Tongue in Cheek?

I've never really got Jeremy Clarkson. He provokes the sort of comments that are better left unsaid, unless you are totally sure you're off microphone (in a Gordon Brown/Gillian Duffy sort of way). In the Sunday Times, JC took a critical look at his home town of Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, a town of similar size to Rhuthun/Ruthin. In particular, he examined the reasons why the town centre was loosing convenience shops. He blamed the traffic wardens.

Yes, I know his comments are always supposedly entertaining but, oddly, people actually believe him. On his income, he can afford to be frivolous and doesn't need to worry about the consequences of the town centre decay he mocks. For, you can no more blame traffic wardens for a town centre's ills than you can the bank teller looking after my balance for the recession.

One reason we need traffic wardens in Rhuthun is senseless parking, where motorists seemingly abandon their cars anywhere. Another is to regulate free on-street and paid-for car park spaces for the good of all, to ensure no one outstays their allotted time. Unfettered free parking would clog spaces to the detriment of the town.

There is a far simpler explanation why Norton has lost its florist, off-licence, children's clothes shop, cobbler and deli. And a lesson for the rest of us. It's that people don't use them. Like Clarkson, for example. While he goes on about how important these shops are to the "soul" of the town, he admits he doesn't use them.

There are plenty of reasons why people don't support local shops and they tend to have little to do with traffic wardens.

• Few people seem prepared to walk more than 200 yards to shop.


• Lifestyles have changed over the last 40 years such that a supermarket makes shopping as easy as a vacuum cleaner in the early 20th century made light work of chores.


• Our cars give us the freedom to shop pretty much wherever and whenever we like, out of town.

The Clarkson solution is to level the playing field by offering a free-for-all, so that you can park wherever you want, whenever you want, right outside where you need to be. In Rhuthun, we see the confluence of a town designed in the age of the horse with the lifestyle brought to us by the car. There needs to be compromise in terms of parking, unless we are to see the complete dominance of the car at the exclusion of everything else. My guess is that the same's true of Norton.

The difference between Norton's famous resident and Rhuthun's, also featuring recently in the media, is that one of them is being positive and looking forward to improving the streetscape...

Clarkson article from the Times