In Focus: Life is a rollercoaster
All three of the main East Midlands cities have their ups and downs – such are the vagaries of life and the markets, but one of them seems to have soaring peaks followed by depressing troughs.
Following the economic development and inward investment news around Nottingham can be akin to riding one of those huge rollercoasters only the insane seem to take pleasure out of.
Speedo are building a new research centre on NG2 – hurray!
The City Council is halving the number of Invest in Nottingham staff – boo!
There appears to be genuine enthusiasm for the Invest in Nottingham Club – hurray!
The government has pulled the plug on the £200m PFI scheme to redevelop the Meadows area of the city – boo!
Up and down and up and down it goes.
The government’s decision to put a block on the huge Meadows scheme is, in my view, particularly short-sighted. It takes a leap of faith for any private investor to come along and pump money into a deprived area, but Nottingham City Council had managed to do its groundwork well.
Developer Blueprint is already out of the blocks with its Green Street development, and you can bet there were some glum faces in their offices when the news that the government was pulling out broke earlier this week.
We all know the government has to make cut-backs, but the Meadows scheme seemed to be an almost perfect fit for David Cameron’s so-called ‘Big Society’. Surely it’s time to test whether giving communities something to be proud of will resume in lower crime, more wealth and Cameron’s treasured ethos of a more voluntary attitude.
It seems to me, sometimes, that Nottingham needs to learn from its recent history. Take the Nottingham Contemporary; derided as a waste of time and still not really truly loved by the entire city, it’s been a roaring success, bringing millions of pounds into Nottingham and garnering worldwide praise.
Why did this go ahead and not the Meadows redevelopment? There’s certainly an element of bad timing about it all, but there’ll also be the lingering rumour that the Meadows doesn’t deserve the money. Nothing can be done about it now, of course, but these sorts of chances only come around once a generation, and it’s not just the people who live on the Meadows who will suffer; it’s the whole city.
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