And not before time some might say… but first a quick look back.

In the beginning

“Crewe – owes its prosperity entirely to the fact of its having become one of the most important railway centres in the world. The London and North West Railway Company has its works here – an enormous establishment for the manufacture of engines, carriages and all descriptions of railway plant.”  So wrote John Bartholomew, Gazetteer of the British Isles, back in 1887.

With a population of 24,385 Crewe came into being almost entirely as a result of the railway station being built in 1837, followed by the development of Crewe Works by the Grand Junction Railway which later, with the addition of other railways, became The London and North West Railway Company. Over the following years many thousands of local people were employed and Crewe was indeed a thriving and important Cheshire town well into the 20^th century.

But then… in more recent times and despite some good solid businesses, the good fortune of the town, its heart, along with its economy began to disappear. The reasons are many and not especially simple but it would be true to say that the Crewe of old is barely recognisable.

So what next…

All Change for Crewe is an ambitious strategic programme designed to support sustainable economic growth and development in the town. It’s not a short term fix and will require major investment over the next 20 years that will see the town revitalised. The plans include a centre for advanced engineering and manufacturing (sound familiar?) with a vision that would see the town becoming a sought after place for people to live, to work and to put down roots.  Five key priorities include developing Crewe as a world-class hub for the automotive and rail industries, making the town a UK centre of excellence in employer-led skills, positioning Crewe as a market leader in renewable energy (geothermal as discussed by us very recently) and spearheading a £500 million infrastructure programme for the town. Bentley Motor’s £1 billion investment in new product development has already seen employment opportunities benefitting the local community and a proposed new University Technical College backed by Bentley, Siemens, OSL and Manchester Metropolitan will help deliver skilled workers needed to help realise both their, and the town’s ambitions for the future.

HS2

Love it or hate it HS2 also has the potential to turn Crewe into a hub station bringing more potential benefits to the town and the North in general – although the hub could be on an alternative site South of the town. It’s a controversial topic and the debate continues about the possibilities versus the realities. Pete Waterman OBE – friend of Crewe, known to us locally for his work through The London and North Western Railway Heritage Company of which is he Chairman, gives HS2 his seal of approval and here is a man who knows about trains, and about business, and about the way it is North of Watford. No doubt the debate will continue for a long time to come!

The Crewe of tomorrow

• 14,500 new jobs focused on the Basford strategic employment site
• Over £230million additional retail and leisure spend
• 20% population growth by 2031 (currently 83,000)
• Crewe Rail Exchange – a high quality gateway into Crewe developing a new station entrance, improved concourse and station facilities
• A new public transport interchange and improved access arrangements to relieve traffic congestion

The list goes on… and we think that the Crewe of old, a town with pride in its industrial heritage deserves not just a face lift, but a whole new face.

The UK produces somewhere in the region of 67% of the food we buy. The agricultural industry is often ‘up against it’ as far as viable business goes, with a multitude of issues to contend with. It appears however that globally, we need to feed 9 billion people by 2050, so perhaps it’s not a bad sector to be in longer term, because increased consumption could be the key to economic growth, and if statistics on waste are to be believed, even if we don’t eat it or need it, we’ll still be buying it.

What a waste!

After the Second World War ended in 1945, there were several years of food shortages resulting in food rationing in the UK. That’s why our older generations perhaps appreciate the food on their plate and in their refrigerators, more so than those who have grown up with a more relaxed view of what gets thrown away – influenced no doubt by retail trends of buy 1 get 1 free, 50% extra free and so on. It comes as no surprise then, that globally, we throw away more food than packaging, and that growing and transporting food around the world, accounts for somewhere in the region of 3 billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gas.  Shockingly 40% of food in developing countries is lost through either environmental or logistical reasons but yes… there are still starving children in the world.

And at home?

It’s not just that we buy 7 million tonnes of food and throw it away – in the UK this waste equates to about £700 annually for a family of four – our retailers are equally guilty. One of the larger supermarkets admitted that they had 28,500 tonnes of ‘waste’ disposed of in the first 6 months of last year due to the ‘sell by date’ system. There are disadvantaged people who try to make use of the surplus by taking from food from skips (known as ‘skippers) and those who do it on a point of principle to highlight the cause for action. Either way, in the UK you can be prosecuted for taking food from a bin under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Let’s not forget hotels, restaurants, hospitals and other food providers who along with the rest of us, contribute to the 30% annual food waste. Apart from the moral issues surrounding this whilst people go hungry, and the economic impact on our pockets, there are also massive environmental implications in the disposal of it, with costs often passed on to consumers in higher prices and through local taxes for landfill.

