Colonel

The totally unsurprising news that Colchester’s old ‘Debenhams building’ is no longer going to be a leisure site including go carts indoor golf etc as developers pulled ‘ for reasons beyond our control’ should be another stark warning to @yourcolchester and local politicians that they need to do a lot more protect the City centre by , for eg , making the car parks free ( for at least some of the time ) and easy to get to rather than closing them , tidying it up so it doesn’t look like temporary pavement surfaces , help sort rates and rents to attract some decent stores , rather than seeming to try to remove any reason for people to get to the City Centre . I expect their reply would be ‘ there’s lots going on to make Colchester even better ‘ . One day , hopefully soon , they’ll realise it needs real serious effort if we are not going to end up with loads of small flats in unsuitable old stores and office buildings in a town centre that no one wants to go to . There’s an old saying ‘ speculate to accumulate’ . I know personally of of two wonderful shops , independently owned , one shut , and the other following shortly , both basically struggled with ‘footfall’ , obviously that’s not all down to CCC , but it seems they don’t help . If we want to keep the few ‘Anchor stores’ we have , we must do more . I expect I’ll be ‘flamed’ for this post by various bodies saying ‘ we are already doing etc etc ‘ , well it’s not enough , or done well enough . I clip below part of an article , I beg you to read , written by a guy called Gabriel Mckeown which he published on Substack , which is spot on , and we need to pay attention if we want Colchester to survive the damage being inflicted from seemingly every side . “A country is more than its economy, its society, culture, and attitudes are its truly defining characteristics, however without a strong financial foundation, these factors become meaningless. We now stand at a crossroads with two choices available to us, either we can accept the previous years of a destructive hollowing out of our nation and move on, or we can continue in ignorance, our economic failures disguised by the promise of future riches just around the corner. I must stress that this is a collective failure stemming from policymakers, business leaders, and unfortunately, a society that won’t acknowledge the severity of its quiet collapse. We have taken solace in the illusion of prosperity, hiding from the near-irreversible damage occurring in plain sight. Our high streets are increasingly dominated by low-value businesses whose sole purpose is to mimic functioning commerce, to create an appearance of commercial activity and mask deeper economic weaknesses. A trip down the high-street feels more like a visit to a poor-performing trade convention, an endless array of soulless corporate entities, interspersed with vacant stalls and marketing detritus. There is something unnerving about a shiny new storefront, equipped with its glossy acrylic sign, Americanised slogan, and blinding LEDs, stuck between five empty shopfronts. This is Potemkin Britain, where the facade of productivity is more important than the reality, where the promise of future gains placates those experiencing the current reality. Our businesses operate in a state of perpetual survival, neither thriving nor dying completely, just existing in a near-lifeless purgatory of economic irrelevance, consuming resources for the sake of it. We have dined out on the achievements of past Britain, and now rely entirely on the promises of future Britain, forgetting that we live in current Britain, a place far less pleasant.” @Colchesterviews @ColCivicSociety @VisitColchester @Essex_CC @ColchMum @ColchesterAmb