A Manifesto for the Landscape of Cumbria Expand Better Funding for the Countryside - A Manifesto for the Landscape of Cumbria Prior to the snap General Election on June 8th 2017, we launched a Manifesto calling on all political parties to unite in developing better environmental policies so that we can have healthier landscapes for all, prosperous rural communities and increased funding for the countryside in Cumbria. We hope that the Cumbrian MPs will take note of our concerns and will support the Cumbrian landscape, heritage and environment in the coming Parliament.
MOD proposal to deregister Warcop, Hilton, Murton and Burton commons Expand 17th May 2017 Our objection as submitted to the MoD proposals to deregister Warcop, Hilton, Murton and Burton commons. Applications to Deregister Common Land: CA14/3: Murton Common (CL76), CA14/4 Hilton Common (CL27) and Burton and Warcop Fell Common (CL122)
Energy proposals at Old Hutton Expand Update 27th June 2017 Application SL/2017/0425 comprising of the Installation of a 49.99 MW battery storage facility with associated equipment, and application SL/2017/0426 comprising of the installation of gas fired electricity generating station. You can still respond to these applications by submitting comments via the South Lakeland District Council (SLDC) website. The application reference numbers are: SL/2017/0425 and SL/2017/0426 and can be accessed via these links or by searching on the SLDC website. You can also arrange to view the applications at the SLDC offices in Kendal. Update 14th June 2017 Application SL/2017/0425 comprising of the Installation of a 49.99 MW battery storage facility with associated equipment, and application SL/2017/0426 comprising of the installation of gas fired electricity generating station. Friends of the Lake District have assessed the above proposals and objected to both on the basis of landscape and visual impacts, both individually and cumulatively, transport impacts and the removal of diverse hedgerow to enable access. We do not consider that the applications have fully assessed the impacts of these proposals and they do not provide sufficient evidence to substantiate the arguments for the proposals. Our full response can be read here. 16th May 2017 We are aware that two planning applications have been submitted to South Lakeland District Council for significant energy related infrastructure on land at Greenmoor Bank, Old Hutton Kendal. Our planning officer is currently assessing these proposals and will issue our written responses to the application in due course. Initial assessment has raised concerns over the cumulative impacts of the development alongside current infrastructure as well as the two applications combined. We are particularly concerned regarding detrimental impacts on landscape character and visual amenity from key viewpoints including the Helm. The application reference numbers are: SL/2017/0425 and SL/2017/0426 and can be accessed via the SLDC website or by arranging to view the application at the SLDC offices in Kendal.
Car Park at Derwentwater Expand 23rd April 2017 Proposals for a permanent car park for up to 65 vehicles near Catbells have been lodged with the Lake District National Park Authority. Whilst it is acknowledged that there are significant issues with illegal parking in the area we are concerned that this proposal would exacerbate the situation. We consider that it would be more appropriate for the LDNPA to continue to work with all partners and encourage sustainable transport methods to access this popular fell. The proximity to Keswick and the availability of the launch, bus service, and opportunities for walking and cycling to the area mean that the need for private car use is not essential. By formalising car parking in this area would draw a greater number of private vehicles in to this area and would have a negative impact upon the landscape character and tranquillity of the area. Our comments to the LDNPA in full can be viewed here. Change of use of agricultural land to create a permanent car park, The Cupboard Field, Newlands, Portinscale, Keswick, CA12 5UE(pdf document - click to view / download)
Our response to NuGEN's Stage 2 Consultation on the proposed Moorside Nuclear Power Station Expand 28th July 2016 Friends of the Lake District’s response to the NuGEN Stage 2 consultation.
