Front page. And tonight, nine thousand signatures!
We saw the North Somerset Times this morning, and there we were on the front page. "Save crown jewel woods."
That phrase isn't ours, by the way. It's what the region's own nature recovery strategy calls Weston Big Wood. A crown jewel. The same strategy North Somerset Council helped write, while its draft Local Plan takes the fields on both sides of that wood out of the Green Belt for 500 homes.
The paper went to press saying 8,000 had signed. By this evening it was 9,000.
A word on where the rest of it has got to. On 8th September we spoke at full North Somerset Council on a motion about preparing the district for extreme heat. The motion was carried.
We spoke on it because the two things are the same thing. A mature wood cools the ground around it and holds water in the soil. That is climate adaptation, already built, and nobody has to pay for it. But a wood only does that work if the land around it stays open. Build right up to its edge and you get the drainage, the lighting and the daily footfall that wear an ancient woodland down from the outside in. The Green Belt around Weston Big Wood is the thing that ensures that the wood is able to do its job — and it was put there in 1988 for exactly that reason, with the wood named in the plan.
So it's crazy that a council preparing for extreme heat is also seriously proposing releasing the fields on both sides of an ancient wood for 500 homes. Those two decisions cancel each other out.
You can insulate a home. You cannot plant an ancient woodland.
The motion commits the Cabinet to a review. What we asked the chamber was that Tower Farm and Black Rock be named in that review, with the answer published before the Local Plan hearings start in November.
Meanwhile, the examination timetable has firmed up. The Inspectors' questions are due out around 21st September, and everything anyone wants to put to them has to be in by 27th October. There is no second chance after that.
Which brings us to the number...
The goal is ten thousand signatures before we walk up Downing Street on 14th October. That's a thousand more in four weeks, or about thirty-six a day. You got the last thousand in a fortnight, so we know it's in reach.
If you've been meaning to ask someone and haven't, this is the week. And if you've already asked everyone you know, the paper is on newsstands across North Somerset right now — a lot of people will be reading about this for the first time today.
Last thing. We're still collecting pages for the folder going into Number 10: one side of A4 about what this wood means to you, in your own words. They come to info@swbwportishead.co.uk by 9th October. The handwritten ones are the ones we keep rereading.
Nine thousand of you. Thank you!
Tom and Susan
Save Weston Big Wood, Portishead