After a relatively quiet couple of weeks, over the past couple of days there have been two key announcements relating to the development.
Firstly, the Arborfield Garrison Landowners Consortium, headed up by Crest Nicholson, have announced the three dates for the exhibition of their revised proposals. These are as follows:
- Friday 29 August from 4pm to 9pm at the Finchampstead Baptist Church Centre, Gorse Ride, Finchampstead
- Thursday 4 September from noon to 6pm at the Garrison Community Centre, Sheerlands Road, Arborfield
- Friday 5 September from 4pm to 8pm at the Arborfield Village Hall, Eversley Road, Arborfield
The first of these dates in Finchampstead is at the end of the last full week of the school holidays, whilst the other two dates in Arborfield are after the local schools have gone back. The consortium seems to have now abandoned their previous Arborfield Vision site and are instead setting up a new web site that will carry details of the proposals at www.arborfieldgarrison.co.uk which is due to go live on the day of the first exhibition.
We would urge everybody to try and attend the exhibition, and to ensure you give your feedback to the developers representatives who will be attending.
The other announcement, which came today from Wokingham Borough Council announcing that the potential site for the new school had been identified. To be fair the potential site they have identified is actually the same site that was proposed in some of the earliest layouts for the development, indeed you can go back to this posting from 2010 for an example, and which was actually revealed by the Marino Family Trust on the front cover of their Hogwood Garden Village brochure a few weeks back. The site still has all the same problems it did two years ago, when the previous group of AGLC consultants successfully argued to have it relocated to the edge of the development, the primary reason that it has moved back is that Wokingham Borough are now pushing for the school in 2016 and the site identified on the edge of the development just won’t be available in time.
The fundamental problems with the site remain, the biggest of which being that, as can be seen from the plan in the Marino document it will only be accessible via the new village centre. With the Reading Football Club training ground at Hogwood Park directly behind, and a large area of SANG and the existing industrial estate adjacent, the route for students from Finchampstead will be along the new Nine Mile Ride extension into the village centre. Students from Barkham will again be coming into the development right to the centre to get to the school. It would make significantly more sense from an accessibility point of view to turn the school around and access it from the Park Lane side, but unfortunately whilst Hogwood Park is there and occupied, this isn’t possible.