Westmorland Dales Hidden Landscapes Partnership project bid Expand 5th November 2016 A £3.5m grant to unlock and reveal the hidden heritage and landscape of the Westmorland Dales is given initial approval¹ by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) through its Landscape Partnership (LP) programme². Friends of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority have been given the green light to develop an ambitious joint project. The project has been designed to encourage community organisations, interest groups, public and private sectors to work in partnership to deliver a raft of initiatives aimed at revealing what is hidden in the landscape and used to connect people with what is special and distinctive about the area. The project has three main aims. To unlock and reveal the rich, spectacular, but hidden heritage of the Westmorland Dales. To conserve and enhance the forgotten landscape and heritage of the Westmorland Dales ensuring that the landscape is protected and cherished; in so doing to provide a strong foundation for the “new” National Park. To provide opportunities for those journeying through the Westmorland Dales to linger in the landscape and learn about its rich cultural and natural heritage. The project area will extend over 200 sq km from Maulds Meaburn to Tebay in the West and Ravenstonedale in the south. It’s an area that now forms part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park following the extension to park boundaries in August although still lying within the county of Cumbria. It also contains a unique assemblage of cultural heritage including a remarkably intact pattern of historic settlements and associated earthworks. Earthworks in the Orton area range in age from prehistoric stone circles, cairns, and burial mounds to medieval furrow and field systems. Douglas Chalmers, Chief Executive, Friends of the Lake District said, Until recently the Westmorland Dales were the forgotten landscape; a hole in England’s landscape designation. The area’s outstanding landscape has been shaped by its tremendously rich cultural heritage over many generations. Heritage Lottery Fund support gives us the opportunity to work alongside local communities to record, interpret, conserve and manage the exceptional natural and cultural heritage of the area and ensure that many future generations are able to continue to enjoy it. The project will provide training for volunteers and establish a framework for the coordination and promotion of volunteering opportunities in the area beyond the lifetime of the project. Many of the projects within the scheme will provide opportunities for volunteers to develop skills and work to conserve the landscape and its heritage and to promote the special qualities of the area. Carl Lis, Chairman of the Yorkshire Dales National Park said, This is a fantastic opportunity for the Westmorland Dales. In partnership with the local communities, support of the Heritage Lottery Fund helps us lay the foundation for the newly designated national park giving us resources to help people look after and connect with, enjoy and benefit from this inspirational landscape and to share the distinctiveness of this special place with visitors. Ros Kerslake, Chief Executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund said, Our historic landscapes are incredibly important to people’s wellbeing and need to be protected. Some of the landscapes we are funding today are in the most remote parts of the UK; others form an important backdrop to some of our largest cities. What they all have in common is the potential to make people’s lives better, which is why they are so richly deserving of National Lottery money. A development grant of £317,204 has been awarded by HLF to enable Friends of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority to develop their plans and seek final approval for the grant amount of £3.2m for implementation at a later date. Additional notes: ¹ HLF’s Landscape Partnership (LP) programme operates a two-stage grant approval process. Today’s announcement means that money has been set aside by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for the scheme. The applicant initially receives development funding, then progresses to the second round and submits a further, fully-developed application to secure the full award. This early level of strong financial commitment means that Landscape Partnership projects can move forward with the assurance that funding for their scheme is in place provided that their final proposals fully meet the programme's criteria. ² HLF’s Landscape Partnerships are helping bring together members of the community as well as local, regional, and national organisations to deliver schemes which benefit some of the UK’s most outstanding landscapes and rural communities. Grants range from £100,000 up to £3m. The next closing date for LP applications is May 2017. More information about the project can be found on the project pages of our website. 5th September 2016 We hosted a visit for the HLF assessors of our project on 24th August. The sun shone on us and we had a tour round the area meeting partners who explained their projects and the needs of the area. Sir Martin Holdgate opened the morning with a presentation on the project which you can read here:Westmorland Dales Project presentation (pdf) We will know if our funding bid is successful on 26 October. 31st May 2016We have now submitted our hidden landscapes landscape partnership bid. We will hear if we are successful in October. 25th Febraury 2016With the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority we are running four community drop in events in February and March for the public to learn more about our project ideas and give us their thoughts on what they would like to see in the project. Full dates and details avaialable here 19th January 2016 We're leading a new partnership formed to work with local communities organisations and interest groups to deliver landscape-related project work in the Orton Fells area of Cumbria. It is hoped that its work will be funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Landscape Partnership Scheme. We have launched the webpage today which has more information about the project and will update submission of bid by the end of May. Visit webpage
Our response to the NWCC Consultation Pylon proposals January 2017 Expand 6th January 2017 Friends of the Lake District made its response to the NWCC consultation re: Pylon proposals across Cumbria. You can read it here. Click to see document Thank you to everyone who has contacted National Grid with your concerns. As of 2pm there have been more than 2270 letters written to National Grid via the website and we know of plenty more people who have written separately. Hopefully we can stop National Grid spoiling the Duddon Estuary and the Furness peninsula pictured above.
