I decided I would draw my alternative Master Plan for the development of the golf course. I based my drawing on the idea of using the existing trees as a starting point for the layout. Seemed as good a starting point as any other. This drawing was also influenced by the houses at Dungeness whose gardens radiated around the property a full 360 degrees. These ideas seemed enough for me to start drawing. Then when I’d drawn a few houses…. other issues start coming in!…!
School, yeh that’s a good idea going to need one, probably a primary then, as there is a massive secondary only a quarter of a mile away.
Shops, yeh going to need those.
There is a lot of old people now as parents are having less children and having them later, generally speaking and Herne Bay where I live has a very high concentration of older people. So I’ll put a health centre and yeh ..I’ll put some gardens in there as well, like the French have medical gardens Herne Bay can have the first medical gardens in the region.
I put this ‘Exchange and Re-Cycling Centre’ in, sounds good, I’m not quite sure how that works if I’m honest. But I thought a place where you dont use money you exchanged things on a points system or made agreements on values!!
Flooding….big issue at the moment and this area did have a history of flooding way back, so a few water features I hope will absorb the Brook of Plenty when if swells.
Sports pitches and a public park, yeh all essential going in, as well as an arts and heritage centre. Perimeter cycle path…..nice look at the highland cattle grazing outside the school. I remember working in an unusual school in Hythe which had live stock which was amazing. And so it goes on a little bit of this…… and I remember that was good, bit of that…. its like being God really!
Then I remember vaguely something about how houses should be orientated towards north by the sun (not magnetic north) this was an efficient ecological requirement and I thought my own garden was often in shade. And I had just housed 100’s of people by saying that’s a nice composition on the paper, with the rhythm of those houses and trees..!
What!…. people have to live there, and your just making a nice drawing!
I also realised I was drawing this plan North at the top in the traditional way, had I decided to draw it south up things would have been very different, because this in relation to that type reasons, put that there and this here and as those trees have to be there, this looks good here. Very subjective, unecological and arbitrary really. Had I done the drawing the other way up it would have come out very differently.
I have seen many early maps, the Gough Map for example where the UK is lying on its side. Very disorientating.
Its all an illusion, what is right and what is wrong? Who can tell? I remember the iconic photo of the earth from the appollo moon mission in the 70’s and subsiquently reading that it was actually taken with the south pole at the top. But the coastline of Africa and the Middle East are visable through the clouds and it was pubished the other way up so we could recognise land masses in a North Up orientation.
