by writer, performer and arts promoter Dorian Kelly

PEOPLE might be wondering why there is still such opposition to the building of a student accommodation block on the Cultural Quarter.

To help them understand, here are a few facts.

The four private houses and businesses to the north of the site have permanent unrestricted access written into their house and business deeds, as have Open Road, an NHS facility, the Brewhouse and the Minories.

There are about 100 vehicle movements a day, but they will not be able to get at their own land or premises back doors - car parks, customer car parks, delivery bays or gardens - for two years.

After that, for the next 248 years, only ‘people with a legal right to park their cars’ will be given a key to pass into their own property.

This will not include beer deliveries to the Brewhouse, medicines to Open Road, customer parking at the hairdressers or restaurants or anyone the house owners care to invite (or delivery vehicles, taxis, plumbers, electricians or even hire cars).

During the build, those with the aforementioned ‘right to park’ have been offered a season ticket to Priory Street instead.

This is an incredibly busy car park, often full, and when the schools and the Mosque are in use, impossible.

Thanks to Alumno’s needs (and what Alumno needs, Alumno gets), six times a year part of it will be closed for several days of student arrivals and departures and three disabled spaces will be moved further away from the town centre.

It is also the new hotel car park and when Britannia and Vineyard are closed, it will be the only surface car park.

These places are an eight-minute walk away.

Sometimes, commuting residents may be carrying valuable laptops and so on and women, late at night, will have to walk through this area where the police crime map shows many violent assaults.

Writer, performer and arts promoter Dorian Kelly

Writer, performer and arts promoter Dorian Kelly

The borough keeps talking about statutory compensation for loss of value of these homes and businesses, but have been told by an agent jointly hired by Alumno and Colchester Council they will get none as there will be ‘no loss in value’ and they won’t consider consequential loss or business interruption. Nothing gets in the way of Alumno.

The planning inspectorate set a condition that the developers would not be allowed onto the site until they had solved the knotty problem of providing a safe, legal disabled access from Priory Street.

You may recall the council has recently tried unsuccessfully to force a solution on us that had an unsafe slope that would tip a wheelchair backwards and no safety rails just to allow Alumno onto the site by May as they require.

No-one has solved the problem - a fact - that building this building on this site is forbidden by the protective covenant protecting it.

A fact both the council and developers have always known but chosen to ignore.

Essex County Council, who own the covenant, disagree, and it may all come to court.

The developers have been awarded the land for a one-off payment from Alumno of just about £111 per square metre when the council got 16 times that per square metre for the old resource centre and also for student accommodation.

We will get virtually zero cash income from the site for the next 250 years, with no ground rent agreed and almost no business rates due.

The council has spent a great deal in buying up extra land for them and in demolishing the old buildings, but they won’t tell us if there is any profit left over for us.

It’s commercially confidential.

There are 360 18” diameter 30-foot deep piles ready to be smashed through any Roman archaeology to take the enormous weight of this behemoth.

And until they were told not to by the inspector, they planned to put piles just four metres away from the Roman Wall.

That’s the care the council has for Colchester, its heritage and its people. And for what? You tell me!

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