Westwood Cross Thanet Town Centre Consolidation

Putting up the last weeks planning applications on my press release blog I noticed that one of them didn’t have a title, perhaps it’s too big.

Anyway there are pages and pages of this thing, because it’s on the council’s planning website I can’t link to it, but recommend that you have a look at the application.

Please follow these instructions to get there.

1 copy the following planning reference F/TH/11/0200

2 click on the link http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet to get to the council’s planning site

3 paste the planning reference in the application search number box and click on the search button

The council’s planning site is a very cantankerous bit if IT, documents often open reluctantly in difficult file formats only to have been scanned so badly as to be illegible. There are no linier scales on the plans most of which are scanned scale drawings, this means that you can’t actually tell how big anything is by looking at the drawing.    

I suppose that some of the councillors see my concerns about the way the council manages its internet presence as some sort of mischievous attack on them. I had a fairly long discussion with Simon Moores about the council’s failure to promote the opening of The Turner Contemporary, on the councils homepage, last week, see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/03/wedding-bells.html

I think, although it is difficult to say, that Simon is saying, that this wasn’t some sort of dreadful error, or even an April fools joke, but something the council achieved deliberately. 

Well now we have plans for this huge development without even a title, so that it looks less significant than an application for a garden shed, this does the beg the question, was this also done deliberately?


This all leaves me with the problem, do I take the planning files for this huge project and convert them into ordinary web pages that can be viewed on any computer, found by the search engines and linked to in the normal way, or do I just leave the whole mess for the council and local people to try and get on with as best they can?