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Reviving the Phoenix

19/4/2015

 
Viva Lewes
A look at what lies ahead for the North Street area of Lewes

The rise and fall of John Every’s Phoenix Iron Works has been well documented, from its North Street birth in 1832 to its eventual demise in 1986. Even today, the streets of Lewes bear witness to the Every legacy. Not just in the old warehouse buildings by the river and the road names of the industrial estate, but marked on cast-iron drain covers, bollards, gutters and coal holes across the town.

By 2005, Angel Property had acquired much of the former Phoenix site and was planning to build a cinema, a car park, shops, bars and over 800 new properties – including high-rise flats – on what it was calling the ‘Phoenix Quarter’. Revised plans later reduced the visual impact of the development, but little progress was ever seen because Angel Property went into administration in 2009. Yet the property crash that claimed Angel wasn’t bad news for everyone. Angel’s reported £27 million investment became a bargain buy for the Santon Group and investment business MAS, which apparently paid significantly less for the site in 2012. As well as submitting new plans for the area, they’re proposing a new name: the ‘North Street Quarter’. Since then, consultations have been held, opinions have been gathered and campaigns have been waged.

Which brings us to today. Or, more correctly, to the middle of March, when Lewes District Council (LDC) and Santon North Street Ltd jointly submitted a planning application that included 416 houses, workshops, a new health centre and public spaces. Between them, they own almost all the 6.3 hectare (15 acre) site; LDC is responsible for around 30% of properties – those to the west of North Street – and Santon owns the remainder, with a few exceptions. This application is now in the hands of the South Downs National Park Authority, which will be holding a public consultation before making a decision later in the year.

The redevelopment of the bus station and the derelict Wenban-Smith warehouses is part of Lewes District Council’s joint core strategy but doesn’t form part of these plans. A separate application by Waitrose, which owns the land behind its supermarket, is expected by the end of 2015.

Meanwhile Lewes Phoenix Rising Ltd, a community development company set up last year, is raising £20,000 to submit its own plan for 3.5 acres of the site. Although it doesn’t own the land, it wants to propose “an exemplary scheme” to be considered alongside the Santon/LDC submission. Instead of demolishing all the old warehouses, it’s suggesting 48 rental homes along with work and social enterprise space within renovated Phoenix Ironworks buildings.

In the next few months we’ll be taking a closer look at the area, the planned North Street Quarter development and the alternatives that are being proposed. We’ve already spent time with Lewes District Council and Santon – there’ll be more details of that conversation in next month’s magazine – and look forward to talking to other interested parties.

First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 103 April 2015.

My Space: David Bland, Flint Owl Bakery

2/4/2015

 
We’ve been in this building since around 2010. I wanted to have the bakery in Lewes but couldn’t find any suitable buildings. And then I spotted this little unit in Glynde. 

Our building is the old dairy. I think this was the bottling room, which is why it’s on a slant. Underneath there’s a deep bunker with thick brick walls, where they’d store the milk.

My first customer was The Ram in Firle, so they’re our oldest friends. Today we cover an area from Alfriston, across to Haywards Heath and down to Brighton. We supply around 30 food businesses: restaurants, gastro pubs, cafes and farm shops, plus our own shop in Lewes.

In my 20s I went travelling a lot. I loved travelling around Scandinavia and started eating such characterful breads. When I got the travelling bug out of me, I wanted to learn a craft – and found I was good at baking. I love it.

Someone’s usually here from 8pm and we bake until around 8am. Then the kitchen opens, preparing food for the shop. Friday night’s the big night, so we start earlier. We could bake up to 1,500 loaves, plus cakes and tray bakes.

Essentially we’re making bread the old-fashioned way. We’ve got linen cloths, a mixer, a wooden table and an oven. And our hands.

All the bread is made from our own blend of flours. We might call a loaf ‘white’ but really it’s white with a bit of light rye, a bit of malt… That’s how we produce distinctive products. All those little changes will adjust the flavour.

Sunday is the only day we’re shut. We work Sunday night but don’t work on Saturday night. It’s always been that way. I like to see my kids on a Sunday.

As told to Mark Bridge

209 High Street. 01273 472769.
flintowlbakery.com


First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 103 April 2015.

Interview with Iain Sinclair

1/4/2015

 
Iain Sinclair interview
The last time I picked up a book about walking, it recommended an Ordnance Survey map and sent me along a coastal path towards a cosy pub. That’s not the kind of book Iain Sinclair writes. For example, his London Orbital describes a walk alongside the M25 motorway, with vibrant research-peppered observation that’s likely to leave the reader as exhausted as the author. Iain’s a poet, novelist and film-maker, although he’s currently best known for his subversive walk-inspired works: a genre that’s often referred to as psychogeography.

“This is something that really belongs in the late 1950s and early 60s in Paris”, he explains. “It was to do with confronting a consumerist society by inventing conceptual ways of behaving, largely in cities.” A series of non-fiction books, starting with 1997’s Lights out for the Territory, have drawn on those ideas of unconventional urban exploration. Yet today the word psychogeography is “almost meaningless”, Iain tells me, “because it could be applied to absolutely anything. Some of the more interesting writers in that area have started to call it something like ‘deep topography’, because it’s more about researching by repeated walks or journeys.”

But even if the word is lost, the process has retained its value. For Iain Sinclair, walking was originally recreational travel. When he began writing professionally, it developed into an enjoyable research method. “The walking was part of how I constructed a book, but it wasn’t the actual subject matter. It took quite a long time for the process of walking to actually become the way of writing… and then that evolved, and I sort of became stuck with it.”

Would he recommend walking to other writers? “Yes, very much. Sitting at the desk, working on my laptop for hours, I used to get backache but that’s been totally dispersed by just doing an hour walking. Loosening yourself up, I suppose. And mentally as well. There’s a freshness by the time you come to sit down.”

“In a grander sense, to take more substantial and serious walks is a way of breaking out of being locked into reflex ways of thinking and behaving. It’s a great way to ‘go beyond your knowledge’, as the poet John Clare would say. To take yourself into something you don’t know and to see what happens. Like walking round the M25.”

Iain Sinclair is speaking at the Monday Literary Society this month. What’s he going to be talking about? “I have a book coming out in June, called London Overground, which is about a single day’s walk around a newly linked-up railway line, seeing the social and cultural changes that the railway brings. So in a sense I’m using that as a metaphor for a talk about walking, and ways of walking, and the way walks fit into the world as it is now.” You’ll probably want a pair of stout shoes for the journey home.

Under the Overground: Walking as a Way of Writing, Mon 27 April, Pelham House, 8pm, £7.50. mondayliterarysociety.co.uk

First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 103 April 2015.


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