Newcastle Emlyn and Adpar / Castell Newydd Emlyn ac Adpar

“Supermarket Saga Tours” by our on the spot reporter

The Great Day of the Planning Committee meeting in Carmarthen was a bit like one of those historical re-enactments, this time featuring the Grand Old Duke of York. Troops from the opposing sides duly tramped up Castle Hill to the County Hall, and then tramped back down again.

The Cawdor and Lidl applications came up much earlier in the proceedings than expected, possibly because the chairman decided that he wanted to clear the building of the assembled Newcastle Emlyn peasantry as quickly as possible.

At any event, a vote was taken to send the Planning Committee on a day out to Newcastle Emlyn to inspect the Cawdor and Lidl sites. This meant that all discussion was curtailed, and it is unlikely that the meeting will reconvene much before the end of September.

Eifion Bowen, the Head of Planning, noted that opposition to the Cawdor plan was very strong from the public, but he asked members of the Planning Committee to put aside letters they had received from local people, presumably so that the issue can be decided on the merits of the truly bizarre planning report.

Before the meeting passers-by would have noticed a bit of a media scrum going on outside County Hall. The BBC was there, as was the Carmarthen Journal. S4C turned up too late. Interviews were recorded, as usual with 99.9% of the material ending up on the cutting floor.

Afterwards a fairly surreal debate took place on Radio Cymru, with Kevin Davies sounding generally pretty grumpy and fed-up, and the lovely Audrey Baker of Ededa J modelling a little number inherited from Mother Theresa as she movingly described the plight of families with children who were denied the right to shop till they drop in a neighbourhood Tesco store.

Back outside County Hall, Haydn Jones again gave a masterful performance as he waxed lyrical about the beauty and charms of the town – “a town of character” – before adding that progress was sometimes essential. What does it all mean? Why is that man not Prime Minister?

Meanwhile more and more people are scratching their heads as they struggle to make sense of the Planning Report, which now contains an addendum produced by Savills which helpfully tells confused readers that what they have just read is pure nonsense. And they may be right.

For example, the report is based on a study which reckons that £6.4 million currently allegedly spent by people from Newcastle Emlyn at Tesco in Carmarthen will come back to the town. So that means that nobody from Newcastle Emlyn will ever go shopping in Carmarthen again.

For us blokes who have wheeled a trolley round the Tesco superstore as the missus chucks in the goodies, that would be very good news, but something tells me it is too good to be true.

The report also tells us that CK’s and Somerfield would lose half their business to a new supermarket. Not such great news for anyone who works there, perhaps, or indeed for anyone who works in any of the other shops in town facing Armageddon.

Unfortunately we can expect this story to run and run, but let’s all hope that Mr Davies doesn’t get a supermarket for Christmas.

For anyone wishing to come to the next Council meeting, pitchforks and torches will be provided.

Dai Aria

Carmarthenshire’s Planning Department today published its reports on the Cawdor and Lidl (Castle Motors) planning applications and has recommended refusal for both when they go before the Planning Committee on Thursday, 10 September.

However it is unlikely that this is the last we have heard of the Cawdor plan.

Read comments from Action Group

Carmarthenshire County Council has announced that its Planning Committee will meet on 10 September to consider both the Cawdor and Lidl supermarket applications. The meeting will start at 10 am in Council Chambers.

The planning report prepared by the Council’s Planning Department will be published on the evening of 4 September. This report will make a recommendation as to whether the councillors should accept or reject the proposals.

It is expected that at least one councillor will request a site visit. If this happens, the meeting will be adjourned, and the Planning Committee will travel to Newcastle Emlyn at some point a few days later before returning to make a decision on the applications, probably some time around 17 September.

Members of the public are able to watch proceedings. Under Council rules, two objectors will be allowed to speak to the Committee for a maximum of 5 minutes each.

A new A-Z of objections to the Cawdor supermarket proposal can be viewed and downloaded here

This and previous supermarket news can be viewed here

by Dai Dom Da.

Older readers may remember an ITV series from the 1980’s called Brass, a couple of editions of which were recently repeated. Brass was set in a town in the North of England sometime before World War One. A mill owner called Mr Hardcastle had climbed his way up the greasy pole and come to dominate the life of the town. His workers lived in fear and admiration of him. “Mr Hardcastle is a man of genius”, said one. “During the last great slump, he put all the rents up to show how confident he was that there would be an economic recovery. What foresight!” Mr Hardcastle’s generosity to his townspeople knew no bounds. Another family had fallen ill with TB and could no longer pay the rent, so Mr Hardcastle had their roof taken off at his own expense to ensure that they got plenty of fresh air, and the whole family was very grateful until they died, shortly afterwards.

