Residents call on council to help skaters (From Gazette Series)

Residents call on council to help skaters

A GROUP of youngsters is making life intolerable for residents of a respectable residential area because there is nowhere suitable in the town for skateboarding.

A letter from nine residents of Parklands in Wotton-under-Edge has been received by the town council complaining that the noise of skateboarding in the evenings after school had made their lives unbearable for the past five years and they were at the end of their tether.

The letter, from Walter Dawkins and signed by eight other residents of Parklands, was read out to a meeting of the council last week by chairman Cllr Elizabeth Warren. Many of those who had signed the letter, including Mr Dawkins, were present to hear the resulting discussion.

The letter said the residents had suffered from the intolerable noise of skateboards for from a group of six to eight boys for more than five years. The group was sometimes as large as 16, the residents claimed.

"It is impossible to sit in our gardens," the letter said, pointing out that the problem was worst at the entrance to the Parklands estate, where most of the skateboarding took place, and that some of the youngsters were driven in cars to the estate by their parents.

The residents claimed that the skateboarders brought objects such as boxes with them to Parklands to jump over, the noise of landing making the problem worse.

Mr Dawkins stressed that the youngsters were not otherwise badly behaved and the residents were fully supportive of their need for somewhere appropriate for their activities but they felt very strongly that Parklands was not the place. The matter had been taken up, the letter said, with the police and with individual councillors but to no avail.

The residents asked why a skateboarding ramp bought by the council four years ago had not yet been found a home and they asked the council to resolve the matter.

Cllr Warren said it had proved impossible to find a suitable site for the ramp and that repeated requests for land had brought forth no offers.

Cllr Simon Smith said the New Road site in the neighbouring parish of Kingswood where the Recreational Trust was creating a recreation area would be suitable but that as much as £75,000 would be needed to create a suitable skateboard park and in any case the work would take several years.

"We cannot go ahead until the rest of the project goes ahead on the New Road site, where it will not get on anyone's nerves," said Cllr Smith. "We are desperately trying to sort something out," he added.

The parents of one of the skateboarders also attended the meeting and said the boys would like to find somewhere safe for their activities where they did not annoy residents but there was nowhere suitable in the town.

Cllr Warren said the council was agreed that there was a desperate need for a site and that New Road was probably the best place for it but in the short term it would be difficult to help.

The council agreed to talk to the skateboarders to see if a compromise could be reached.