The Friday Five 08.07.22
1. MULTIPLE PLACEMAKING POSITIONS, BLACKPOOL COUNCIL
Location: Blackpool, Lancashire
The job: “Blackpool has a £1 billion+ Growth and Prosperity programme, including a £300 million world class leisure development at Blackpool Central; the £250m Talbot Gateway scheme, the town’s modern civic centre and commercial hub; a 144 hectare Enterprise Zone to deliver 5,000 new jobs; £40.5m of Town Deal funding; and a £28m conference and exhibition centre project and being at the heart of the government’s levelling up agenda.
“To meet the demands of this expanding programme of work, Blackpool Council’s Growing Places Team is looking to recruit additional professional and technical staff, who have enthusiasm and motivation to drive forward the changes in the built environment across our town. We currently have five vacancies available:
• Project manager
• Project manager (housing and regeneration)
• Assistant project manager
• Asset manager
• Senior planner (development management).
“Come and join us at the heart of the most ambitious and exciting regeneration programme in the UK.”
Fun fact: Blackpool’s most notable landmark – its 158-metre-high seafront tower – was modelled on the Eiffel Tower and opened in 1894. At the time it was the tallest man-made structure in the British Empire.
The ‘Tower’ actually refers to an entire entertainment complex, which consists of the tower itself and a three-storey red-brick complex containing the Tower Circus, the Tower Ballroom, and roof gardens. The whole was given a grade I listing in 1973.
It has had, as you might imagine, quite a colourful history. Among other things: it was used as a radar station in the Second World War; its ballroom hosted the BBC series Come Dancing for years; its circus has run more or less continuously since 1894 and the circus ring can be lowered into a 190,000-litre pool of water, which allows for “grand finales with dancing fountains”; until 1973, it had a menagerie that at various times contained lions, tigers and polar bears; and 10,000 light bulbs are used to illuminate the Tower at night.
It takes seven years to paint the Tower structure and the workers who maintain the structure are known as ‘stick men’.
2. HEAD OF DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL
Location: Portsmouth, Hampshire
The job: “With a little over 207,000 residents and 7,000 businesses throughout this city, this unitary authority’s main goal is to ensure the best care and development of all those within the city.
“As head of development management, you would be responsible for managing the following functions within the planning and economic growth service:
• Development management
• Planning enforcement
• Contaminated land
• Section 106 contributions and community infrastructure levy
“You will deliver an efficient and effective customer focussed development management service to deliver sustainable development and growth within Portsmouth.
“You will also contribute to the sustainable development and long-term economic prosperity of Portsmouth and the wider area.”
Fun fact: The Portsmouth Sinfonia was an orchestra founded by art students in 1970 that was open to absolutely anyone, regardless of whether they had musical training or not. It became a home for people who wanted to play instruments but never had, or who played instruments and wanted to try something else.
The Sinfonia started as a prankish piece of performance art but became more serious as a musical project over time. During the 1970s it gave many concerts featuring well-known works and recorded albums and a film soundtrack. At one point the great Brian Eno was a member, as a clarinettist (an instrument he hadn’t played before) and he produced the orchestra’s first two albums.
The Sinfonia became incredibly popular, mainly because its members weren’t very good. It even had a hit single in 1981, a medley of classics set to a disco beat called Classical Muddly.
Among the founding members of the orchestra – and its guiding light – was a teacher from Portsmouth School of Art, Gavin Bryars. Bryars was a professional musician, a double bassist who worked in jazz, free improvisation, avant-garde and experimental music. He liked the idea of experimenting with music rather than forming a traditional orchestra and so, instead of picking competent musicians, encouraged anyone to join the Sinfonia, regardless of their talent, ability or experience. They were all required to try their best, however – the idea wasn’t to be deliberately bad.
Among other prestigious locations the Sinfonia played were the Royal Festival Hall’s Purcell Room and the Royal Albert Hall. Over time, however, the musicians became quite proficient at their instruments, which undermined the whole ethos of the Sinfonia, and it stopped performing (although never officially disbanded).
3. SENIOR PLANNING OFFICERS, WILTSHIRE COUNCIL
Location: Chippenham and Trowbridge, Wiltshire
The job: “Wiltshire is a busy planning team, responsible for determining between 6,000-8,000 planning applications each year. Our challenges are wide ranging and as a result there will be plenty of opportunity to develop your experience and skills in a team busy balancing significant development pressure in a constrained area which includes green belt, AONB, vast numbers of listed buildings and conservation areas and other sensitive environments.