Thank goodness the pillars of our community these days set a similar example of the entrepreneurship and forward thinking we can all admire. Indeed, our own town council is a beacon in this respect, with one councillor even sending his wife out to clean the public toilets for a trifling token payment of £700 per month. What public spirit, and therefore how sad that some people in the town have seen fit to criticise this piece of public service and suggest that the contract for the cleaning should have gone to tender. Such is the ungratefulness and impudence of some of the people of this town, with some even daring to suggest that the toilets have not been properly cleaned. Thank goodness a council inspection showed this to be complete nonsense.

Newcastle Emlyn is fortunate to have as its leading light Mr Kevin Cawdor who wishes to drag us out of the dark ages of pokey little shops and small businesses and provide the town with a huge and shiny new supermarket. No longer will we have to trail around the High Street buying a few chops here, a loaf there, some fruit and veg from the market or a light bulb somewhere else. At last, everything will be conveniently located in one place.

We only hope that when the new store is up and running and the old-fashioned shops have shut up for the last time, that Kevin will snap up the derelict properties and bulldoze the lot. Then at last we will have enough car parking.

The Carmarthen Journal recently gave Kevin most of its front page to tell the world how much he cares for the town, and it was only to be regretted that the rabble which opposes the plan managed to get a few column inches on page 29 of that edition of the paper. They recently delivered a huge package of letters objecting to the supermarket to the Council, bringing the total number of objections up to around 500, although Kevin believes that many of these were signed by schoolchildren, or possibly stupid adults who should be sent back to school.

Kevin subsequently gave up some of his precious time to go on radio to say he could not understand what all the fuss was about, and he rightly contrasted his own plans with the disgraceful attempt by Lidl to build a discount store opposite CK’s, a proposal which has attracted a staggering 3 objections.

Fortunately, the Carmarthen Planning Department is doing all it can to show the residents the error of their ways. Kevin pointed out on the radio that there was nothing to stop Lidl from opening a store on the Castle Motors site and then selling it off to Tesco. Of course if this happened, we would have one of the smallest Tescos in the country with a tiny car park with no room for expansion, but you can never be too careful, and the County Council appears to agree that this possibility poses a serious threat to the magnificent Cawdor project and is therefore raising new objections after its attempts to stop the development on the grounds of road safety.

In a further demonstration of his generosity, Kevin went on to offer to negotiate with concerned traders to agree covenants to stop the supermarket from selling certain types of goods, such as chest freezers or particle accelerators. No doubt he will ensure that they have to pay handsomely to have such covenants, and it will be very amusing to see them try to take any major supermarket chain to court which breaches a covenant. Amusing, and speaking as a lawyer, very lucrative.

A new traffic survey was recently carried out at council taxpayers’ expense. We fervently hope that it will show that the Cawdor supermarket will not pose a risk to road safety or cause more congestion, as the original survey did. Let us hope that the Council rejects impudent demands from townspeople for the new report to be made public. This is surely unnecessary.

There is no doubt, as Kevin himself has made clear, that his heart is with the town, and to show us this, he has just announced that he will be closing our last petrol station at the end of this month. We all know about global warming, and so we can be truly grateful that he is abandoning his softly softly approach to reducing oil demand by charging more than any other petrol station in a 10-mile radius and finally driving home a new and uncompromising message that we have to stop driving around to save the planet. With any luck, the new supermarket will open soon so that all those little trips to Cardigan and Carmarthen will be a thing of the past.

This does not mean, of course, that we should stop buying Vauxhall cars from Kevin. There may no longer be any petrol to put in them, but we can be sure that he is selling us a long-term investment.

The Cawdor application forecasts that the new store will achieve a turnover of around £12 million per year. These figures were taken from the Council’s own planning estimates. Unfortunately, a revised report commissioned by Lidl from the same company which drew up the Council’s own estimates shows that some mistake must have been made in the original count, and that the total now available for the new supermarket is only about £5 million. Happily, however, the Council has wisely opted to refuse to make the new report public, and we hope that the shortfall in the new supermarket’s revenue will quickly be made up from the money currently spent in all those out-dated and cramped little shops in the main street.

The Council has said it will not hear the Cawdor application until September at the earliest, but we can be confident that this will not drag on for too much longer, as Kevin’s decision to close his filling station shows he must, like Mr Hardcastle, be confident that good news is coming his way very soon.

…and has a visit from the Children’s Commission for Wales

True to its promise to keep adding to its new playground, Newcastle Emlyn’s King George V Playing Field Association committee has successfully secured a further £4,000 in grant aid, which has been earmarked specifically for a new piece of equipment for older children. The CAVS grant will be spent on a Sky Surfer (pictured) – a surfing system for older kids, designed to improve fitness as well as being great fun.

