Bristol

  • Bristol Post Balls – tall tales

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media

    image of Bristol's Castlemead building
    Bristol’s tallest building according to the Post
    Yesterday the Bristol Post published a story of a wrecking spree that took place at the Castlemead building in central Bristol.

    Castlemead was completed in 1981. The building has a roof height of 80 metres (262 feet) and consists of 18 floors. Written by an unidentified journalist, the Bristol Post article confidently describes it in its first paragraph as “Bristol’s tallest building”.

    But is it?

    No.

    Most definitely not.

    image of St Mary Redcliffe
    Bristol’s actual tallest building
    As this blog has pointed out before (posts passim), that accolade is held by a much older building – St Mary Redcliffe, parts of which date to the 12th century.

    The spire of St Mary Redcliffe, is 89 metres (292 feet) high. Its height makes it the third tallest English church spire in England. The spire itself was struck by lightning in 1446 and truncated (something which can be clearly seen in the illustration of the church on Millerd’s 17th century plan of Bristol. Ed.), in which condition it remained for some 400 years before being rebuilt to its present height in 1872.

    So, Bristol Post hacks, think carefully – and do the all-important background research and fact checking – before in future describing any modern edifice as Bristol’s tallest. 🙂

  • More wifi on Bristol’s buses

    Steve WoodsBristol, Tech

    Some time ago, FirstBus, Bristol’s major bus operator, introduced free wifi on its services nos. 8 and 9 (news passim).

    image of First Group bus
    Never mind the fares, at least the wifi’s free!

    Today the Bristol Post reports that there’s to be a large scale expansion of free wifi for Bristol’s bus passengers, starting next month.

    Written by the Post’s business correspondent, Michael Ribbeck, the article states:

    Free wifi has already been introduced on the 8 and 9 routes in the city on a trial basis but is being rolled out across Bristol throughout December.

    Fellow operator Wessex is also offering free wifi to its customers and is looking to have most of its buses connected to the internet by the end of the year.

    A spokesman for First stated: “We are currently in the process of installing wifi on the majority of our vehicles in the West of England. We fully expect that this work will be completed by Christmas and that all the vehicles that regularly travel in and out of Bristol, in addition to a number of vehicles that are used elsewhere, will offer our customers access to free wifi by the New Year.”

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Bristol Post Balls – bedding expenses

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    I knew having children was expensive, but never realised cots – those small-sized beds for babies – could cost so much until I read this article in today’s Bristol Post about an expensive night out which sadly ended up in that local Palais de Justice also known as Bristol Crown Court.

    Bristol Crown Court
    Bristol Crown Court

    Apparently, the night out resulted in a huge bill for bedding, according to the relevant sentence in the article.

    The court was told Collins had to stump up £8,500 towards legal cots.

  • Bristol Post Balls – beefing about faggots

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Today the Bristol Post has been occupied with faggots. It all started when Facebook, that bastion of free speech, banned the use of the word faggot as offensive. Apparently they’ve never heard of this traditional item of English cuisine over the pond, where faggot is a term of abuse for homosexuals.

    As a result, Mr Brain’s – a producer of culinary products resembling faggots that started life in the Bristol area – has started a campaign to fight against Facebook’s ban, which is duly being reported by the Post.

    In addition, the Post also informed its readers what faggots are. Any similarity between the Post’s article and the introduction to Wikipedia’s faggots article is presumably purely coincidental.

    However, the Post hasn’t finished with faggots yet; it also tells its by now slavering readers how to make faggots. After having stated that faggots are made from pork, the Post drops a real clanger on this report, illustrating it with a photograph of a butcher (so far, so good. Ed.) posing with a joint of beef (D’oh! Ed.), as evidenced by the screenshot below.

    Bristol Post screenshot

  • Bristol Post Balls – the pick of the best

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media

    There are annual events that pepper the year providing easy copy for the media. One of these is Bonfire/Guy Fawkes Night on 5th November.

