Two contrasting views this week of what “the environment” can mean. The Town Council has members on various organisations in the town. Three of the councillors (a record number) expressed an interest in South Lakes Action on Climate Change / Towards Transition (SLACC/TT) – the group who successfully gained Transition Town status for Kendal this [...]

Interesting debate at the Planning Committee tonight. We were considering a planning application for works at a house in the conservation area in Kendal, to replace an existing porch / conservatory of little merit with a new design. The owner and the architect had obviously studied the Green Building Bible and taken it to heart. [...]

I seemed to spend all of Tuesday walking to and from the town centre on Council business. In the morning there was a briefing for new councillors on the role of Local Area Partnerships (LAPs). Dilligent readers may remember I spent Monday evening at a meeting of the Neighbourhood Forum, a body set up to [...]

During the Mayor’s Sunday Service, Kendal’s new Mayor asked for the Parable of the Good Samaritan to be read. This must be the most famous answer ever to the question “Who is my neighbour?” So it was with some interest that I went along to a meeting of the Kendal Neighbourhood Forum, a forum run [...]

I went along to the opening of a fascinating little exhibition at Kendal Library this morning. Kendal is an ancient wool town – the town’s motto is Pannus mihi Panis (Wool is my Bread) – and a sample book dating back to 1769 somehow survived the centuries to become one of the town’s treasures. This [...]

It’s been a hectic week, which means my good intentions of posting my first impressions of life as a Town Councillor have been a bit delayed. Monday night was meetings night! Planning Committee kicked off with a brief training session for new councillors; followed by a meeting of the Planning Committee (14 planning applications rattled [...]

Following the driest spell in Cumbria for years, you think the weather could have stayed dry for the twenty minutes it took to process from the Town Hall to the Parish Church and back again for Mayor’s Sunday. Alas not – it started raining on the way there and positively bucketed it down on the [...]