My definition of affordable housing

High Plateau is the very important, forgotten for decades, residential housing site that is marked on this official Dudley MBC plan:

 WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg

I am asking that it be used for low cost, very highly energy efficient, solar powered apartments of 1 and 2 bedrooms for the most badly housed in the borough.​  And for migrants.​

Many thanks

Tim    (Weller  0791 380 4363)

High Plateau stalled site

1. Who owns this site?  The owners of the Merry Hill Shopping Centre.
2. For how long has it been available? The site was created in the late 1990s following the diversion of the Dudley Canal No 1 and has remained undeveloped since.
3. Why has nothing been done on the site? This is not a Council site, the applicant will need to refer to the owner.  The site is however affected by the Midland Metro construction works.  A viaduct is proposed to the east of the site to carry the tram to Brierley Hill High Street.  Part of the site is temporarily needed to support the construction works.
4. What is its area, please? site area to be 2.5 ha (approx.)

HOMES NOT TRAMS

23,000 sq m, no less at High Plateau, Merry Hill if only it can saved from immorally extravagant Metro trams and ALL of it used for 1/2 bedrooms, highly energy efficient, solar-powered apartments for those most badly housed now, including migrants.  Wasted, unused for decades - since the 90s, I believe.  We have a housing crisis NOT a crisis over too few trams! Right priority, please Andy, my friend.

Transport and Housing Reforms are vital

TRANSPORT

Stop destroying or, not fully using, urban railway lines.  It only adds to road traffic congestion and all our woes!

You must have the courage to say 'No' to yet more conversions of vital railway lines and roads to tramlines.

Be content with trams from Dudley town centre to Sandwell and Brum.

If you must do WBHE Phase 2, then keep the trams on the railway line to connect with the national railway network at Stourbridge Jct.  Freight trains at night.

DO NOT destroy nature (we are also part of nature!) by wiping out Dudley Canal No 1, 400 metre canal embankment and housing land at Merry Hill.  See plan:

 WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg

 WBHE map in leaflet

Use the long, high embankment as part of the Black Country Urban Forest to sequester carbon dioxide, a dangerous greenhouse gas.

FINISH what you started and return trains/stations to the ready built, 120 Kms line "of national strategic significance" 

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

from Worcester to Derby via the historic capital of the Black Country - us!  As Railfuture want, here:

 Railfuture's full map.pdf

HOUSING

Build homes not trams on the 23,000 sq metres of High Plateau, Merry Hill.  See plan, above.

1/2 bedroom apartments, highly energy efficient and solar powered for the most badly housed and migrants.

Get migrants helping to build their own homes.  Lobby government for the necessary changes in rules/regs/laws.

Ask Cllr Mike Bird, Leader of Walsall Council, for his architect's brainwave of putting housing apartments around the outside of multi-storey car parks.

Would it work on the land used for the visitors' car park at Russell Hall Hospital and, make more parking spaces, too?

LEARN FROM NOLAN:

 The Nolan Principles

To my personal, v young, ward councillors

Good to meet you both at the last community forum.  As a retired old gentleman of leisure and pleasure, I'm still available at any time and any date to show you:

• where the short-lived 1990s monorail went and how it fell short of a vital connection that only added to the tragic incompetence of the scheme;
• the one and only monorail station that can still be seen and is preserved for occasional, anniversary viewing from inside the shopping centre;
• my guerrilla garden up against the rusty, metal sheet piling that is due to be destroyed by the 400 metre concrete and steel viaduct on top of it;
• the route of the devastation wreaked by the Metro across the only public open space at Merry Hill and this:
  
   6 glorious white trees.jpg
  
  
• 10,000 sq metres at Daniels Land and High Plateau designated for housing but has nature now got the upper hand at Daniels Land and should it be left to enrich biodiversity?

Tim

To Richard Hatcher

Hi Richard​

 Nine Action Points from W Mids Climate Coalitio...

​

Every member present, plus officers got their copy this morning before the meeting of Housing and Land Delivery Board.  I asked Wendy Slater if she might send out the A4 sheet to those not present but with their name I had written on.

