Last time we set ourselves a target, we said we would love to reach 5,000 signatures by the weekend. You got there yesterday!
Five thousand people is not a handful of neighbours worried about a view. It is a town saying the same thing at the same time, and it is now the clearest evidence anyone has that the objection to building on Tower Farm and Black Rock is town-wide and serious. Thank you.
Thank you as well to everyone who came and found us at the Eat Portishead festival on Saturday, at the Town Council stand by the Marina. It was good to put faces to the signatures, and to hear how many people already knew about the wood and had been waiting for someone to do something about it.
Where things stand:
Nothing has been decided. That is still the most useful sentence in this campaign.
North Somerset's new Local Plan is the document that decides where houses get built for the next fifteen years. Tower Farm and Black Rock are in the draft. That draft is now being examined by three independent government Inspectors, whose job is to test whether it stands up. Their public hearings run through November and into December this year. They then write a report, which takes months, so none of this will be settled until 2027.
There is also still no planning application for Tower Farm and Black Rock.
A lot of people in Portishead have been told it is a done deal. It isn't. Every time one of you puts that right in a conversation, it does real work — when people think something is already decided, they stop objecting, and that silence gets read as agreement.
What happened with the complaints:
A couple of updates ago we asked you to complain to North Somerset Council about its decision that Tower Farm does not need a full Environmental Impact Assessment, the most thorough environmental survey there is, even though up to 400 homes are proposed beside a nationally protected wood. Many of you did it - thank you.
The Council has promised to reply later this month. We will tell you what it says, whatever it says.
Two things we are asking you to do:
1. Reach the people who will never see this.
Everything you have read about this campaign, you found online: a petition on a website, a Facebook page, a folder of documents. That has worked. It also has a blind spot we cannot fix from a keyboard.
Some of the people who feel most strongly about Weston Big Wood are not on Facebook and do not use the internet. Many of them are older. They have walked in that wood for forty or fifty years, some of them remember the last time its future was fought over, and they often care about this more fiercely than anyone reading this. But every route we have built runs through a screen. So the people who have known this place longest are the easiest ones to leave out, and the least able to do anything on their own once they find out.
They are not a lost cause and they are not a footnote. They are some of the strongest voices we have, and they are being missed because of the way information travels now, not because they have nothing to say.
Fixing that needs people who already know them, which means you. Think who that is on your street: a neighbour, a parent, someone you nod to and have never really talked to. Tell them what is being proposed, because most people still have no idea. Have the conversation properly. Then bring them along to one of these:
📅 Monday 10 August, 12pm to 2pm
📅 Monday 17 August, 12pm to 2pm
Fedden Room, Folk Hall. Please use the side entrance on the right.
Come in, ask anything you like; you will be supported. You do not need Facebook. You do not need the internet. You do not need to know the first thing about planning. Bring someone, or come on your own if you would just like to understand it properly. And if somebody needs a lift, offer them one — that on its own might be the difference.
2. Keep passing the petition on.
The number is what makes people outside Portishead take this seriously, and it is what we will be pointing at in November.
Anyone aged 16 or over can sign. Everyone in a house can sign in their own name, so it is not one signature per household. All you need is an email address. If your partner, your teenagers, your parents or the people either side of you have not signed yet, please ask them.
📄 Read the evidence: Shared folder
👍 Follow us on Facebook
📷 And on Instagram
Five thousand names in just two weeks, most of them signed in under a minute.
The people still missing will take longer than that: a knock on a door, a phone call, a proper conversation with someone who has not heard a word of any of this. Slower work, but it really counts.
Thank you for your support and for getting us this far!
Tom and Susan
Save Weston Big Wood — Portishead residents