St Ives Golf Club sold its nine hole course on the Houghton Road for building development and moved to its new location off the Needingworth bypass in 2010. The great news was a big area abounding the Thicket path would be preserved as a country park for the benefit of St Ives.
Nine years on a whole chunk of houses have been built, but land allocated for the country park has been left to grow wild. Fenced off with ugly steel caging, it can't even be accessed by walkers. So what is happening?
The agreed plan for the country park was finalised in October 2018, shown below. It lays out a rather attractive space in which some of the land has been recontoured. There are areas planted as dense woodland, native hedgerows, meadowland, a flowering lawn, even a boggy area. All sounds very positive. But progress seems to have ground to a halt.
The agreement between Huntingdonshire District Council and the developers, Barrett Homes, is for the owners to create, maintain and lease to the Council at a peppercorn rent a Country Park. Work was to start once half of the 184 homes for which planning permission was granted were occupied. That threshold has been met and work should have started.
Huntingdonshire District Council is currently considering how best to resolve the situation. The developers say the work is out to tender with an anticipated start date of 'around September 2019' and an estimated completion date of 'early 2020'. Apparently the delayed start is to avoid conflict between users of the Country Park and construction vehicles for the housing estate.
Sounds somewhat suspect. There'll be no users until the park is completed. Surely some of those metal barriers could be repositioned. Wouldn't access to the park be from the path heading towards The Thicket? Expect another St Ives Matters update in Autumn 2019.
Huntingdonshire District Council is currently considering how best to resolve the situation. The developers say the work is out to tender with an anticipated start date of 'around September 2019' and an estimated completion date of 'early 2020'. Apparently the delayed start is to avoid conflict between users of the Country Park and construction vehicles for the housing estate.
Sounds somewhat suspect. There'll be no users until the park is completed. Surely some of those metal barriers could be repositioned. Wouldn't access to the park be from the path heading towards The Thicket? Expect another St Ives Matters update in Autumn 2019.
To download a more detailed version of the plan, click here. For access to the planning application and all related documents, click here.
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