30m mobile mast on Cambridge's most popular park?

[gizmo]

If you live in or visit Cambridge you probably know Jesus Green as a good place to get an ice cream / go for a swim / enjoy a beer festival / picnic.

Well now you can do all of that and also admire some of EE's finest steelwork, as the City Council have received an application to erect a 30m mobile antenna on the tennis courts by the river.

This application is being made under an 'emergency' order that apparently allows the mobile operator to bypass the normal planning route.

The emergency here is particularly urgent and unforeseeable - the mast has been living on top of Park Street multi story car park for several years. There appears to be an agreement between EE and the City Council to supply a site. The City Council do not seem to have noticed that the redevelopment of the car park into a hotel means the mast will need to be removed, even though this project has been in the pipeline for a couple of years.

Anyway, if anyone in Mumsnet likes Jesus Green and has an opinion they would like to share with the council the link to do so is here

There is also (inevitably) a petition with a very pretty mock up of how lovely the mast will look and how it will encourage all of us to use our green spaces for more outdoor activity.

[PawPawNoodle]

Jesus Green is huge and the application is for a temporary, movable mast. The loss of coverage especially during a time when connectivity is essential surely outweighs a tiny bit of the Green being a bit ugly until a permanent solution is found?

[gizmo]

Hey PolPotNoodle, good to hear from you.

Agreed Jesus Green is huge, but so is a 30m mast. The problem is that there is no plan for removing it, ie no sign that the council are looking for alternative sites to put the thing. If they haven't managed to sort it out in the three years they've been planning the Park Street redevelopment, I'm not clear how or why they think things will change in the next eighteen months.

So my suspicion is that we end up with a permanent antenna and loose a chunk of park (tennis courts at the moment).

I've got no problem with mobile, yes we all need it and we're lucky in Cambridge that actually we're very well connected. But I'm not keen that the council goes about cutting bits off a very busy park because they haven't been terribly effective in finding a more suitable rooftop site. Or in negotiating with the developer at the Park St site to replace the antenna when the project is completed.