Thursday, November 15, 2012

Right Here Right Now....

Here and Now. I'm sorry to be so negative but really what is the point of this glossy excuse for a magazine. It isn't that it's badly written or anything like that but rather that it is so typically local government. It tries to be all encompassing, to bring together the borough of Tonbridge and Malling with it's zillion or so towns and villages in a way which is, by necessity, so watered down that you end up just binning the thing in disgust. To make it relevant and informative the magazine would have to be as thick as a telephone directory to cover everything that went on across the district. Be honest though do the vast majority of Tonbridge folk give a rats arse about what goes on in Borough Green, or Kings Hill, East Malling or Snodland (is that even in the borough? I'm not entirely sure.) I did however want to find out when the Christmas lights were being switched on in Tonbridge but I could have done that via their web site. Sorry guys but time to call time on Here and Now right now before you waste any more of our taxes in the form of the community charge. It's glossy and therefore most probably expensive to produce and so editorially widely spread geographically as to be pointless. Put the information on the web site instead. That way you can regionalise the information so that readers only need to read the bits most relevant to them....

2 comments:

sebfox said...

I dunno about Christmas lights in Tonbridge..Anyway the worlds going to end on the 21st of December according to the Mayan calander, so I doubt if they'll bother this year.

Paul Bailey said...

Unfortunately as a result of the ill-thought out local government reforms brought in by the Heath government (I think this happened in 1972), Tonbridge was lumped in with a host of smaller towns and villages that had no historic ties or connection with the town. You are correct TB, Snodland does fall within the TMBC boundary, yet it is closer to Maidstone and the Medway towns. I believe the borough extends right up as far as Cuxton, which is only a stone's throw from Rochester!

I live in south Tonbridge, and am just 10-15 minutes away, on foot, from the town centre. 10 minutes walk in the other direction though, and I am in the Borough of Royal Tunbridge Wells! Work that one out?

This is the ludicrous situation residents of Tonbridge and Malling find themselves in today. In the past much of the counvil's investment has gone north to places like Kings Hill and East Malling, but the worst case of mismanaged funding concerns the Leisure Centre, built at Larkfield but used in the main by people from Maidstone! Money from Tonbridge residents paid for this!

Total lunacy and a criminal misrepresentation of the interests of the loyal citizens of Tonbridge.