A day in the life of a Middle Quinton resident...

For the developers’ suggestion, check their Vision document

A day in the life of Richard .. a MQ Resident

Richard, ever eco-conscious, was itching to buy a new house in Middle Quinton. Determined to demonstrate, a touch smugly, to his then neighbours in Birmingham, how much more enjoyable life could be, living an eco-existence in the heart of the countryside.

So without much upheaval and a totally clear conscience, the decision was made. The developers had promised the new town would “catalyse residents to make more sustainable lifestyle choices by enabling, engaging, and encouraging the community and providing strong examples”. What more could a man and his family want?

Yet his wife, Anne, was used to a typical Richard ‘bright idea’ – and privately gave it 8 months, at most.

Several months on…
It’s 6am and Richard downloads his newspaper online. He prefers to read a paper copy during his commute, but tries to avoid generating too much waste paper for recycling as it doesn’t get collected often enough. The family is now very wary of accidentally putting recyclable rubbish out with the rest, given the recent court fine for Jim and Diane at number 47, over pizza boxes and a Ben & Jerry tub protruding from the “wrong” dustbin. The vacuum waste system packed up months ago – the” wrong type of waste” was being disposed of by residents, apparently.

At 6.30am Richard cycles across town to the bus/tram stop to Stratford-upon-Avon, cursing at the flat tyre picked up from the broken bottles lying about the street (glass is less frowned upon than plastic in MQ) and is further delayed by the bicycle calming measures recently installed by the overly safety -conscious MQ Residents’ Management Committee. He balances a large sack on the handle bars – for disposal in Birmingham to avoid MQ’s waste surcharges. His annual fee for bike parking slot at the bus/tram stop has risen already, “to cut down excess demand” according to the MQRMC diktat.

As usual, the forty seats on the bus/tram are already filled, probably by those carbon-generating residents of Honeybourne Richard muses. This is the third bus/tram he’s tried to board before he can squeeze on, as so many MQ residents commute out. The on-site jobs are great if you’re an estate agent, Tesco Metro employee or bicycle repairer, but there’s a finite demand for these skills – not matched by many residents. In fact, though Richard doesn’t like to think of it, most of those employed on-site don’t actually live in the town, but come in from Redditch, Evesham, Worcester and Warwick every day. He hopes they all use public transport, but seeing how quickly the edge-of-town car park fills every morning, he somehow doubts it.

At 7.30am, Richard arrives in Stratford and crosses the Cattle Market transport hub to reach the mainline train station to Birmingham. He wryly ponders the similarity of transport experience between cows and commuters. This cerebral meandering leads him to hope that Middle Quinton man comes out favourably in a comparison between their respective carbon emissions… but doesn’t dare do the maths. A brisk 20 minute walk from Moor Street St ensures he arrives bang on 8.55am – it may have taken 2hrs 25 minutes, involved four types of transport and two changes, but at least it’s green.

Secretly, Richard is now seriously contemplating buying another car as he’s at the end of his tether (as were the cattle). The long commute is wearing him out and he misses spending time with his children in the evenings.

Anne visits her elderly mother a couple of times a week in Bidford-on-Avon. She dutifully tries to get there by bike as implored by Richard, since the village and MQ are not directly linked by public transport. Sadly the narrow country roads have been far too congested with HGVs, vans and 4x4s since the building of Middle Quinton began (as her mother regularly points out), the roads so cut up, muddied and slippery, that Anne gives it up, in favour of the car.

In fact, unbeknown to their Birmingham friends, Richard and Anne now pay a premium to keep a car on the edge of town and find themselves using it more and more. The cost of keeping a second car at MQ for Richard’s commute is extortionate so he’s struck on the idea of leaving it at Grandma’s and Anne will just have to visit her morning and evening to take and collect him. His Birmingham and MQ neighbours will be none the wiser.

How ironic that they’re becoming a two-car family since they didn’t even have one when they lived in Birmingham and public transport was on their doorstep, direct, and convenient. Richard’s work was less than 5 miles away then too.

