Country cousins test Southampton's authority (From Daily Echo)

Country cousins test Southampton's authority

3:01pm Monday 2nd August 2010 in Hampshire Business By Gareth Lewis, Business Editor

ADANAC PARK: Not Southampton, even though you could be forgiven for thinking so.

IMAGINE if someone else owned your front garden, the gateway to your home.

They get to decide what’s planted there and how it looks.

But everyone assumes it was you who decided to stick the ugly great leylandii there and let Japanese knotweed run riot.

This is the situation Southampton finds itself in with Adanac Park, comfortably the biggest development site in the city. Except that it’s not actually in the city...

It’s where Ordnance Survey is now putting the finishing touches to its landmark headquarters, which, as well as being a dramatic new building, is doubling as the start of an impressive gateway to Southampton.

This is just one spot on the vast greenfield site, which comfortably has room for another five buildings on a similar scale. Buildings fit to house the headquarters of major corporations. Companies that would bring with them thousands of well paid, aspirational jobs of exactly the sort that are so thin on the ground in Southampton.

It is potentially transformational for the city.

And yet our destiny does not lie in our hands. No, it will be decided by Test Valley Borough Council (TVBC), a rural authority based away in Andover and Romsey and primarily concerned with the good work of managing the backwaters.

No doubt it is expert at running Romsey and keeping things ticking over nicely in King’s Somborne. But are planners and councillors whose day to day expertise is in the humdrum business of housing extensions really qualified to manage major deals with international corporations.

A dour example of the sort of thing can be found by swivelling your eyes 180-degrees from the Adanac site to the western edge of the M271. There is the vast, corrugated grey edifice of Sheffield Insulation. It’s a fine company and it’s fantastic that they’ve decided to build their jobs generating business here.

But the consequence of TVBC’s planning decisions is that for millions of visitors to Southampton, from boat show tourists on a day out to cruise passengers steaming in for a holiday, this drab tin warehouse is the signal that they’ve arrived.

Portsmouth signals your appearance on its boundaries with a fluttering, ethereal piece of sculpture.

A set of sails leaving the visitor in no doubt about the primary business of the city they’ve just arrived in; something that elegantly nods to its past and its pride and its sense of place.

Until Ordnance Survey arrived, we had a big grey shed.

If that land had been controlled by Southampton it is difficult to see city bosses waving it through without at least pausing to order some trees be planted to dress it up a bit. Why do Andover planners care?

For a host of reasons Adanac Park matters to Southampton in a way that it never will to Test Valley.

It should be Southampton citizens that call the shots here. It should be an authority concerned with creating jobs in a city with eight areas among the ten per cent most deprived in the UK that is leading the charge to lure in major businesses.

Not councillors who look to wards in leafy Leckford and Longparish.

Everyone imagines the motorway is the boundary of the city and so it should be.

It’s time to take back our garden.