1. Stockbridge Lane car park
As an occasional Market Stall holder I have found that it is very important to the survival and success of our markets on Thursday and Saturday and to shopping in the town as a whole that as many people are encouraged to visit the town not only to shop but to enjoy our many activities throughout the year.
Many times in the summer all the car parks in the town except one are full to bursting with essential visitors. Stockbridge Lane Car Park is the exception. It is the nearest large car park to the Market Cross , capacity 88 cars, which is never full except at the Dickensian Festival when additional car parking is also needed at the Health Centre.
At other times the occupancy of this car park is never above 50% and often as low as 15% even in the height of the summer, as you will know from your takings at the meter.
Why is this car park so little used ? There is no sign at the Market Cross to indicate this car park exists. This needs to be rectified immediately .
Debbie Binch of the CCC approached Dave Conlin to appeal for a sign here on Monday January 12th with no result.
Secondly a better use of this car park would be for the business people to be offered this car park at a greatly reduced rate over the year this freeing up many of our streets close to town. In this way SLDC would receive far more money for its car park than at present.
SLDC would benefit as would the town.
Why can’t the Town Council to be given the responsibility over its own car parks? It would then be able to offer free parking on Market days as do towns like Hawick in Scotland if it decided that this made commercial sense.
The town is suffering from a lack of tourism; everything possible should be done to prevent this.
2. 27 Princess Street.
For some time now the Town has had to endure the sight of a burnt out house at 27 Princess St which is on the route taken by all tourists that arrive by train.
Far worse the neighbouring houses have had to endure the misuse of this house for over ten years and its lack of repair and broken windows. Repeated attempts by the residents and local councillors have failed to achieve a change. Only when there was a fire that threatened the safety of the residents adjacent did the council start to listen.
Could the Council assure the town that a resolution to this sad episode is at an end and that it will enforce a compulsory purchase of this property if present negotiations with the council and the present owner fail?
3. Web site for the town.
The towns shops and activities are a great source of benefit to the town's tourist trade and attractiveness. Why is it the the SLDC has never done a good job of designing an effective Ulverston website for this purpose.
The present Ulverston Online web site continues to come top of Google rankings yet it has very little information on it from a tourists viewpoint and many of the links don't work.
Jayne Kendall describes its purpose as being a portal and not a site specifically to promote Ulverston.
Yet the description of the site on Goolge is
“Ulverston Online
Lake District, Tourism and Ulverston information from Ulverston Online - the website of the festival town.”
Festival town? There is no information on this site about Ulverston’s festivals. A tourist would loose patience before discovering this on another site if they were lucky.
By contrast Newcastle recognised the importance of promoting itself to the world on the Internet five years ago and were in a position to reap the benefits of its hard promotional work with a surge in tourists when the pound weakened against many other of the worlds currencies.
Ulverston could have benefited in a similar way.
Though the Town Council have had a new web site designed, this is primarily to promote the views of the Councillors and its business; it is not specifically targeted to the tourist.
When will something be done to improve this situation by handing the responsibility and running of this site to an organisation that promotes tourism with flair throughout the Southern Lake District so that we all benefit from each other's strengths?
If the Council is not going to provide a good presentation of our town will it then remove this site from the prime slot on Google so that tourists do not get the impression that are town is a complete shambles. Private business can then be encouraged to take up the slack and become top slot on Google.
Response received Monday 28th September:
(clicking on the image will bring up an enlarged version)
4 comments:
princess street has new windows and is undergoing a renovation by the owner and has been for the past 3 weeks
Thats the whole point with Keith he jumps in all guns blazing before he even checks out the problem,He's seen the write up in the evening mail then he trys and takes over,yet people are already on the case
The point of the 27 Princess St question is that the house is taken out of the hands of the present owner not that it is repaired again only for the same cycle of misuse of the building to continue.
It's that I wasn't completely up to speed on this one as I had little notice that the council were in town.
It's interesting that the last person to comment is immediately negative and critical rather than supporting questions 1 and 3 which I believe are very relevant.
Did they go to the council meeting?
If not, be thankful that someone did! We won't get improvements to Ulverston without speaking up.
How about part of Stockbridge car park given over to a youngsters playground area?
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