What of the kids? Elsa could have had a ten-minute walk to Woodlands High, in the centre of Middle Quinton. Well, it was promised to be Woodlands High, but hasn’t yet been built. So she stands at the site and waits, with hoards of other children, for a convoy of minibuses that comes to ferry them to other schools across Warwickshire and Worcestershire. It is 2020, MQ has been ‘open’ nearly two years, but the town’s schools are still not built – something to do with demographics and young resident numbers, according to the MQMRC.

The mini bus is late, as usual, caught up in the heavy traffic between Middle Quinton and Stratford. While waiting Elsa wonders if her new school, should it ever get built, would be superior to her old one in Birmingham. It completed a series of energy-saving improvements in the mid 2010s and has now won awards from the City Council and Energy Savings Trust, so her old friends tell her. They get the award yet I’ve moved 40 miles away to a new house, and am bussed 15 miles each way to school every day, she thinks crossly.

Anne walks Elsa’s brother James to his partially complete primary school. There aren’t enough carers so Anne volunteers to stay some days. On the way they pass 6 excavators, 9 track loaders, 2 log handlers, 7 bulldozers, two cranes and a number of assorted cement mixers. At least James’ construction vocabulary has come on leaps and bounds. It looks as if this building crew is working on a road to some new shops. Anne hopes they’ll prove better than the existing meagre supply. Since they got the car, the family have shopped in Evesham and Stratford as the prices are higher in MQ supermarkets and the choice very limited.

When Anne chose the new house’s furniture last year, she’d wanted a suite she’d seen on the internet. She hadn’t been able to order it because there are restrictions on delivery lorries in Middle Quinton – she wished she’d negotiated with Bovis to pick it up by bucket loader en route. Sadly all MQ residents seem to have the same kitchen furniture bought from the same on-site shop – how lacking in individuality, she inwardly sighs. Some say that goods are more expensive in Middle Quinton just because they’re eco-friendly. Hearing this, Elsa asked Anne if Asia had all the environmentally-friendly factories since most of the clothes for kids her age she’d seen in Middle Quinton had had to come all the way from China.

Anne looks at the hoards of cars, buses, trucks and vans entering and leaving the town daily and wonders just how peaceful it would be to live here if it wasn’t for the building work, commuting and the lorry loads of imported waste needed to keep the incinerator burning 24 hours a day. She recalls the people behind MQ saying it would feel like a Cotswold village, styled on Poundbury. Given her experience at MQ, she sees why Poundbury has the highest car usage of any Dorset town. She wonders how the Poundbury residents’ litigation over flooding was resolved. She vows to drive down there to see if she can discover Poundbury’s ‘soul’ that so many residents say has been missing since its inception. For MQ’s sake, she hopes so.

As Richard arrives home that night he passes the corner shop, still open at 8.30pm to cater for all the commuters. He buys some locally produced fruit from a farm on the edge of Middle Quinton. Richard knows that this farm was once surrounded by nothing but green fields for as far as the eye could see. But MQ soon engulfed it, causing crop-damaging flooding. The farmer has had little choice but to sell his land for housebuilding. There’s now a strong rumour that the Long Marston Airfield has at last received planning permission for another high density housing estate of 3000 homes to help pay for the cost of MQ facilities. Plus talk of a new Magistrates Court, to cope with the rising crime caused by the town’s overcrowding, lack of nearby jobs and non-existent youth entertainment facilities.

The regular floods play havoc with the town’s few allotments, ruining most of their produce. Richard and Anne would have grown their own veg in their garden, but there’s not enough sunlight in the corner not taken up with trampoline and bikes, compost containers and rainwater butts, as the housing density at MQ is so high. He absent mindedly swats yet another mosquito from his face and reflects it’s probably just as well, since pesticides are forbidden in MQ so his veg would have no protection from the huge insect population attracted by the town’s lake.

Over dinner, Richard observes that today marks 8 months since they moved to their new home. Seeing the looks on his family’s faces, he resolves to put in place his latest bright idea. It involves a rapid house sale, removal vans and a popular and seemingly successful, eco-quarter on the outskirts of Birmingham …