JennyMorgan

Only by shady characters!

Repeat a lie enough & it will eventually be accepted as the truth by some people. Me thinks that the ASA is taking the easy way out and that perhaps Packman got there first!

Sorry. John. but that is nonsense. We either have boundaries or we don't. Since there are legislative issues in being a national park then we have to have such boundaries. The issue of planning policies immediately spring to mind.

Hopefully it will suffer a critical erectile dysfunction during its attempted conception!

Please, no 'revive forty-fives' featuring Barry Manilow or Donald Peers!

Somebody must have complained!

Magnificent wash!!

Please, don't let it become 'posh'. The hippy aspect of the Locks has long been a large part of its attraction. One blessing is the old bridge at Beccles, it's something of a leveller.

Something oddly familiar about one of those posters! This year's Green Book made good use of those posters on its cover.

Spot on, exactly right, in my humble opinion!

Thanks for the correction. Haven't mastered the art of cutting & pasting on this one forum.

Colin was also an angler with plenty of sound advice about the area. Pity that he's gone, decent bloke.

Just hope that the Lock is operational!

The Authority has a responsibility to 'promote the special qualities of the area', which, apparently Packman has taken as carte blanch for a number of activities including being responsible for tourism and the Acle Debacle.

The first picture shows Susan at work. For me the days of Walter Coe took some beating!

You have, intentionally or not, opened the can of worms. If we can imagine for one moment that the Broads is actually a national park, hard I know, but where is the boundary? I have asked DEFRA, the National Parks people, the BA, the Ordnance Survey and even Google, not one has been able to give me a definitive answer. The BA offered predictable bluster but when push came to shove absolutely nothing definite, except a grudgingly given admission that the Broads was only known as a NP for marketing purposes but that it wasn't one by legislation. Haven got that one straight I'm still no nearer being able to answer East Coast's question! Apart from Norwich I am not aware of any adjacent Authority claiming to be a national park. Perhaps someone else knows better? Whatever, marketing confusion must surely be a fact by now. Where is the mythical Broads national park? Seemingly no one actually knows! In the meantime we have an uncoordinated mish mash of advertisers and tourist boards/authorities, a situation that helps absolutely no one. Just a thought, if the Broads was eventually to become a national park then where should the boundary be? Would there then be an actual Broads National Park Authority or would it be am an amalgam of all the relevant authorities which would also include the Broads Authority? DEFRA has made it absolutely clear that the BA can not call itself the BNP Authority.

Anyway, back to my earlier question. what do people expect of a national park? Me, if I were a visitor to the Broads, I would expect decent toilets and showers, waste disposal, pubs with tables and chairs that aren't minutes from collapsing, a network of attractions, similarly a network of hostels and interconnected footpaths for those on foot or bike, the same for those in boats (especially camping type boats, greater facilities for visiting boats from the continent, high quality alternatives to hostels and burger bars, far more access to the natural Broads, e.g. Hoveton Great Broad. That's just for starters, but largely this should be down to private enterprise. What I don't want to see is a Disney Land approach.

I like that picture too, but then I like both the Broads & the Wherries, but for all that I don't see it as being representative of a national park as such. My guess is that Dr P has been working hard within the corridors of National Parks House! Have to go along with Chris on this one. In the meantime another Broads picture, just to add a tad of balance to the debate you understand!

Well said, Loo. It's been asked elsewhere and is worth asking here, 'what do people expect of a national park?' The next question being 'does the Broads meet that expectation?' I also wonder what were the thoughts of those 12% who visited the mythical BNP and whether they will return or not.

The Doctor might say that it is the justification , well, he would!

Interestingly the BA are organising a series of workshops in order replace the Broads Forum. Not a political statement, just one of fact. The first workshop is on the question of 'access' which seems reasonable enough. As it is I have my own thoughts on that topic but nevertheless it is one that needs discussing. For a kick off, and this applies both to national parks and faux one too, at what point does excessive access lead to the destruction of what is being accessed? Horning, for example, is rammed but the footpaths and marshes are not, so we need both access and reason to visit the Broads away from the water's edge. However, the Broads Authority's legislative area is pretty limited, much of what is attractive in the area is outside the BA's remit. The Upper Waveney, if you know where to look, is incredibly beautiful, but it is outside the formal Broads area and therefor outside the area of the mythical national park, the BNP. It is well worth visiting the Waveney Valley, as is North Norfolk, also well outside the BNP. In a nutshell I don't see a way forward, not unless East Anglia proper resorts to just one all embracing tourist authority rather than the confusion and mess of competing authorities that we have now and I don't see that happening. As it is, in my opinion, the unfortunate BNP tag is leading to both identity and marketing confusion. On top of that the BA is not a tourist authority.

Just a thought, is there an environmental cost to having dissolved anodes? Perhaps not a potential issue in isolation but with the concentrations of boats on the North Rivers or at Brundall there must surely be a discernable zinc content to our rivers? Just curious!

That begs the question as to how often boats should be slipped. I know that a number of folk slip their boats every two years or more and that some folk haven't done so in years. In a nutshell what damage can be done to a boat once the anodes have gone? I have certainly seen timber boats where fastenings have departed this world and planks have sprung but what about damage to glass boats?

Obviously a greater problem than some folk realise. I suspect not helped by some totally unqualified DIY installations.

Ours was only red because we had a friend who was a bodywork painter at our local coach builders, where buses tended to be a uniform London Transport red. Hand painted, with a brush, superb. Ours was eventually buried under the camp site at the Waveney River Centre. It was her mechanics that died, not her bodywork.