    As 5th November is less than a week away, most media outlets are publicising local fireworks events. Here’s today’s offering of that ilk from the Bristol Post.

    As usual a screenshot has been taken, just in case authors Rachel Gardner and Alex Cawthron realise they’ve posted a half-finished article. Additional black marks to Rachel and Alex too for a lower case start to the headline.

    screenshot of Bristol Post article
    What’s the best that Bristol has to offer?

  • UK government does something right

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics, Tech

    The UK’s dreadful, destructive coalition government has done something right – for a change.

    As part of the forthcoming Local Audit and Accountability Bill, which will be debated by MPs in the House of Commons on Monday, new rights will be granted to the press and citizens to film and report council meetings, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has announced.

    In 2012 the government changed secondary legislation to open up councils’ executive meetings to the press and public. However, this did not apply to councils’ committee meetings or full council, nor to parish councils. Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, asked councils to open up their committee meetings, but many councils are still not complying. Many councils, particularly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are still keeping democracy behind closed doors. Some councils had even banned local residents from recording, blogging and tweeting at council meetings. Ministers believe these councils are clinging to outdated analogue ideals in a digital age.

    Mr Pickles said: “An independent local press and robust public scrutiny is essential for a healthy local democracy. We have given councils more power, but local people need to be able to hold their councils to account. I want to do more to help the new cadre of hyper-local journalists and bloggers.

    “I asked for councils to open their doors, but some have slammed theirs shut, calling in the police to arrest bloggers and clinging to old-fashioned standing orders.

    “This new right will be the key to helping bloggers and tweeters as well as journalists to unlocking the mysteries of local government and making it more transparent for all. My department is standing up for press freedom.”

    BCC council chamber
    The council chamber in Bristol’s Counts Louse (aka City Hall © G. Ferguson)

    Here in Bristol, the council is well ahead of Mr. Pickles. Meetings have been webcast for years and members of the public and elected councillors freely tweet proceedings from the Counts Louse.

  • Bristol Post Balls – News in Brief

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media

    Most newspapers have brief items of news (posts passim).

    However, they don’t come much briefer than this one.

    As usual a screenshot is provided, just in case someone down the Temple Way Ministry of Truth decides to edit it after this post is published!

    screenshot of empty Bristol Post article

    Within a few hours, the above post attracted the following apposite comment:

    That’s one of the better written stories I’ve seen on this site.

    Quite! 🙂

  • Bristol City Council – the developer’s friend

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    My attention was drawn today to a curious article on the Local Government Association website from Bristol City Council.

    To me it’s reminiscent of a livestock dealer crowing about the fine qualities of the beast he’s trying to sell or perhaps even a prostitute buttering up a prospective client.

    There are some fine examples of jargon too.

    However, this article gives me cause for concern on three counts.

    Firstly, I’m paying the wages of the council’s planning wonks directly through my council tax (and indirectly through your national taxes, a portion of which gets returned to local authorities by way of government grant. Ed.), but it seems like they’re not working for the benefit of the city’s residents, but the planners seem rather concerned with working for the benefit of property developers.

    This leads on to my second concern: those chummy quarterly chats with the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA), a cosy club whose membership is drawn from primarily from local residential and commercial property agents, as well as commercial property lawyers, developers, architects, planners, building and quantity surveyors.

    Finally, there’s the offer to renegotiate Section 106 agreements. These are planning obligations under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (as amended) and are a mechanism which make a development proposal acceptable in planning terms, that would not otherwise be acceptable. They are focused on site specific mitigation of the impact of development. S.106 agreements are often referred to as ‘developer contributions’ along with highway contributions and the Community Infrastructure Levy.

    For a cash-strapped council, I would have thought that its priority should be squeezing as much from developers under S.106 as it can.

    Evidently not.

    The example of Finzels [sic] Reach given in the article is interesting. After being granted planning permission, the developers renegotiated their S.106 obligations and still went into administration last year. Perhaps their scheme was so poorly planned and financed, it should not have been given planning permission in the first place.

