Drs Natalie Hicks and Tom Cameron of the University of Essex’s School of Life Sciences. There was something of a disjunct between their commentary and the featured statements from the Environment Agency and Essex County Council. If local journalism wasn’t in such an under-resourced state that disjunct might have been creatively opened further in order to plot some better sense of the different visions of the future each presents.

Vulnerable to Flooding

Lots of the local ecologically concerned folk are sharing this news story based on the
Climate Central flood map update using the CoastalDEM® v1.1 digital elevation model. I’m not immune to doing so myself. Combined with the recent devastating floods in the north of England these projections seem to offer a warning from the future that

The Hour is Getting Late

Sunset at St Peter’s Chapel, Bradwell

The time we have left to avoid climate disaster is getting short and the sun is setting on the opportunity to avoid catastrophe. Not that you would know it from the political inactivity around here.