Do we really want expressways barrelling across our national parks? Expand Written by Lillian Burns, life member of Friends of the Lake District. A journalist by training, she has done spatial planning and transport policy work (on a voluntary basis) for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), to which Friends of the Lake District is affiliated, for over 20 years. She is non-political. Which of us has not complained when road journeys have been taking longer than we had hoped or we are trapped in a traffic jam? Why can’t this particular road that we happen to be travelling on be ‘improved’ – or that regular bottleneck be bypassed? But when we step back and look at the problems from a wider perspective, do we seriously want to re-create a Los Angeles freeway situation everywhere rather than having a high quality landscape (yes, with quirky, winding roads) and a first class public transport system as exists in Switzerland? What matters most – conserving the things that make a place special and wonderful or getting from ‘A’ to ‘B’ 10 minutes faster than would otherwise be the case – and probably enduring poor air quality while doing it? The travelling public have actually pronounced on this time and again. In survey after survey, they opt for reliability of journeys as their top priority – not time saving. They simply want to know how long a journey will take so that they can plan their day around it. Here in Britain, our political terms of four years nearly always cause politicians to focus in on road building as the solution to transport problems because new or expanded roads can usually be delivered faster than major public transport improvements. But this simply draws us into an increasingly unsustainable spiral of building ever more road capacity to accommodate ever more road trips which we are generating because we are not offering reliable alternatives. Add to this the scenario where so many local facilities have closed down and an expanded choice of education options over wider areas and there is a perfect storm for generating as many road trips as possible. (Whatever happened to the concept of sustainable communities?) However we have got to where we are, we now have a scenario where money and political emphasis is being poured into more roads (again!) while promised rail improvements such as a number of electrification schemes were cut back in the recent Autumn statement. Meanwhile rural bus services in particular - always the poor relation - have been totally decimated in so many places. A plethora of road schemes Friends of the Lake District is dismayed by the raft of road schemes now being contemplated. The Northern TransPennine Study that the Department for Transport and Highways England have been running has proved to be little more than a rubber-stamp exercise for progressing moves towards the dualling of the entire A66 and a ‘mini study’ that sprung from it looking at roads to the west of the M6 and led by Cumbria County Council and the Cumbrian LEP has recommended the upgrading of numerous routes. Friends of the Lake District attempted, on both studies, to introduce the voice of environmental reason but alternative arguments to building more road space were not welcomed. Added to which the Northern TransPennine Study consultants consistently circulated images to study members that failed to show the National Park extensions despite prompting from Friends of the Lake District. The Chancellor gave approval on November 23rd for funding to take forward to the next stage plans to provide a dual carriageway across the whole of the A66 corridor (which won’t necessarily be the same thing as adding a lane to the existing single carriageways and will almost certainly involve some off-line sections) and also to re-build two major junctions on the A69 between Hexham and Newcastle. Transport consultants and economists are now working up economic/business cases for these proposed road improvements, which we look forward to scrutinising. How the ‘West of M6’ recommendations will be taken forward remains to be seen. A common feature of all three strategic road studies in the North of England to date has been the dearth of detailed new evidence to support the opinions of professional transport people who have so far focussed on accumulating past evidence through desktop exercises and making assertions. Serving on this and the other two Northern studies - the TransPennine Tunnel Study and the M60 North West Quadrant one - has felt very much like taking a step back to the ‘Roads for Prosperity’ White Paper of 1989. In announcing a massive road building programme, that White Paper made bold assertions about new roads leading to guaranteed economic prosperity. The starting point of the strategic road studies was very similar – we are heading in this direction because transport links need to be improved and, if we do this, it will benefit the economy. (Whatever happened to the much-heralded concept of ‘reducing the need to travel?’) In the event, after the furore created by ‘Roads for Prosperity’, thinking started to change and the government subsequently accepted two seminal reports from SACTRA - the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment. One demonstrated that new roads generate extra traffic movements and another showed that, in a developed country such as the UK, there was no automatic connection between new transport infrastructure and economic growth and also that new roads could actually suck a workforce away from an area rather than bring new businesses to it. It has felt over the last year and a bit, since this latest range of studies commenced, as though everything has come full circle and there has been a determination to forget SACTRA’s findings. This in addition to environmental NGOs being excluded altogether from the formation of a freight strategy for the north – which was simply launched recently without any consultation. Friends of the Lake District will be continuing to follow closely what is happening and will report back to members. In the meantime, anyone interested in catching up with the progress of the Northern TransPennine Route Strategic Study Stage 3 report (or the other strategic studies) can do so at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/road-investment-strategy-post-2020 and the West of M6 mini study report is available at: http://www.cumbrialep.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/West-of-M6-Strategic-Connectivity-Study-Report-FINAL.pdf
Lamplugh Housing Expand 14th June 2017 The Planning Officer is currently assessing an application for 27 executive dwellings in Lamplugh on a side adjacent to the National Park Boundary. We are concerned regarding the density of such development in this area and the associated landscape and visual impacts. We will provide an update once the application has been fully assessed and a site visit undertaken.
West Cumbria Mining proposals Expand 14th June 2017 Friends of the Lake District has received a consultation from Cumbria County Council for the Development of an existing surface mine entrance for a new underground metallurgical coal mine and associated surface development at Pow Beck Valley and area from Marchon Site to St Bees Coast, Cumbria. We have previously provided pre-application response relating to this development and we are currently assessing the proposals at submitted. We will provide an update on this as we progress our response. The application can be accessed on the Cumbria County Council website under the reference number 4/17/9007.