Bit of a long post so apologies in advance.
Essex County Council are holding consultation meetings on the 2012 Olympic Mountain Biking event. There was one last night which I went to and there is another one this morning.
The meeting was chaired by the head of the quango which has been set up to look after the legacy of the event and manage it from a local perspective. His major qualification seems to be that he runs a shoe shop.
Anyway, various people were there from Castle Point and Southend Councils, Essex County Council, the Olympics authorities, Police and the Salvation Army. The event was pretty well attended I’d guestimate 100 people were there. Mainly local residents, and mainly over 50. Their major concern last nights, as at the last meeting, was parking, the number of spectators, security, traffic, road access, oh and parking again.
A few interesting bits of information came out of the meeting though.
The guy from Essex County Council acknowledged that the County Park where the event is to be held is already heavily used by mountain bikers but that he considers there to be a big problem with user conflict on the trails and wants to use the Olympics course as a way of moving mountain bikers away from the trails they are currently using (although he did acknowledge that they legally can’t stop people using the current trails).
The majority of the actual event will be held on farmland owned by the Salvation Army next to the Country Park not in the Park itself. The long-term plan is that Essex County Council will lease this land from the Salvation Army and manage it on an ongoing basis including managing the mountain biking facilities. They are planning to start building the course in 2010 and to hold a trial event in 2011 before the full event in 2012. They said that they then hope to use the course to hold one event per year after that.
The course is going to be about 5km and will be predominantly singletrack. They hope to build a skills area as well and the major focus of the legacy use of the course will be geared towards families, school groups and novices.
There are plans to legalise the cycle route along the sea front to the Country Park and the legacy facilities from both Leigh on Sea and Benfleet (currently heavily, but illegally, used by cyclists).
In the legacy subgroup after the main meeting I raised that point that for most mountain bikers a 5km course isn’t particularly long and asked whether there were any plans to try and tie the legacy facilities into the existing trail network both inside the county park and outside (Shipwrights Wood, Belfairs, West Wood for locals) so that a longer loop could be put together but I didn’t get much of a response.
I know a few people from here went to the last meetings. Did anyone else go along to these ones? Also there was some mention of a mountain biking group they have been consulting. Is anyone part of this or know who is?