This morning, I approached some members about the scandalous negligence at Merry Hill Shopping Centre where land has been designated for housing for years (actually, decades of land wasted, unused yet available) but nothing is ever done.  Plan here:​

 WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg

​​I've worked out about 10,000 sq m is designated at the two sites.  Can you be any more accurate, please Richard?  I am suggesting: for very low cost, highly energy efficient apartments of 1 and 2 bedrooms, with maximum PV solar for the most needy, including migrants​.

I hope to be at Dudley's Housing and Public Realm Scrutiny at 6 pm tomorrow to speak in the public forum about the worsening housing crisis with over 40,000 migrants already arrived this year in England but the land at Merry Hill is still not being used.  So far, no one can tell me who owns it, even!

Please help or advise me in some or, any way, Richard if you have the availability.  Thanks!

All the best

Tim

​​PS bonus:​

 GARETH DENNIS: This articulate young man has go...

​ 

The HS2, Metro, Sprint, Grand Central Shopping Centre Syndrome!

The authorities are so well-meaning, sincere and want the very best - so think HS2, Metro, Sprint, Grand Central Shopping Centre are the most essential and desirable projects since sliced bread.  But they are sincerely wrong!

The already very well-paid love their wealth flaunting, out to impress, flash projects like these.  In contrast, nearly 40,000 desperate migrants have boated across the Channel, just this year, and remain in almost equally desperate straits with their wretched accommodation in England.  This is shameful!

And the UK is near the bottom of European nations in taking asylum seekers.  We do the least - almost!

Fleeing war, famine, and environmental degradation from climate consequences, we would do the same if we were in their plight.  And only the Ukrainian refugees get quickly housed with UK families, it seems.

It does not matter what subject is talked about at the Green Forums, we can still talk about the even more desperate need not to waste money as they are doing but to get the brownfield sites like High Plateau and Daniels Land at Merry Hill given to the most desperate and not to immoral Metro "bus on rails" trams.

We can still talk about the grossly extravagant, greedy HS2, Metro, Sprint and the desperate need for a more sustainable, more eco-socialist, the poor first and foremost emphasis.

This is urgent: Very low cost to run, highly energy efficient apartments, small housing units with their own rooftop solar PV to make the electricity for warmth and food for the worst housed.

The millions of pounds in price and in weight of GHG emissions must, like the staff, be redeployed into these new priorities.

Tim Weller

to Ed Lawrence, Chair, Future Council Scrutiny

Dear Ed

My wife is whisking me off to visit our daughter and her family on her birthday today, so I cannot have my three minutes in the public forum at 6 pm.  Would you be so good as to read this out in my absence, please?

STALLED SITES

With the multiple crises affecting our nation, region and borough, consumer champion Martin Lewis is warning of the poorest getting into such financial debt this winter that it will bring some of them into such serious difficulties that their lives will be at risk and, certainly, their health will suffer.

I am, therefore, asking that the decades of neglect over the housing designated land at High Plateau and Daniel's Land at Merry Hill must immediately be given to the poorest for very low energy cost housing of flats, apartments and terraced housing of the kind that my wife and I have lived in for the last 46 years in Halesowen.  Our energy bills remain very low.

Who owns the High Plateau and Daniel's Land?

I would suggest that our council and the WMCA follows the example of Germany's striking measures to reduce energy demand, by doing the following:

Cut flood lighting of buildings and reduce street lighting.

Turn down the thermostat to 19C for central heating of public buildings.

Do not reopen the swimming pool in Halesowen and, perhaps Stourbridge closed too over the winter.  Reduce the water temperature at the Duncan Edwards Centre swimming pool.

In Hanover, Germany showers at pools and at public sports centres will be (or, now are) cold water only.

Certainly, bring in shorter and cooler showers in public leisure centres.  Cold only in Germany.

Cut/reduce the car mileage allowance for officers on official council business.

Cancel the Dudley Tram leaving the mainline railway at Hart's Hill and keep it running down to Stourbridge Jct to connect it, once again, to the railway network.

Scrap the £15 billion (Feb 2020 figure) to 2040 for the 150 miles of eight lines and 380 tram stops of Metro tramlines.

to Pat Willoughby re High Plateau

 

,

Dear Pat and Cllr Padda

It was lovely to have a quick chat with you and Charn before the meeting yesterday morning.

