….and a peaceful and prosperous 2017 to you all.
Meanwhile …. a quick look back at some of the main stories from 2016.
There has certainly been no shortage of events worth recording this year: some have made us smile, others have been tragic, new Ryers have arrived and old ones, who will be much missed, have passed on. There have been the usual small-town spats, some serious while others could have been written by EF Benson in his Mapp and Lucia books.
But the year started with a good news story of the first shipment in 2016 of warm clothes gathered by Churches Together and in conjunction with Samara’s Aid Appeal to help the refugees gathering in camps in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. Further shipments have followed during the year.
Here the rains came down and saw the rivers rising to worryingly high levels with minor flooding in places. Although this was a small inconvenience at the time the problem of potential floods did cause the demise of a long-running development planning saga for Tilling Green, when the developers of a possible new housing estate finally decided to pull out .
And on the subject of developments, several of our sports clubs have been busy with their own. The Cricket Club finally got their pavilion signed off by RDC, The Rugby Club opened a cafe in its newly-refurbished club house and the Sailing Club launched an appeal for funds for an extension to their club house at Rye Harbour. We understand the the total they required has now been reached.
There have been several ongoing sagas, one of which is the problem of traffic and parking and from our first comments in March and report of the public meeting with the Police and Crime Commissioner to a recent conversation with an officer briefed to talk to us, it is clear that there is no appetite to improve the situation. Even our own Town Council continues to dither. Having been presented with the latest draft of the Neighbourhood Plan to approve a short while ago, they had the opportunity to be pro-active and start work on the recommendations for traffic made in the plan with a view to putting suggestions through to RDC and ESCC (the final arbiters on traffic and parking), before something, possibly totally unsuitable for Rye, is imposed upon us. There is no sign, so far, of this happening.
Of our many festivals, there was one missing this year, The Maritime Festival, usually held in August. For such an ancient sea-faring town it seems inconceivable that we should not celebrate this and we hope that a way to revive the event can be found in the future.
The sea, however, provided mixed news elsewhere. Down the road in Camber, completion of the new, and very impressive, sea wall was duly celebrated. But only a couple of months later the first of two tragedies took place on Camber Sands. Three young men got into trouble while swimming and, while two were saved the third sadly died . It seems incredible that history could repeat itself so soon, but it did and only a month later five young men, on their first visit to Camber drowned together. The full story of how this could possibly have happened has not yet been revealed, but the inquest will take place in the New Year and we will report on this. Yet another death occurred at this time, but off Winchelsea Beach rather than Camber. A light aircraft crashed into the sea and sank almost immediately with the pilot still inside. He was recovered some days later.
On a more cheerful note, although the Maritime Festival may be no more – for the moment, anyway – all our other celebrations seem to be going from strength to strength. At the beginning of the year we overdosed on Scallops and later in the year on Wild Boar. In between we were entertained by several days of first class jazz, a wonderful two full weeks of culture of every description, the usual splendid – and completely mad – bonfire night and finally a celebration of Christmas. In addition, throughout the year, there has been a constant supply of classy music acts performing at venues throughout the town (and on many of which our resident culture vulture, Heidi Foster, has reported) and a number of impressive art exhibitions.
And finally, no report on this last year would be complete without mention of trains – or, in this case, lack of them. The Marsh Link – our little bit of Southern Railway – has always been something of a hit or miss affair, but the inadequate service finally collapsed into total chaos when, first the RMT and later ASLEF decided to strike. This is a battle where the Company still gets paid by the government, the strikers get paid by their unions and only the passengers – the whole reason for the railway’s existence, and about whom neither side seem to care – are suffering. We can only hope that someone in the government will have the moral strength to bang heads together and finally get this mess sorted out before we get too far into the new year.
So much more has happened in 2016 that we have reported on and all this is still available and accessible by searching our pages.
Photo: Rye News Library