St Faith’s church was packed on Thursday evening for a public meeting called by the Langstone Village Association (LVA) to raise the profile of the issue of the millpond and footpath between Langstone Mill and Wade Lane.
The capacity audience was welcomed by Canon Tom Kennar, passionate as always that this wonderful space in the centre of the old town should be seen not just as a church but also as a public space for the community. He welcomed the councillors present, including the Leader, Cllr. Alex Rennie, spotted ‘hiding behind a pillar’, the mayor, Cllr. Rosie Raynes, Cllrs. Phil Munday, Liz Fairhurst and Lulu Bowerman, accompanied by Lyall Cairns, the HBC executive officer who heads up Coastal Partners.
With the usual twinkle in his eye, Tom reminded the congregation that all faiths offer simple, pictorial metaphors, the pertinent one here being that God had created a garden before instructing his people to take care of it. The message wasn’t lost on the meeting which when prompted, responded with a chorus of ‘Take care of the garden!’
The meeting Chair, Ed Neville, introduced the LVA team and reminded us of the two hundred year history of the millpond before introducing Margaret Tait, the driving force behind the current campaign.
Margaret told the meeting that efforts to rectify the collapse of the wall were ‘still being blocked by Natural England’. Local council representatives were said to be presenting a common face behind their Leader who, while wholeheartedly sharing the public’s wish for action, had told the LVA that his ‘hands were tied’ by central government agencies. The local MP, Alan Mak, had visited the millpond and recognised the value of supporting the popular view, before voicing his opinion that it was, nevertheless, a job on which the local authority should lead.
The meeting was given a recap of the previous two public events, the meeting at Langstone Sailing Club last winter and the weekend in May which had brought many walkers of all generations down the Billy Track from The Spring to the millpond to demonstrate their support.
The online petition has now crept past the 4,100 figure and is still open for all to view and sign and, in a voice at times tinged with emotion, Margaret read out some of the comments posted with responses, expressing heart-felt concern that without action, ‘the dreams of almost 5000 people’ would be dashed.
Next to take the microphone was Gemma Nash of LVA, covering the ecology of the Langstone SINCs (Sites of Interest for Nature Conservation) at the millpond and the paddock. These connected sites have important amenity value for the local public, linked to Havant town and Hayling Island by the Billy Track. The Langstone village foreshore with the Royal Oak and the SINCs behind it form a much valued heritage asset, with a unique habitat at the millpond fed by the natural chalk Lymbourne stream and occasionally overtopped by the sea on high spring tides. The resulting semi-saline environment provides a unique home for many species including the critically endangered European eel, the Western barbastelle bat and water voles.
Given the likelihood of continued erosion of the footpath, the current proposal is to re-route the coastal path to the north of the millpond, across the paddock, closing off this much-loved and well-trodden local section of the King Charles III Coast Path ‘enjoyed by 100,000 walkers’ each year. Gemma explained that while Chichester Harbour Conservancy and Coastal Partners classify the existing dam and its supporting wall as a hard coastal defence structure, it is already too low to serve that purpose as the sea level rises. The frequency of overtopping events will increase and the saline balance of the millpond will change.
The argument was made that the premature rollback at Southmoor a couple of years ago ought surely to be considered as more than sufficient mitigation for the coastal squeeze impact of the relatively short length of fixed wall fronting the millpond dam, a point we covered in an earlier post back in May.
Peter Oliver of LVA was unable to speak personally, but his slides were voiced by Canon Tom. Peter’s view was that no progress has been made at all since the meeting at Langstone Sailing Club and it should now be time to ‘recognise the paralysis and break the deadlock’. He felt that there are ‘too many agencies standing on principles’ and by deferring to the local authority for action, the local MP is abdicating a key role in the decision hierarchy.
Using slides covering the subject of coastal squeeze, Peter’s presentation made an intriguing point that with rising sea levels, the protected millpond would form a stable tidal terrace which might encourage a higher quality environment for the establishment of seagrass than would be offered naturally through rollback following failure of the dam.
Having set out the LVA case, some at the meeting were expecting to see presentations in reply from Alex Rennie, Lyall Cairns and Ann Briggs, Chair of the Chichester Harbour Conservancy. However, having presented the Langstone Village Association’s case, the Chair now opened the meeting for questions from the floor, perhaps missing the opportunity to present the full story.
With his colours already nailed to the millpond mast, the Leader, Alex Rennie kicked off the ‘question’ session and used the opportunity to voice his continued support for the campaign team and its supporters, ‘recognising the importance of the issue across wider Havant’. He then took issue with some of the statements made in the LVA presentations and possibly with one ear cocked towards next year’s elections, took shelter behind the Environment Agency’s statement that any remedial work would be unlawful.
In the discussion which followed, a number of points were made. The view that rebuilding the wall would actually promote high quality salt marsh growth and would, in any case, be too low to provide effective permanent defence is quite compelling, though is perhaps rather too subtle for the political leaders of environmental regulatory bodies.