Since the 1990s, I believe I am correct in saying, High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre has been a valuable brownfield site, designated for residential, that has not been used.  It remains wasted.  PLAN, here:

 WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg

This is a very serious oversight that may have partly arisen because of the Metro extension (WBHE) that is due to take a corner slice of this much needed site.  A site for low running costs, highly energy efficient, solar powered apartments, using only electricity for heating and cooking, for sale and rent from, preferably, the Combined Authority and for "the stranger in our midst".  Metro trams must keep off and keep out of ALL of this site.

Metro trams must also keep off the only public open space at Merry Hill.  This is also the valuable, green space that is essential to continue to sequester CO2 thanks to the area of grassland, shrubs and trees that extends for 400 metres.  In addition, if you do as I advise, you will save £100 m.  This is the likely cost for the two double track tramway bridges over the Dudley No 1 Canal and for the massive, standard gauge, double track, concrete and steel tramway viaduct to obliterate the beautiful, nature rich canal embankment.  Add to the destruction, my landscape enhancement scheme to hide the rusty iron wall that holds up the High Plateau!  PHOTO of only a part that gets destroyed:

 6 glorious white trees.jpg

My own nature planting is off to the left of the photo and is not in view.  It also gets obliterated.

INSTEAD, keep the trams running on the "railway of national strategic significance" from the Cinder Bank roundabout on Duncan Edwards Way, through Brierley Hill and on to Stourbridge Jct station to connect with the national railway network.  Tram stops at the Waterfront, Brierley Hill and Withymoor on the railway route to Stourbridge.

Turning the UK's only mothballed, principal mainline railway of 120 Kms into a piddling little shuttle tramline over two short sections totalling 6.7 Kms is incompetent.  And the enormous cost of well over £500 m is immoral in the face of increasing poverty for those who are struggling both to eat and to heat their homes.  It is socially unjust and proves you are climate deniers, when you should be climate champions.

 Railfuture's full map.pdf

I hope you and the CA will act urgently.

Very best wishes Pat as you all address the climate, nature, ecological, housing and cost of living crises.

Tim

NOW IS OUR CHANCE to end the idiocy

Dear friends - Left Unity

This is what I mentioned near the end of our meeting last night.  Last month, I was told by a fellow pensioner at our Halesowen meeting that TfWM/WMCA was postponing the construction of the second half of the 10.7 Kms, £550 m tramline on mainly a railway "of national strategic significance".  The second half is still planned to run from Dudley town to Merry Hill but now is our chance to get it permanently stopped for housing and nature, instead.  Only public pressure can make the postponement permanent.

PLEASE SEND THIS (select, copy, paste as you wish or, just tell them what YOU want) TO: customerservices@wmca.org.uk

Put v low, finite fossil fuel apartments for those most badly housed (including those seeking refuge from war, famine and climate breakdown) on ALL of High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre.  Plan here:​

 WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg

​This means permanently keeping Metro "bus on rails" trams off High Plateau.

Save nature at Merry Hill by permanently keeping the trams off the 400 m canal embankment with the planned £100m double track railway viaduct.

Let it be naturally rewilded with NO MORE MOWING to allow plants, shrubs and trees to sequester CO2 on the embankment, instead of the climate damaging concrete and steel viaduct to make our prospects even bleaker.

STOP £0.55 billion, 10.7 Kms, Metro trams destroying the UK's only mothballed, principal, mainline railway "of national strategic significance" in the heavily congested, densely populated Black Country.​

 Metro map with my notes.pdf

​

THANKS, if you do write to tell them what you want!

Tim

Preferential treatment for migrants of all colours and all places

Would you help this cause of mine to welcome migrants and others badly housed in our borough by asking the authorities to give preferential treatment to "the stranger in our midst" by putting small, highly energy efficient and very low fossil fuel dependent apartments on High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre?  Plan here to show you where High Plateau is:

 WBHE plan for Merry Hill.jpeg

HELP SLOW THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

PLEASE SEND THIS (select, copy, paste as you wish) TO: customerservices@wmca.org.uk

Put v low, finite fossil fuel apartments for those most badly housed (including those seeking refuge from war, famine and climate breakdown) on ALL of High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre.

