Discontent with the way the future of Tilling Green’s community centre is being handled is growing. Rye’s town council decided on Monday to ask AmicusHorizon / Rye Partnership to arrange additional consultation sessions. On offer, if that move is rejected, is a three-hour window on Monday afternoon [July 6] at a time when many people will be at work.
As it stands, Monday will be the first chance for the general public to consult with the housing association Amicus since it reported to the town’s public services committee on April 27.
Dan Lake, chairman of the Tilling Green Residents’ Association, Richard Farhall, Rye town clerk and Anthony Kimber, vice chairman of the Rye Neighbourhood Plan steering group – all interested parties – had one thing in common when Amicus announced its Monday meeting: not one of them had heard from Amicus since April 27.
Rye Cllr Charles Harkness has asked Amicus to provide a list of current users at the centre – that has been refused. He also asked Amicus to publish the footprint of the existing centre alongside its latest redevelopment plan to see how the sizes compare and where – exactly – the new centre will be. Again Amicus declined. Some of those who hire the centre, including the residents’ association, are considering setting up a Community Interest Company (CIC) to run the new centre now that Rye Partnership no longer wants to do that.
What is known is that the new centre will be a single-storey building. An Amicus statement circulated to users of the centre claimed the new layout provides comparable-size facilities to the existing centre. This is challenged by John Wylie, a Tilling Green resident who hires the community centre for his camera club. In a letter to Rye News published today he says the new building would be far too small. Space has effectively been halved, he says. Planners seem to have overlooked the fact that the new centre has to serve the needs of a town, not a village.
Question marks over whether the old will close before the new can open continue to cause concern. For example, Jean Christophe, aka Bob, who runs the Queen Adelaide internet café in Ferry Road, Rye, and the Tilling Green internet club, would have nowhere to store his equipment for computer classes, he says.
If users do find themselves without a home in a transition period, this would appear to fly in the face of Rother’s Core Strategy policy for community facilities and services. This says that development proposals that result in the loss of sites or premises currently or last used for community purposes should not be permitted. There are two provisos: “unless (a) alternative provision of the equivalent or better quality is available in the local area or will be provided and made available prior to the commencement or redevelopment of the proposed scheme or (b) it can be demonstrated there is no reasonable prospect of retention for the current use and that no other community use of the site is suitable or viable”.
If Amicus or the Rye Partnership is thinking of using St Mary’s Centre in Lion Street, Rye, as a temporary home then they have kept that to themselves. “No one has approached St Mary’s to date,” Harkness said yesterday.
John Howlett, a regular columnist in Rye News, and who with Christopher Strangeways, a local farmer, edits our Opinions and letters section, speaks for many in town when he calls for the Rye Partnership to step aside and for the town’s council to take the lead in deciding the fate of Tilling Green’s new centre. “There is still time for Rye residents to make their views heard by the town council, which should exercise its own democratic right and duty of stewardship,” he writes in his “Wry Comment” column this week.
Photo: Dan Lake / Drawing: John Wylie