When our first chaiman, Dr Maurice Rogers retired in 1974 he wrote an open letter stating that he believed that your society had had “a significant influence in maintaining the surroundings to our homes at least as attractive as we found them”. It’s often enough said that the only constant thing in life is change, but it is my view that without the presence of the Society to moderate that change then the parishes of Hitcham and Taplow would have been a lot less attractive than when Dr. Rogers left us.
In more recent years we began to learn to play the game of anticipating what the planners and the government intended for our lovely parish, lying as it does so enticingly athwart the green space between Slough and Maidenhead, by attempting to tell them what we would like to see happen, given the unrelenting pressure to build and build simply because the land was there to be built on.
We had a go at producing a Village Design Statement, using the one produced by Wheatley as an exemplar. This idea of a VDS matured into our Parish Plan under the guidance of Professor Trevallion and the Parish Council. I think it perfidious that after the work we all put into its creation that we were eventually told that it would not, after all, be used by the increasingly remote planners as a Supplementary Planning Document (which they had promised it would be) Had it been accepted as a planning supplement then, as the growing Regionalisation of our beloved country and the concomitant bureaucratisation and remoteness of the planners proceeded apace, they would at least have had some idea of where and what Taplow was. As it happened the new and somewhat unwieldy system devised by the government is still in some disarray. The latest version of the South Bucks Core Strategy clearly shows that local planners are desperately trying to avoid the worst excesses of centralised planning and showing true care for our green land. In particular the requirement for a proper planning brief for the future development of the Mill Lane site is a welcome step in the right direction. Our constant pressure on the District Council has, I believe paid off. Together we have made a difference, we are highly visible, our parish is not just a strip of available development land between two expanding conurbations.
During these latter years we also created links with other societies, such as the Chiltern Society but perhaps most importantly with ANTAS (the Association of North Thames Amenity Societies) which gives us access to about 20 other societies which have added critical mass to our voice on larger issues.
In this later period we have also been moving with the times in engaging ourselves in wider community activities and in joining up with the younger folk responsible for the marvellous Taplow Heritage Day. In this connection it’s worth noting that your committee is not getting any younger and is in serious need of fresh faces to carry the torch forward to face the challenges of the Society’s next 50 years.
Fred Russell
