Our Folkestone Leas Promenade's destruction of its Victorian / Edwardian/ Art Deco heritage

 

I seriously believe that the biggest cause of our Leas Promenade's destruction of its Victorian / Edwardian/ Art Deco heritage has to be laid at the door of Folkestone & Hythe District Council, formerly called Shepway District Council. The Shepway District was formed in 1974 and renamed FHDC in 2018. We also have the Town Council, though heaven knows why we need a town council, as no one I've ever spoken to knows much about it.

 

The former balcony beneath the Leas Cliff Hall.

 

 How it looks now like a football stadium.

 The state of the Leas infrastructure, our heritage, is in serious decline. From its crumbling ragstone walls on both the Promenade level and below on Madeira Walk, its cracking paths, and corroding Victorian lampposts, to its rapid loss of sea views along whole swathes of its entire length. The lost paths that once took generations of locals as well as visitors back and forth up and down the Leas cliff face. Dangerous fencing that needs replacing in certain areas, memorial benches that cost families over £2k for a 10-year rental period, which should all look the same and not as a mishmash of colours from chestnut brown to pale grey, and those covered in green mould.

 

FHDC is so broke that it cannot maintain our Victorian Heritage Promenade lampposts.
 

You will be hard pressed to find 4 benches together of the same colour

 

 

To blame anyone for this decline must be laid at the doors of those who can only be held responsible, which begins and ends with those charged by us, the residents of Folkestone and the voters and council tax payers, who elect them. Present & past local authorities must be held accountable, their officers, and their councillors, and those political parties who govern in our name by virtue of the fact that their parties polled the most votes.

I just don't get why it's classed as a Conservation Area. What are they meant to be conserving, as there is little evidence of anything being conserved? Even the Leas Lift project is now in the hands of a private consortium.

Look at the diabolical eyesore we have had to look at these past 2 years on the now-abandoned former Leas Pavilion site, with no one telling us what is meant to be happening. If FHDC does not have a clue, then do something about it, don't just leave it and carry on fiddling whilst it blights our Promenade. It's a prime coastal site development. Why can't they see that?

 

 

 

Folkestone's now iconic twin towers that need blowing up! 

  It should be commanding attention from developers from all over the UK and beyond. Compulsory purchase it for peanuts, as whoever owns it at the moment has had long enough to come up with a recovery plan. 

 

This time, make sure any 106 agreement or CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy) imposed on any developer to this site is spent on the restoration of the Leas Promenade and not shovelled into some hole in the ground at the Otterpool Development site that the council has already shovelled tens of millions into.

https://www.tendringdc.gov.uk/content/what-is-a-section-106-legal-agreement 

Sell it on at a small profit to any developer with a plan less ambitious and contentious than the previous one. Make sure the finances are in place to pull our town's twin towers down and start from scratch. Make sure any developer puts money in a fund that, if anything goes wrong again, it will at least cover the cost of bulldozing it. Doing nothing isn't helping FHDC; this town and district have had enough of that, it seems, over the years.

Our elected Town Councillors and our MP should be doing more to put pressure on FHDC to do something now about this site.

FHDC published this report dated March-May 2024, entitled The Leas-10 Year Maintenance Plan.

 It must have taken them a year to put it together. For all its worth, it's a 10-year wish list as there is no way they have the resources to fund this; their own figures suggest it will cost £695,600.00 over 10 years, and they have no idea what the costs for materials and labour will be by then. They won't even be here in 10 years; the whole council will be gone by May 2028.

This 30-page document tells us one thing: it is a dreadful indictment of FHDC's abysmal failure through starving the Leas Promenade of funding that has led it to the state it is in now. 

Many of these sets of steps are treacherous underfoot. 

Shamefully FHDC cannot even find £28k to sandblast all 34 of its Victorian lampposts, it's 36 actually, they can't seem to count the 2 on the Leas Road by the Bandstand. Yet, remember this figure, they can find £750k for a new children's play area in their award-winning Green Flag Coastal Park and can find a whopping £^ million of council taxpayers' money to refurbish Hythe Swimming pool, that you could build a new one for that amount surely. Remember, most of the Green Party Councillors, including its leader Councillor Jim Martin, who are the governing party at FHDC, hail from Hythe; not one is elected to represent the Town Centre of Folkestone, let alone its Leas Promenade. 

An unbelievable state of disrepair of our town's historic Victorian heritage.

So if the Bandsand roof canopy collapses this Summer you can't say you did not know about it FHDC and its highly paid officers and its Councillors. 

In many cases, all they needed was a coat of paint every couple of years.

When you start to look more closely at everything on the Leas Promenade, you can understand why we have been saying for nearly 2 years now that its infrastructure is in a woeful state of disrepair.

When you read this report, remember it was FHDC that is largely to blame for the state of disrepair of the infrastructure on the Leas Promenade, much of it being our heritage. An authority that is not fit for purpose should be consigned to the history books soonest rather than later.

Please join us on our Facebook Group Protect & Preserve The Folkestone Leas.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/746105824775303