Fake 56

Last week to Bourne Hall to hear about the future of Epsom and to contribute to that future, a variation on the focus group theme. Or perhaps the group therapy of the last years of my life at work. Maybe ten people from the council there, including the chief executive officer and her chief operating officer, maybe forty people from the borough. As one expects at such gatherings, more older than younger, but a good sprinkling of the latter. Including two city boys in my group, one of whom was deep into the modelling of tricky derivatives - not what one would expect from someone who was economist rather than physicist trained. Plus someone who knew that ING, noticed at reference 4, took on Barings' sommelier along with their paintings. An old retainer who did not like the idea of a stranger taking over his cellar?

The venue was the fine theatre come dance hall in the basement of the Hall, last noticed at reference 1. On the way out I asked the chaps on the door about how much it was used and they said plenty, which I was pleased about. It would be a pity for it to stand empty, one month to the next.

The format was introductory talk, break out into five or six groups, each with its own council facilitator, each with its own topics to think about, then report back from groups and wind up. Flip charts, post-it notes, pens and paper. Coffee, tea and biscuits. I thought it was a well run affair: it is not easy to do this sort of thing and I thought they had a good crack at it. One of a number of events they are running under the banner 'Future40' to help them build their strategy for the future. My group's topic was housing and it was good for me to be reminded that there are lots of different - and entirely reasonable - views out there about how to tackle such things. Different views which our elected representatives and their officers have somehow to turn into policy.

The big driver seemed to be that the population of the borough was set to grow by 20% in the next twenty years. Most of this was ageing population, some of it was lots of births. Oddly, it was expected that there would be a small fall of numbers of people in early middle age; perhaps people with growing families who not afford the bigger accommodation they needed while staying in the borough. Which was rich in average income but even richer in house prices.

Plenty of recognition in the group that the detached and semi-detached estate houses of the sort that I live in are probably not the way forward. They take up too much space and plenty of young people do not want the bother of gardens.

I entered two pleas. One for the council to allow the footprint of the retail part of town to shrink, in line with the long term decline of town centre shopping. Essentially the same point as was made at reference 2. Two for the need for accommodation for young people. Essentially studio flats (a fancy name for the bed-sitters of my young days) but with the addition of some communal facilities and a modest dose of supervision. An affordable place for young people, possibly with problems, who have either flown or been pushed out of the nest. A new take on the hostels of old, when for example, some of the big London stores provided accommodation for all the young people they had sucked into the big town from their native provinces. I don't suppose either plea will make the cut.

And I did not care for the rather growth and competition tone of the whole business. We want Epsom to do better! We want Epsom to attract more people! We want Epsom to attract more businesses! Speaking for myself, I would be quite happy for the borough to stand still and I have no ambitions to drive either Leatherhead or Ashtead to the wall. A tone which rather echoes, to my mind, the desperate scramble for growth and for more which seems to be a feature of our society. A desperate scramble which certainly delivers various kinds of progress - say in the technical side of health care or in the variety of food available in our big supermarkets - but which is starting to run up a large bill in other ways.

But that said, as I said at the outset, a well run affair.

Moon not up to much at exit at 2030, not a patch on the day previous.

Following the notice at reference 3 and being on foot, I thought to go into TB for the first time for a while. Open. Wine cheap and drinkable. Quite busy with a darts match. Maybe twenty of them and ten others, not bad for the middle of a Monday evening. And I even got to sit at what had been my regular stool at the bar in the olden days.

PS: faked because the chief executive used the snap above for her opening shot. I got our facilitator to send it to me afterwards and Google image search revealed that the precariously perched boat had probably been added to the picture by a drop of Photoshop. The point of the opening shot, which Google suggests has plenty of track record in presentations, being that this was how it felt to be a local authority, trying to weather the storms of austerity, the shifts and shakes of central direction.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/pianos.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/planners.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/trolley-216.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/heritage-saturday.html.