Lyme Park is safe for now

There’s a reason this blog is called “From the Bowstones”. Rather than mince my own words, I’ll simply quote the website’s About section:

The Bowstones are a pair of large carved stones near the summit of Sponds Hill, a hill which overlooks Lyme Park, a large country estate in Cheshire now managed by the National Trust. One of the regular walks that I’ve been doing for years takes me past the Bowstones and through Lyme Park, and a lot of the things I write about here I have first thought through in the mental downtime that a long walk in the countryside affords me.

The point is that Lyme Park is a place that holds great significance for me, and also for many hundreds if not thousands of other people, just as a nice bit of countryside to spend time in.

The National Trust, though, seems to see things differently. Their focus is on the “visitor experience” at the mansion house and garden, which, last year, they declared to be in need of improvement. This post concerns a planning application submitted, supposedly to that end, by an architecture firm called “Land Studio Limited” on behalf of the NT.

Let’s dive in…

What was proposed?

The supporting documents identified various issues with the current visitor experience. Many of these were of questionable validity, sometimes to the point of comedy: my favourite example has to be the non-issue of dispersed toilet provision (the site, which is several miles across, has a whole two sets of toilets, and they’re not even that far apart).

So the NT had invented, or at least enormously exaggerated the significance of, a problem in Lyme Park. That was bad enough. But the way they had proposed to deal with it was truly awful. The plan could be summarised as follows:

• Construct a new 530-space car park, destroying a substantial area of grassland in the process.

  • The new car park was to be located further from the vehicle entrance than the old one.
  • The new car park was to have no provision for electric vehicle charging, nor was any new bicycle parking capacity planned.

• Close the existing 375-space car park, currently located in an area known as the Swine Ground.

  • Note the net increase in the quantity of parking spaces.
  • Apparently the Swine Ground was to be restored to its natural state, but I’m not sure what they had in mind here, as there would still need to be a road through it to allow access to the new car park.

• Move the entrance to the house and garden to the opposite side.

  • This would mean it faced the new car park at the expense of leaving visitors by train and bus a considerably longer walk. This is a classic example of prioritising private motorists over public transport users.
  • The park is served by a free shuttle bus connecting the key points for people less able to walk, but it is inaccessible to wheelchair users and relies on the availability of the volunteers who operate it.

Future phases of the project would have involved various changes and supposed improvements to other visitor facilities - but little consideration was given to actively encouraging modes of travel other than the car. Aside from some token statements, the writers of the application seemed to lack ambition in this area and appeared resigned to visitors continuing to arrive by car.

The traffic problem

This proposal is already stupid, but it appears even more so when you realise that there is a true, major problem with the vehicle access to Lyme Park that it doesn’t solve. The current access road for visitors to Lyme Park is from the A6 between High Lane and Disley. The junction is at an angle that makes it awkward to turn in and out of (Street View for those unfamiliar) and it’s not uncommon for queues to form to enter the park, resulting in congestion on the A6. The fact of the matter is that, at the busiest times, the park attracts too many cars for the road network to handle.

The NT’s planning documents do not appear to acknowledge this as an issue. On balance, I will assume stupidy rather than malice here, but it is nonetheless important to point out that increasing the car parking provision and making access by other modes less convenient would have increased traffic volumes, not reduced them.

There used to be a summer season shuttle bus service at weekends between the park and Hazel Grove Park & Ride, allowing visitors to leave their cars there rather than adding to congestion around the park, but this was removed during the pandemic and has never been reinstated. I can’t even see it mentioned in the planning documents.

So if you needed yet another reason that this scheme was a terrible idea, there you have it.

Misleading the public

The NT’s Transport Statement claims that “it is not proposed to change the number of parking spaces that are available at Lyme Park”. This is a statement so disingenuous that I consider it a lie.

Above, I described that the current car park has 375 spaces, and the proposed new one has 530, making for an increase of 155. However, the NT would have you believe that there is actually a slight reduction in the number of spaces, from “just over 1000” to 950. The vagueness in that first figure provides a clue for frequent visitors as to how they came to it: in the summer, when the park is extremely busy and the ground is dry, they let cars park on nearby grass fields as an overflow measure, and they are including that space in their calculation! Apparently the space in the fields around the new car park would be slightly smaller than around the old one.

But then the Transport Statement goes on to say something even more insane:

Overall, the development plans as set out within the planning application are not anticipated to increase the quantum or frequency of vehicles accessing Lyme Park

Even ignoring the questionable use of the word “quantum”, this sentence genuinely leads me to question what its writers could possibly have been thinking. Making the visitor experience at the park more attractive - in other words, making the park attract more visitors - is the whole point of the planning application, and the plans do not include improvements for visitors by any other mode of transport. So, by saying they would not increase the number of cars visiting, has the NT not just declared its own plans completely useless?

Of course, it is all but guaranteed that this would, in fact, increase the “quantum and frequency” of vehicles in Lyme Park. It is a clear example of the economic phenomenon of induced demand which manifests itself all the time in transport systems: improvements to infrastructure for cars almost always encourage more people to drive.

Backlash

The problem with misleading planning applications that take the public for fools is that much of the public are not fools and will realise that you are proposing something terrible. The plans recieved national media coverage and the deadline for comments on the planning application was extended, with hundreds of representation letters recieved, and more than a thousand signatures on a petition to halt the plans.

This all culminated on Wednesday 31st January 2024, when the NT took the decision to withdraw the planning application and leave the park as it is - at least, for now.

This is clearly a win, but the withdrawal email suggests that the battle might not quite be over yet:

our view is that further time is required to reconsider the project and establish the best way to take it forward through the planning system.

So I’ll be keeping my eye out for a new set of plans submitted for something very similar, but dressed up a different way.