The latest move comes as part of the latest plans for the playground, to provide equipment for a wide range of ages and interests.

In keeping with this plan, the playground committee yesterday welcomed the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Keith Towler to the site, at the invitation of Cllr Fiona White, who helped secure the latest round of funding. Unable to attend the official opening of the new playground in May this year, Mr Towler kept his promise to visit and see the great work that has been achieved over the last year.

Mr Towler is a very influential figure in promoting children’s interests across Wales, and used the visit to gather feedback from children and teens in the playground about the facilities that are lacking in the town. He took particular interest in the lack of teen facilities, such as a youth club, and went away with a series of notes on the subject.

“It is fantastic to know that we have a voice for the teenagers of the town,” enthused Patricia Murphy, who has long championed the cause of this age group in Newcastle Emlyn. “If we could provide a new youth club for them, this would go a long way in giving them somewhere to go and something to do.”

Plans were mooted for a public meeting to be held in September, aimed specifically at the teen age group. “Mr Towler thought this was an excellent idea, and said he would be delighted to come back and hear what young people want and need in this area,” said Sue Tabbitt, another active member of the King George V Playing Field Association, who proposed the forum.

In the meantime, the existing ‘Bird’s Nest’ swing has been taken down temporarily, while the frame is re-secured. Age-related signage will be installed shortly, encouraging ‘reasonable use’ of all equipment.

The King George V Playing Fields Association committee can be contacted at: email kgv.playingfield@btinternet.com tel: 0560 249 5881.

Julie Gerrity and Gill Davies representing the recently formed Newcastle Emlyn Action Group today delivered 425 letters and a petition with 724 signatures to the Carmarthenshire Planning Department as a part of a battle to halt plans to build a supermarket on the Cawdor Cars site in the middle of the historic market town.

The letters and the petition were all signed by local residents and visitors to the town, which has a population of just over 900.

Gill Davies, who manages Ruby’s shoe shop in the town said,

“The response from the public to the Action Group’s campaign has been fantastic for such a small community. The number of local people who have taken time to write to the Planning Department shows how strong local opposition is to this plan, which would so drastically change the character of Newcastle Emlyn and have such a devastating effect on jobs and the wonderful range of independent shops we have.”

Julie Gerrity, who runs the town’s popular Spar shop said,

“Newcastle Emlyn is a traditional Welsh market town and is now sadly one of only a small number of towns left in Wales with a full range of traditional butchers, bakers, grocers and other food shops, as well as exciting specialist shops selling everything from local cheeses, bread and cakes to flowers, pottery and electrical goods. You can buy pretty much everything you need here, which is good for the environment and the local economy generally.”

The controversial plan for a new supermarket is not expected to come before the Council’s Planning Committee until August at the earliest. The supermarket itself would be almost three times the size of the existing CK’s supermarket, dwarfing all other retail businesses in the area.

Dr Tim Swann, a retired engineer who lives in the area said,

“Newcastle Emlyn already struggles to cope with all the traffic trying to squeeze through its narrow streets, and yet incredibly the early signs are that the Council’s Highways Department does not believe that the huge increase in cars and large delivery lorries will pose a threat to road safety or disrupt the flow of traffic. We have discovered that the Council carried out its survey of road use in early January during the ‘Big Freeze’ during which one pedestrian was tragically killed when she slipped and fell under a lorry. Not surprisingly, there were not many cars on the road.”

The Action Group believes that the supermarket plan would also be very damaging to the environment, with increased air pollution, more noise and lights round the clock, seven days a week. It also says that any new jobs created by the supermarket would be more than offset by the loss of jobs and businesses in the town’s busy main street.

The Action Group’s views are supported by the recently re-formed Newcastle Emlyn Chamber of Trade, local County Councillor John Crossley, the local Assembly Member Rhodri Glyn Thomas and MP Adam Price.

A new Newcastle Emlyn discussion group and live chat has been launched entitled “This IS Emlyn”. Current topics include General, Sport, Reviews, Gossip and Scandal. Visitors can also engage in live chat with other users.

The site is located at http://emlyn.freehostia.com

Note: Newcastle-Emlyn.com is not responsible for the above site and cannot guarantee its suitability for any age group. See our link disclaimer under Terms and Conditions.

New discussion forum and chatroom

The “Action Group against New Supermarket in Newcastle Emlyn” were out in force last Friday (12th June) in town with stalls and banners and even a town crier, putting their case to the public.

They gathered hundreds of signatures against the proposed supermarket development and said that 80 per cent of the people they spoke to were against the building of the supermarket.

