The unrelenting march of developers now includes Surrey County Council.
The education authority is eager to provide new school places for the influx of children expected following the creation of Cranleigh New Town. So, now it intends to add its own development of 98 houses in the heart of the once rural village!
In the race to provide another 11,000 school places for existing, and an influx of new pupils, it intends to demolish the Church of England Middle School and the nearby Cranleigh Infant Schools to make way for even more houses, and trouser some money. And all it, needs is to – CONSULT ‘Your Waverley.” No doubt the Surrey County Council highways department won’t have any objection to development – unless of course, it sans to break the habit of a life-time and object on safety grounds!
So here you have it – slap bang behind those multi-million pounds homes on Cranleigh’s once prestigious Maple-lined common goes a new/infants/nursery school – complete with sports pitches and playgrounds adjacent to Glebelands Comprensive School in the middle of a highly populated residential area!
The Cranleigh Civic Society, which the locals back, and nobody at ‘YW’ listens to, is predicting traffic chaos – along with everyone else living on Cranleigh’s Glebe Estate, and in the nearby vicinity, where house prices are already dropping!
Homeowners in nearby Victoria Road, St Nicholas Avenue, The Common and Ewhurst Roads say their homes will be unsaleable as thousands of coaches and cars will converge on one small highly populated area of Cranleigh accessing the High Street, as thousands of children are unload. They predict chaos and…
- Five schools: – Infants, two nurseries, a Speech language and Communication Needs (SLCN) Centre, a secondary School , and a Roman catholic school, all within less than one-quarter of a mile of one another!
- 98 new homes on the former middle school site backing onto Cranleigh Post Office
- New homes on the Cranleigh Infant School site accessing to be accessed off Dewlands Lane- a one way road used by Cranleigh’s Emergency Fire and Rescue and First Response Ambulance Service, and the main access to – Cranleigh Cemetery!
- New schools in Parsonage Road will have no extra parking or a drop-off area for parents, only for staff!
- A new all-weather youth pitch U11/12 which will fit in nicely with ‘Your Waverley’s cunning plan to move onto the Snoxhall Fields behind the Hitherwood Estate – and build a new Recreation Centre.
- Whoops! and start developing there no doubt!!
So while the recently dumped former Surrey County councillor Alan Young trumpets his last success of obtaining funding for the new schools in his very own publicity machine – the Surrey Advertiser… and again, for a new bridge! He can now safely leave Cranleigh’s future in the safe hands of his successor Andrew Povey. He can pick up all the pieces for the Eastern village now dubbed by Waverley councillors as… ‘poor old Cranleigh’ soon to become ‘ Chaotic unsafe Cranleigh!
Is it any wonder the Cranleigh Civic Society has Called a Public Meeting on Thursday 25th May at 7 p.m.
If you care about your village as much as it does – be there?