Winchester City Council has removed the Abbotts Barton parks from its current council house building programme!

At last week's Cabinet meeting Council Leader Keith Wood made an announcement about an update to Winchester's council house programme. He detailed which local housing schemes will be going through and which won't be due to limited finances.
 
Over the next three years Winchester Council will not be building any new houses in Abbotts Barton! However  - when more resources will become available again -, Hillier Way and the two garage sites (also Westman Road in Weeke) are still supposed to be developed, probably within five years.

The main park in Abbotts Barton and Dyson Drive green which we were fighting for to be kept as they are (clear of houses) were not mentioned at all, so for now these should be safe. What a shift in focus by the Council!

Of course this is great news for the Abbotts Barton community and Winchester in general, and we are very happy that going forward we will be able to use our parks as we used to!

Many thanks to everybody who supported our campaign in so many different ways:

• Preparing and handing in an application for a village green status for Dyson Drive green.
• Writing petitions and spending hours going from house to house to get signatures.
• Researching numbers, laws, and maps to help with the campaign.
• Reading through Council meeting papers and reports to find information and report that back to the group.
• Attending and speaking at Council meetings on behalf of the community.
• Writing letters and emails to councillors and city officials.
• Engaging in regular conversations with councillors about what is going on.
• Engaging with the media in various ways to get our campaign out into the public.
• Running a website and Twitter account to keep everybody informed.

We are also very grateful to have received so many messages of support via our petition website!

How to stay connected
We are planning to keep an eye on Council's development plans for Abbotts Barton. If you would like to stay up-to-date over the coming years, you have a several options to do so. Using these automated options saves you from having to come back to our website manually every so often to catch news:

• Sign up with your email address to our website (this will ensure that you will get an email every time we post something here which most likely won't be very often).  
• Follow the Save The Parks Twitter account.

Alternatively you can stay in touch with what is happening via the Abbotts Barton Community Group:

• Sign up with your email address to the Abbotts Barton Community Group website (again this will ensure you will get an email every time something will be posted, this will probably be once a week on average).
• Follow the Abbotts Barton Community Group Twitter account
• Like the Abbotts Barton Community Group Facebook page.

Fromond Road no longer part of Westman Road project!

An interesting piece of news for our neighbours in Weeke from the Winchester City Council Facebook page:

Westman Road update: Following the consultation event held in June about the proposed development of land at Westman Road in Weeke, the option of improving the open spaces on Fromond Road is no longer being considered as part of this project. Improvements to Fromond Road require much more consultation, design work and significant funding.

Update 11 July:

We are meeting pupils at Henry Beaufort School on today to find out their views regarding the options for improving open spaces in Weeke to compensate for the loss of the open space at Westman Road.

A plea on behalf of Weeke residents

As you might have heard Winchester City Council (WCC) is not only trying to build on parkland in Abbotts Barton, there are also other green areas in Winchester earmarked for new housing (see our Media tab for related articles). One of them is at Westman Road, Weeke.