    The article – dated 8th October 2013 – is reproduced in full below.

    Bristol City Council: open for business on Section 106 agreements

    Bristol City Council has an ‘open for business’ policy in relation to bringing forward development and investment in the city. Last year the Council received just over 3,000 planning applications, saying ‘yes’ to over 80 per cent of these (89 per cent of major schemes).

    The council meets representatives of the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA) on a quarterly basis in order to discuss live issues, including delivery of development. The West of England Planning Toolkit and the Bristol Planning Protocol were jointly produced with representatives from the development sector.

    Bristol has a good record of housing delivery. Its adopted Core Strategy target is for a minimum of 26,400 dwellings to be delivered between 2006 and 2026, and in the six years since 2006 over 12,700 (approximately 48 per cent) of these dwellings have been constructed. In addition, there are around 7,000 residential units currently with planning consent in the city – a significant proportion of which are yet to be commenced. In order to ensure this much needed development is brought forward, Bristol proactively seeks requests from developers to renegotiate Section 106 agreements on schemes that have become unviable since planning consent was granted. Requests are considered by the planning committee in a process that includes an open book appraisal of viability by the developer.

    Outcome and impact

    This approach is proving successful. Examples include Finzels Reach (a £200 million mixed-use development site in central Bristol), which is a high quality regeneration scheme on a strategically important site.

    Within this context, Bristol negotiated a revised Section 106 package that met some, although not all, of the demands put forward by the developer. The revised position incentivised the developer to deliver the development to their timescale by reducing the Section 106 package by around a third (£4.5 million) if various triggers were reached.

    Contact

    Kate Hartas
    Media and PR officer
    Telephone: 0117 922 2649

    Since I drew attention to the article, I’ve received the tweet shown below from Bristol City Council.

    screenshot of BCC tweet

    On the basis of that tweet, I have a couple of questions for Bristol City Council’s press office.

    1. If Bristol City Council describes a press release bearing this month’s date as ‘ancient’, what counts as modern?

    2. If that press release was released in error as you seem to be implying, is any quality control exercised by your officers before material is released for publication?

    Answers will be accepted in the comments below.

    Update 23/10/13: The following message has been received this morning from Bristol City Council.

    Hi Steve

    I’ve tried to leave a comment on your blog but get a message saying we’re blocked, probably because our work computers are behind a proxy.

    In answer to your questions though, the press release you’re referring to was sent out in Sept 2012, hence our description of it as ‘pretty ancient’. The website it was published on is not in our control but that of the LGA, which recently did technical amendments to the page (not the release) which updated the automatic date shown on their site. After your tweet we drew this to their attention and asked them to remove it as it was old news and could be confusing given the apparent date. The original press release was not an error, it was sent deliberately in Sept 2012. What we can’t control is who posts it where and for how long after.

    I hope this clears it up for you.

    Kind regards
    Tim

    Tim Borrett
    Service Manager, Media
    Bristol City Council

    Thanks Tim. That helps explain the ancient nature of the press release (which you might like to know the LGA’s webmaster still hasn’t taken down. Ed.), but not the matter of why the council’s planning department seems to be working more in the interests of property developers and not for the people of Bristol who pay their wages.

  • Bristol Post Balls – an embarrassing vowel movement in public

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Crosby Stills & NashThere’s hardly a day goes by without the Bristol Post screwing up somewhere.

    Today it features a glowing review of veteran US three part vocal harmony and guitar group Crosby, Stills & Nash.

    However, at one point the language is not so much glowing as glaringly wrong when Mr Harnell trips over a near homophone:

    Despite hoovering up the Gross National Product of Columbia in his darkest days, David Crosby’s voice remains a thing of wonder.

    Columbia? The female personification of the United States of America?

    I think the reviewer had got his vowels muddled and actually meant Colombia, a South American country famous for the supply of a variety of white nasal decongestant allegedly enjoyed at one time by Mr Crosby.

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