Food Poverty

It’s real and it’s here! A recent study commissioned by DEFRA and carried out by the University of Warwick, found that food insecurity is difficult to track in the UK as many households adopt a range of tactics to avoid asking for help – it appears there is a stigma attached regardless of the often very genuine and unavoidable reasons for it. Asking for help can be a last resort – so it’s not just the homeless we might find ‘skipping’ outside supermarkets.

On a positive note…

There are people of good sense and conscience who are trying to tackle these issues by taking excess food and redistributing it through proper channels. Organisations such as Food Cycle who since 2009 have reclaimed 97,000 kg of surplus food saving 388,000 kg of CO² emissions and importantly, feeding people at risk of food poverty and social isolation. Or FareShare where up to 51,000 people a day benefit from food provided by them through various distribution schemes – again preventing waste, reducing carbon emissions and fighting food poverty right here in the UK.  It appears  we are getting better with a reduction in food waste of over 1 million tonnes in the last few years – that’s 23 million wheelie bins worth.

So the next time you’re food shopping and tempted by that ‘offer’ for something you don’t really need or when you ‘re putting enough food on the table to feed an army, when in fact you ‘re only feeding four – remember that 1 billion people somewhere in the world are going hungry.

save energy, save money, save our world

You might be surprised…

As an island nation, you can be anywhere in the UK and not be more than just over 70 miles from the coast (Grid Reference SK 257144 if it really matters to you.) We’re surrounded by water – fact! Recent months though, have had us not just surrounded by, but dealing with water inland and on land. Whilst our sympathy has been with all those who have and are still suffering, we know you can’t control the weather –  or can we?

Changes to the weather

The Jet Stream

The main culprit in our ever more unpredictable weather, with longer, wetter winters, is the Jet Stream. In simple terms hot air meets cold air over or around the UK. Travelling between 11 and 17 km above the earth, somewhere in the lower part of the atmosphere and at about 100 mph, there are two main jets – the polar jet and the sub-tropical jet. The direction and angle of the jet stream determines the type of weather we get over the UK. It’s affected by land mass and the influences of landmasses which interrupt the flow through friction and difference in temperature. As we said, in simple terms… and something we can’t control… or is it?

Cloud Seeding

Apparently back in the 1980s and the days of Soviet Russia, cloud seeding was used to ensure that important state holidays remained dry and to reduce snowfall. Flares containing silver iodide, a salt or dry ice pellets can be dispensed through combustion from a plane into clouds to induce rain ‘to order’ ensuring that it was dispensed with before important events. It’s still used today in the United Arab Emirates, America and no doubt many other countries. Discovered by General Electric (GE) labs in Schenectady, New York in 1946, it has been used since by agricultural organisations for crop irrigation with interest from hydroelectric utility companies for enhanced stream flow.  Weather modification…

HAARP

That’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research to you and me and was a project funded by the US Airforce through the Defence Advanced Research Project and the University of Alaska. Its purpose was to determine how the ionosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere) affected radio signals using fire pulsed, directed energy beams to temporarily ‘excite a limited area of the ionosphere.’

HAARP was seemingly developed as part of an Anglo-American partnership that included British Aerospace Systems (BAES). A great deal of speculation over the years has suggested that this programme was intended for the development of electromagnetic weapons – capable of  blasting enemy missiles out of the sky, destroying electronic systems in seconds and all manner of other unpleasant warfare defences. Other claims suggest that HAARP could be used for weather modification that could cause tsunamis and earthquakes which again, could be used as weapons of warfare. We understand that as of last year this programme was closed down.

And finally…

Geoengineering

Going back to the ever present theme of climate change, Geoengineering around the world has come up with some fairly interesting ideas to reduce carbon in the atmosphere which links, somewhat tenuously, with all things weather as they would almost certainly alter weather patterns. These are some of our favourites…

• Reflective roofs and pavements to lower the earth’s temperature
• Algae Units on buildings acting as photo bioreactors to remove carbon from the air
• A space sunshade filtering the amount of sunlight reaching the earth
• Millions of small mirrors launched into space to reflect sunlight away from the earth
• A giant mirror on the moon reflecting sunlight from space
• Artificial trees to capture carbon

And what to do with the captured carbon… store it underground in unused oil wells because we’ll have a lot of them one day!

So the next time it rains…