The point was made that the millpond itself is a man-made energy store, with the potential energy in the pond originally converted into kinetic energy through the tide mill. With nowhere to go, that energy is acting on the wall ‘from the inside’ and with weakened defence to the seaward side through the loss of the wall, collapse could be imminent and catastrophic.
Lyall Cairns, speaking from personal observation noted that the condition and stability of the dam behind the wall has not fundamentally changed in the past twenty years, a view supported by Coastal Partners’ own engineers that the risk of catastrophic failure is low.
The absence of the local MP was noted, with disappointment that he was not directly engaging with this popular campaign. A suggestion that the campaign should seek the active support of Lord Willetts, Mr. Mak’s predecessor, was greeted with some enthusiasm.
The bigger picture
While the Langstone villagers’ view that ‘nothing had happened’ since May reflects local frustration with the course of subsequent actions, followers of the Coastal Partners’ website will be aware that there is more to the story that could have been presented before the meeting was opened up to the public. It’s worth catching up with Coastal Partners’ updates here, including the various included links, one of which includes the key letters exchanged with the relevant agencies since May.
Climate change adaptation should not be simply considered as a political football; the engineering issues are complex, the priorities for funding are clear and the clock is ticking. Coastal Partners may report to Havant Borough Council at an executive level, but its brief and funding spans the four other local authorities across the three closely-coupled harbour systems – Portsmouth, Langstone and Chichester. That patch includes the Solent shoreline from Selsey in the east to Hill Head in the west, a vast length of coastline in which there are many other small local communities which will be exposed to the impact of the rising sea levels. At the end of the day, there cannot be funding for all and the priority set by the government is that protection of homes and businesses must come first.
A suggested way forward?
The challenges presented by climate change and the associated cost and viability of sea defence adaptation work at the local level are significant and many small coastal communities are inevitably going to find that they need to raise their own funds and fight their own battles with local and central planning authorities. It will be up to local authorities to decide whether or not to approve self-funded works, ignoring in the process the high-level planning edicts that can never completely address the intricacies of local context.
Havant Borough Council needs to take a pragmatic and apolitical stance for the sake of the wider borough. The Billy Track, the coast path, the millpond and the paddock together form the most important amenity asset that the town possesses. It is true that there are very few houses and businesses at risk, but there is a significant amount of public goodwill and visitor footfall that would be sacrificed. The value to the borough of the area’s heritage and ecology may be intangible, but to many people, it’s also invaluable.
Having already made a public stand on the subject, the council should call the higher authorities’ bluff and work with Hampshire County Council to simply rebuild the collapsed wall in front of the dam as they last did forty years ago. Just as the likes of Barratts and Amazon can run rings round the planning process and Southern Water can ignore its regulators and the government agencies, then it would serve Havant Borough Council well to stand up for its council tax payers and just get on with the job.
This is a topic that will not go away, the locals won’t let that happen and HBC officers, elected councillors and Coastal Partners could do without the additional distraction. Perhaps they should take the initiative now and save the cost of a major rerouting exercise which would only end up devaluing the prettiest local stretch of the King Charles III Coast Path.
Tell your local councillors what you think.
Making a stand would take courage on the part of the council but with a critical election year coming up, they ought to weigh the wider costs and benefits. Lyall Cairns highlighted the case of a private landowner at Colner Creek near Bosham who lost an appeal in 2021 against the decision of Natural England to refuse consent for the rebuilding of his sea wall. There could, however, be lessons to learn from such cases and it’s safe to say that in the case of the millpond, the good folk of the borough might look kindly upon a council which took the initiative and stood up for them.
If funding the works becomes an issue, then the Langstone Village Association might consider that setting up a crowdfunding page for the local public would be more productive than the current petition. Crowdfunding for local issues can be productive, as Old Portsmouth’s Camber Right of Way campaign team are finding.
There’s also a local precedent for public contribution to works, provided by the Friends of Nore Barn Woods, whose representative at the meeting commented that their own campaigns for the rebuilding of a relatively shorter stretch of sea defence had sought over £80,000 in community donations to complete over the past few years.
In response, Lyall Cairns cautioned that while HBC and Coastal Partners had been fully engaged with the Nore Barn woods work, the political climate is now quite different.
A final thought
Next time you travel eastward towards Havant along the top of Portsdown Hill, cast your eye towards the spire of Chichester cathedral which has dominated the skyline over the low-lying coastal plain to the south of the chalk downs for the past 400 years.
Within the next 400 years, making the grim assumption that the rate of melting of the world’s major ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland continues unchecked, then that spire will be standing on the shore of a broader English Channel.
The Langstone millpond wall was last rebuilt by HBC and HCC forty years ago. In the grand scheme of things, can we not just crack on, employ some local bricklayers and give it another forty year lease of life? The debate will undoubtedly be quite different in 2063.
Havant Civic Society 