Your guide for your
Didcot, Wallingford & Thame Thursday, March 15 - Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Calls for better healthcare provision
GROUP
Weekly leisure guide for in and around Oxford
Out& About
around Oxfordsh
ire
Sharing the passion of Mi Flamenco
Ester Tal brings her dance spec tacu lar to Oxfordshire
Whole Lott of grea lined up for Corn t acts bury
oxfordshireguardian.co.uk
Preserving Henry VIII’s cannonballs
Page 5
leisure time in &
Free
Win! Golf for 5
and pizzas at Gravitee
Pages 12&13
Page 18
Plans for 15,000-population new settlement pushed back PUBLIC consultations into the development of an entirely new town with a population of 15,000 in South Oxfordshire have been pushed back. Leaflets were erroneously delivered to some residents last week inviting views on plans to deliver the 6,500 home development outside of the green belt. A month-long public consultation period was due to begin on Monday. The three public exhibitions planned over the next few weeks have all now been cancelled and details taken down from the Harrington website. The leaflets were recalled soon after they were posted, to allow the developers more time before the consultation launch. The leaflet outlined proposals for the ambitious Harrington New Settlement, near Junction 7 of the M40, between Tetsworth, Milton Common and Great Haseley. Developers want to transform the fields there into 6,500 homes, bringing a population of around 15,000 people. Schools, health and wellbeing facilities, shops, restaurants and cafes would all be built on the site. Harrington is proposed by a partnership between Bellway Homes and Oxfordshire-based Pye Homes. A spokesperson for the Harrington New Settlement development team said: “Last week, due to a set of
unforeseen circumstances, we decided to postpone the public consultation on our proposals for Harrington. “Unfortunately, since this time, Royal Mail has been unable to recall all of the leaflets, a handful have been delivered to residents across south Oxfordshire.” In December, the partners launched a ‘vision document’ based on “three powerful drivers”: the Oxford to Cambridge Knowledge Arc, the protection of Oxfordshire’s natural and built heritage, and a model for a compact, enterprising, self-sufficient new settlement. Charlotte Woods, of the Harrington New Settlement development team, said: “South Oxfordshire has an identified need for thousands of new homes, but the allocations in the Local Plan as they stand steer development on marginally viable, highly-constrained sites in the green belt. The proposed sites are not prepared for the way residents will live and work in 2035.” Many comments on South Oxfordshire District Council’s Local Plan were in favour of the development at Harrington including that it would be well planned and it could remove the threat to the SODC green belt. A spokesperson for SODC said: “The Harrington site does not feature as part of our current forthcoming Local Plan, as more suitable sites have been identified, however developers are free to put forward proposals.”
Jeremy Irons with Gloria Wright from Sinodun Players
Picture: Graham Diacon
By Owen Hughes
Encore performance... 46 years later STAGE and screen star Jeremy Irons returned to the theatre in which he acted in 1972 to help with its fundraising. The actor trod the boards at Wallingford’s Corn Exchange on Monday to help raise cash for equipment to bring the theatre
and cinema up to date. After reading two extracts from T S Eliot’s Practical Cats he was quizzed by the Sinodun Players’ chairman Gloria Wright before answering questions from the audience. Mr Irons, who lives in Watlington,
said he was happy to be there to help keep the theatre going because “it makes Wallingford and our surrounding villages a much richer place to live”. He added: “It is very nostalgic to be back there – same marks on the carpet and so on.”
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