“As a senior planning officer, you will be a key member of the planning team leading on key development projects. You will manage your own caseload of planning applications, pre-application enquiries, planning appeals and other related activities. These will often be the more complex proposals and you will work alongside fellow professionals including both internal and external stakeholders. The council seeks the best possible design outcomes for all projects and you will be expected to have an understanding of urban design principles and experience of their implementation.”
Fun fact: In 2009, Trowbridge became the first UK town to be twinned with an Arab Muslim town, Oujda in Morocco. The links between the two places go back to at least the 1960s, when many Moroccan families emigrated to Trowbridge, where they found work at two of the town’s biggest employers, Bowyers (producer of sausages and pork pies) and the bed manufacturer Airsprung.
Trowbridge is now considered to have the second-largest Moroccan population in the UK, outside London, with around 80 families in the town and more living in surrounding villages.
The official twinning was originally proposed by Trowbridge’s Moroccan Community Association in 2005 and finalised in 2009. A delegation from Oudja visited Trowbridge to mark the occasion, prompting The Independent newspaper to interview Trowbridge’s Moroccan partnership steering group chair, who apparently said: "I think they liked it... We took them to Longleat House and the Safari Park, where we showed them the African lions, which they enjoyed. One of the delegates was an architect and he was very fond of our old, well-kept buildings."
4. PLANNING OFFICER, WOKING BOROUGH COUNCIL
Location: Woking, Surrey
The job: “The council’s forward-thinking attitude and pioneering approach to building sustainable communities makes work in development management both exciting and challenging. Significant growth is planned with an emphasis on town centre regeneration to complement recently delivered improvements. By contrast, 60 per cent of the borough is designated as green belt and forms the backdrop to a number of villages which retain much of their original character.
“Reporting to the deputy development manager, the postholder will be responsible for processing a range of planning applications and appeals, providing planning advice to the general public, developers and applicants and dealing with general planning enquiries.”
Fun fact: Dame Ethel Smyth, composer and suffragette, lived in Woking. Like many women in a discipline that was considered to be a male pursuit, she was patronised, overlooked and not taken seriously, even though her songs (Hymn of the Women being sung in the image), works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas are of a very high standard. Indeed, her opera The Wreckers was considered by at least one critic to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten" and was performed at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 2022.
Ethel was actually born in Sidcup, Kent, in 1858, the youngest of eight children. She formed an early love for, and considerable talent for, music and battled her father to be allowed to study composition properly. While at the Leipzig Conservatory, she met the likes of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky; back in England she formed a firm friendship with the composer Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame).
In 1920 she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, which campaigned (sometimes violently) for women to be given the vote. She even served time in prison for her part in an attack on the home of the colonial secretary (different times, eh?).
There is much else to mention about her remarkable life, not least her numerous affairs (mostly with women), her love of golf and her role as inspiration for popular characters created by the novelist E F Benson. Smyth lived a long and productive life, dying in Woking in 1944, aged 86.
5. PLANNING POLICY DATA AND SPATIAL TECHNICIAN, BABERGH AND MID SUFFOLK DISTRICT COUNCILS
Location: Ipswich
The job: “Would you like the opportunity to work with data and mapping to help shape the future of Babergh and Mid Suffolk Districts?
“The strategic planning team are responsible for developing the councils’ local development plan policies and monitoring their implementation together with supporting neighbourhood planning groups develop their neighbourhood development plans.
“We are looking for a proactive and well organised team player to be able to expertly lead and manage data entry, understanding the data in order to be able to retrieve, manipulate and report on findings to support the councils’ joint local plan, associated evidence documents and annual monitoring.
“The data held will also be presented in innovative ways to a variety of audiences, and high-quality GIS mapping skills will be required.
“Information including new development build progress, local plan settlement boundaries and site boundaries for proposed land-use allocations will need to be kept up to date, as well as, maintaining constraint layers, and policies maps showing visually how the policies will be implemented.”
Fun fact: The Suffolk town of Hadleigh, within the Babergh district, is noted for its pargeting.
Its what?
Its pargeting – the decorative plasterwork that adorns many of the town’s historic buildings. Intended initially to waterproof buildings, pargeting became an art form in its own right that is prominent in the East of England. Here, many older buildings have astonishingly elaborate medallions and scrollwork, which might even include birds and foliage, lending a distinctive and almost playful air to buildings that would otherwise be fairly plain.
Hadleigh itself has an impressive number of well-preserved historic buildings – in fact, the small town has 246 listed buildings. Four are grade I, 27 are grade II*, and many have the elaborate pargeting that is characteristic of the area.
Photo credits | iStock; Furtseff, Shutterstock; iStock; Everett Collection, Shutterstock; iStock