Several shops including Fleur de Paris, Little Bite. Little Gems, Fedwen Bakers, Renaissance, The Makers Mark and Ty Croeso Deli closed at 11am, their owners joining the street campaigning.

Chair of the action group, Tim Swann said:

“The great news is that the large majority of the people on the street were solidly against another supermarket. And all seemed very up to speed on the reasons”.

Could the mystery supermarket company be Sainsbury’s?

On Saturday, 4th July 2009 Newcastle Emlyn and its Castle are once again the centre of a remarkable free entry festival of battles, processions, feasts, music, a fayre, stories and dragons. The story of the death of the old dragon and the birth of the new dragon is retold as Owain Glyndwr, Merlin, the Dragon Charmers, Tiamat, the Dragon Queen and others relive the stories and prophecies, then move the story on.

This festival, labelled the first of its kind in west Wales by the Heritage Lottery Fund, who supported the first event, promises to be ‘a thrilling day out, full of exciting and magical entertainment with links to our historical past and an insight into our folklore,’ Councillor Haydon Jones affirms.

The baby dragon, which has been travelling Europe recently, will re-enact its birth and then later in the day be named. There is also the invitation to suggest a name for baby dragon in a special book.

To celebrate this day a new song is being looked for; a song about the baby dragon, other Welsh dragons or the Dragon as the Spirit of the Welsh people. Anyone wishing to offer a song, in Welsh or English, to be performed on the day should contact Marc Gordon on 07766 370561. The song judged to be the best on the day will be awarded a recording session at the Red Kite Studios.

There will also be plenty of opportunities to join in with lots of activities such as making costumes, puppets, dragon’s wings and eggs with Trysordy Scrap Store, then taking part in the procession of dragons through the town at 3pm . You can have a go at archery in the encampment of Cwm Rhefeloidd and then watch these gallant men and Owain Glyndwr go into battle. The birds of Pant Glas will be flying, Big Small Events and Teatro do Elefante from Portugal will be fire juggling, providing theatre, and strolling minstrels will be performing around the medieval fayre.

A very modern addition will be the chance for visitors to broadcast live to the Heart of The Dragon Website. www.heartofthedragonwales.org

Also ongoing during the day will be the Attic Theatre and Hanes Emlyn’s exhibition as well as impromptu performances around town. Plus the chance to win an amazing Dragon Crystal donated by Rainbow Crystals.

In the evening Owain, with Merlin, returns on horseback through town to the castle to reclaim his flag and meet his bride. There is to be a wedding feast, the marriage itself, the performance of the winning song, dancing, music and dancing, fire juggling, story telling and the fire sculpture.

Interested in being involved contact:

Pamela on 01559 371427
or
Annette on 01559 370969

Contacts:

Pamela Gaunt / Artistic Director
01559 370969
pamelagaunt@aol.com

Marc Gordon / Music & Song Competition Organiser
07766 370969 /01239 710700
marcgordon@btinternet.com

Annette Ecuyere Lee / Festival Organiser
01559 370969
ecuyere@btinternet.com

From: Pamela Gaunt Artistic Director Heart of the Dragon.

Heart of the Dragon has received a grant of £4,895 to work with local community groups to become part of the next Heart of the Dragon Festival planned for July 4th 2009.

Click for larger image

The success of the first festival in 2007 left many people asking ”when is it happening again?”…so the grant gives the opportunity of schools, youth clubs, drama groups, to work with professional storytellers, musicians, puppet and mask makers to take central roles in the re-enactment of the towns local legend of the Last Dragon.

Lady Mayoress Maureen Webley, says:

“I am delighted that the Dragon Festival Committee have been successful in obtaining Awards for All funding, as a great boost towards the preparations for the 2nd Dragon Festival in Newcastle Emlyn, which hopefully will be as successful if not more so than the first. The interest being shown by a number of international groups is very exciting and the town looks forward to seeing their involvement in the Festival”

The festival will be held around the grounds of Emlyns castle and river, where there will be historic battle re-enactments, medieval fayre, birds of prey show, a dragon procession,the now famous arrival of the coracle bearing the dragon egg (which appeared in the town in 2006) a second chance to see the hatching of the First Baby Dragon of Wales, and a fulfillment of Merlins prophecy with Owain Glandwr returning to reclaim his Dragon Queen! See www.heartofthedragonwales.org.uk

To book a visiting artist to work with your group please contact pamelagaunt@aol.com 01559 371427. Or for an inspiration pack with a storytelling and music CD and a thirty minute DVD contact Debbie at thehowlettclan@homecall.co.uk 01559 370842

For further information on Awards for All or to obtain an application pack please call 01686 611 740 or website www.awardsforall.org.uk