14 May (Part 1) - Missing the bus?
At the Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on 22nd April, Mrs. Richardson (Deputy Director of Strategic Planning, £103,000 p.a. including 20% pension contribution) reported on the progress, some would say slow progress, being made on Sidcup High Street. She said…
“The public realm works are now accelerating, we were frustrated by the
poor weather and the difficulty with what turned out in the end to be a
redundant gas pipe but we are now progressing at some pace.
Most of the shop fronts are now in, the work is more or less complete. There are some big tracts
of public realm work now which will make some big impact and differences; one
example is the area outside the gym where work started today and will take about two weeks.
We do expect Hadlow Road to reopen on the 16th of May. The public
realm work may be finished ahead of that but obviously these kind of dates are
agreed in advance with the public transport providers, so that's the formal date
that we are quoting.
So
today seemed like a reasonable time to go and see if the Hadlow Road work, originally scheduled for completion
by the first week of March, was getting along. They are cutting things fine
because the bus diversion signs were changed to say 16th May a week or two ago
and Conway’s men were still pouring concrete foundations in two places.
I still have all my father’s old engineering books, whilst most of them are
about aero engines one is about using concrete in stressful situations. It’s old
but says to allow nine weeks for curing. Maybe that is why
Broadway is broken up by passing buses.
The observant may notice that at 10:45 on a sunny Wednesday morning
six photographs show fewer than a handful of people wandering by the shops.
