In the firmness of our resistance to change something far uglier, harsh and black hearted can happen to our mental state. We glower and groan, allow our inner grump, our inner gammon, to despair and declaim at the state of the world. As though it is the world that is resisting change, not us. Most of the time the world just presents us with a change that perhaps we do not approve of, that we profess to dislike on high principle, and hence create a burgeoning self-righteousness to prevent that change happening at all. Change becomes the enemy that must be defeated at all costs.
You might be forgiven for thinking that currently this is the predominant operational mode of the whole of Sheringham & District. Because there is some contentiousness about one particular change that has divided the town, and divided my own feelings, and its all been over a small shabby bus shelter.
When I first started coming to North Norfolk, I'd travel up by train and change onto the coast bus to go on to Wells Next The Sea. The bus shelter in Sheringham is a small flat concrete roofed piece of street furniture, with brick walls and curved bows. Its a small bus shelter, executed in a standard bit of Post War modernism, which unfortunately has never been much valued or treated as such. Its just grown grubbier, less well cared for. Whilst over the years, one rather naff mural of a train painted on its internal walls, has been painted over, and then replaced with another rather naff painted mural of a train. That's how things are sometimes in Sheringham, they get stuck on repeat. It has this red plastic ledge seating you are supposed to merely pertly park your bottom on, which after five minutes becomes excruciatingly painful. So as a bus shelter its all a bit scuzzy, grubby, often overcrowded, and actually not a nice place to hang around waiting for a bus in. You would have thought then that if this was so intrinsically unloveable, that people might appreciate it being replaced. But say not so.
The land the bus shelter is on belongs largely to the North Norfolk Railway. Though I guess North Norfolk Council must have some statutory interest in it, as they co-created with NNR the design to redevelop the area. Its part of an area of public garden between the Railway and the car park. And this too has not particularly been well cared for, plants became overgrown, its lawns are dry and patchy, seats were old and in some parts broken, And for some reason in the last decade NNR put up an ugly lumpen wooden trellis made from thick railway like sleepers all around it, that made it resemble a World War One trench defence. It gradually has become a bit of an aesthetic eyesore to first set your eyes on as you arrive on the Norwich train.
The council proposed a new layout, to create a local Travel Hub, reconfiguring and replacing seating,and the bus shelter. It also very clearly showed the present bus shelter as being demolished. This plan was put up for public consultation. The plans were given full front pages in local papers, were online and on social media, so there was never any secret about what was planned. As ever, folk complained about the cost of it £500,000. The English, as ever are provoked into outrage at the cost of anything, and deprecate the value or necessity of whatever might be being created with it. Public consultations can often be a bit of a box ticking exercise, and for the public they become this opportunity to express your gripes, to air your favourite hobby horses, and to generally name call and to not be positive or constructive. They are nonetheless part of an established democratic framework for councils, ideally to demonstrate they can be responsive to local concerns. But in this case they were not sufficiently responsive to some local concerns. For there must undoubtedly have been some complaints about the loss of the existing bus shelter, these presumably were not given enough credence to give the planners pause. So after a couple of months the plan was put out for tender.
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However, once the work actually began in November, this stirred locals into action. that maybe that bus shelter should not be allowed to be turned into rubble. And so, as the contractors reached the actual point of demolition, protesters occupied the bus shelter. Ribbons were tied to the wire fences around it. Protestors were removed, and a more substantial corrugated metal fence put round it. Folk are now occupying inside the bus shelter, inside the corrugated fence - on a fully organised rota 24/7.up to and beyond the New Year. On paper this may seem just one small bus shelter, and a rather ineffective one at that. But it has now become this heroic local cause celebre, that appears to light up a number of peoples lives and has given them a huge sense of purpose. That it should ever have come to this, is desperately sad. On both sides of the argument there is resistance to change, and its now turning ugly.
Unhelpfully couched as a David v Goliath struggle. The protestors have adopted a distinctly parochial reinterpretation of Extinction Rebellion's tactics No one is, as yet, complaining about the extra cost to the tax payer when a project delayed by weeks becomes daily more expensive. Not to mention police time and effort to prevent any violence flaring up, and keeping buses and road traffic flowing. But what we have here is an instance of where the initial consultation process has catastrophically failed, and what it requires is the council to be more transparently creative in its response to that. Which doesn't mean resorting to putting the strong arm of the law behind you and serving protestors with eviction notices, but talking constructively with them.
If the council is going to act responsively to these concerns, then they would need to be open to change, as would the protestors. Could the existing bus shelter be taken down and rebuilt elsewhere in town, for instance? It doesn't have to stay exactly where it is, does it? But I can see one simple win win situation here that might satisfy both sides to a degree. Keep the old bus shelter and smarten it up, and build your new bus shelter alongside it. Stop judging it by its current dilapidated state, and treat it as part of the architectural legacy of the town that is worthy of preserving.
If the council persists in taking a legalistic punitive approach, then they will win only a pyrrhic victory This will lose them the willingness of the town to happily embrace any changes they are planning to make now, or in the future. The council, admittedly, will always be put in a lose lose situation, no one trusts them, expecting them to be authoritarian and impose unpalatable changes upon the community. Which only demonstrates the need to constantly act in ways that counter this prejudicial narrative. Otherwise it will only be shown to be true, that you don't really listen. It maybe the council believes its too late for all that, that it can't now afford to lose face, to step down from its high position and offer a change in approach. This would be a sad limitation to its vision for how it is serving the needs of its own community.
A concern of mine is that something really tragic will happen out of taking a confrontational approach, and the protestors won't be the ones shouldering the responsibility for that. I can foresee local martyrs being made here, heroically protecting one rather shabby bus shelter from becoming a pile of brick dust. If both the town and the county council, through each lacking a sense of proportion become locked in a stalemate situation, unable to change or compromise, what hope is there of a satisfactory resolution for all concerned? And believe me the latter does exist, but you do have to be willing to actively search to discover what that is. Not just assume that you already know.
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