This means permanently keeping Metro "bus on rails" trams off High Plateau.

Save nature at Merry Hill by permanently keeping the trams off the 400 m canal embankment with the planned £100m double track railway viaduct.

Let it be naturally rewilded with NO MORE MOWING to allow plants, shrubs and trees to sequester CO2 on the embankment, instead of the climate damaging concrete and steel viaduct.

STOP £0.6 billion, 10.7 Kms, Metro trams destroying the UK's only mothballed, principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" in the heavily congested, densely populated Black Country.

  Metro map with my notes.pdf

Best wishes

HELP SLOW CLIMATE EMERGENCY

PLEASE SEND THIS TO: customerservices@wmca.org.uk

Put v low finite fossil fuel apartments on ALL of High Plateau at Merry Hill Shopping Centre.

This means permanently keeping Metro "bus on rails" trams off High Plateau.  The whole of the area for small, highly energy efficient homes​ to welcome migrants and all without their own place.

Save nature at Merry Hill by permanently keeping the trams off the 400 m canal embankment with the £100m double track railway viaduct.

Let it be naturally rewilded with NO MORE MOW to allow plants, shrubs and trees to sequester CO2 on the embankment.  Instead of the climate damaging concrete and steel viaduct.

STOP £0.6 billion Metro destroying the UK's only mothballed, principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" in the heavily congested, densely populated Black Country.

to Brigid Jones, Karen McCarthy

Dear Brigid and Karen - and copied to Ian Ward

It was a delight to meet you and to have a chat with you both this morning.

You are, of course, right Brigid in making the excellent point about fewer particulates, tyre dust and other toxic matter with trams on rails compared with wheels directly on roads.

It would be wonderful if you both and Ian felt able to take up my offer to show you the 400 metre grass embankment that holds up Dudley No 1 Canal at Merry Hill Shopping Centre.  Ian is ultimately responsible for the concreting of the only public open space at Merry Hill.  There is still time for the plans to be redrawn if Ian, transport lead for the Combined Authority, asked the MMA to tweak the tram tracks two metres west and to place them on steel stilts above the water of the canal.  This would mean maximum room for low energy, eco-housing on both the High Plateau and on 'Daniel's Land', while preserving the public open space and trees.  See one official plan below my name and address, at the very foot.

Work has only begun at the Dudley end of the WBHE tram and not at Merry Hill apart from ground investigations.

My landscape enhancement scheme is under the tram tracks and against the iron wall that holds up the High Plateau on its north side.  See the plan, at the very foot, below the photos.  I would love to show it to you.

This suggestion and my guerrilla gardening are to turn Merry Hell into Merry Heaven and the presence of your good selves and that of Ian would be just that - heaven!

Best wishes and thanks so much for seeing me - as did Ian, at his surgery, some three years ago.  My own Dudley councillors don't seem to have surgeries.  You three are brilliant!

GOOD NEWS STORY AT MERRY HILL

GOOD NEWS STORY!​

 6 glorious white trees.jpg

​

Metro trams will destroy this canal embankment at Merry Hill Shopping Centre in the Black Country, West Midlands (see photo) with a massive concrete viaduct to take the tram on stilts NEXT to the canal.

Instead, it can go on steel stilts directly ABOVE the water of the canal, at a cheaper cost and, still allow the popular boats and towpath to be used!  This is seen in Germany and France.

There will, then, be more room for small to medium-sized, eco-homes on the High Plateau above my landscape enhancement scheme that is against the rusty, metal sheet piling.

Only preparatory work has been done over the last two or three years, as can be seen with the drilling and excavations on the steep embankment.

PLEASE WRITE TO customerservices@wmca.org.uk, above asking for Metro tram construction to go on top of the canal on stilts to save Nature and the trees - a more positive, constructive and helpful alternative, if they really must destroy the UK's very last wasted, mothballed, principal mainline railway between Derby, Dudley and Devon.    THANK YOU!