A walk in the park

It was wet on Sunday so a walk in the park was indicated, rather than the now usual spin around Jubilee Way - with a couple of special interest items already having been noticed at references 1 and 2.

The wall with buildings

Heritage wall meets new wall

First off, around to the express pre-fab to see how that was getting on. With the answer being that the site had been tidied up a bit, but it was still not finished and had a shut up look about it. Had the chap who had commissioned the place got into dispute with the Baufritz people, with work halted pending resolution? Has he run out of money? Getting on for a year in the building now and still counting...

Round to Pound Lane where it looked as if a chunk of wall and a lamp post had been taken down by a car outside the undertakers there. Perhaps I could scavenge some bricks?

Quick turn around the Wellingtonia then onto Court Rec. One large group of youths, probably some kind of football training, paused in one corner, it having by then come on to drizzle a bit. One small group of youngish ladies doing dance exercises with a transistor radio and a leader. All Lycra and leggings and I have to say that the leader was doing a fine job of wriggling to the music.

Pushed onto that other express development, this one by our very own Zestan at the end of Court Lane. The new flats looked to be finished, but they also looked to be empty. Were they asking too much in the present depressed state of the market? Were the speculators (one said to be a rich Russian) hanging on for something or other, perhaps tax flavoured?

Whatever it was, it was not deterring our local graffiti artists. Irritating, to say the least, if you actually lived in one of the flats. While I wondered about the sloppy join of old wall to new wall. Perhaps Zestan did not think it worth doing it properly, given that developers want to turn the land behind the old wall into a small housing estate, a proposal which has got some Epsom citizens into a right lather. If you go to the Epsom Planning Application system and ask for Clay Hill, you find that this proposal has no fewer than 109 documents and 414 comments associated with it. Who would be a planner, having to slog through all this stuff?

See references 3, 4 and 5. The site has been derelict for a long time, but the present campaign by Zestan has been going since at least 2014.

PS: Zestan do not appear to be involved in the second development, the one behind the old wall. Looking at just one of the documents turned up the Guildford people at reference 6. But who is behind them?

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/not-trolley.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/identification-of-wellingtonia-closed.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/heritage-wall.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/03/derelict-2.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/04/paused.html.

Reference 6: https://lytle-associates.com/.