Colchester City Centre Masterplan SPD

The St Mary's Residents Association would like to understand why St John's car park has been included for potential safety improvements instead of St Mary's car park.

St Mary's car park will form one of the key corridors, and rightly so with so much culture just over the bridge - Balkerne Gate, Jumbo, the Roman Walls plus also the arts centre and Mercury theatre which are key to Colchester's Economy. The anti social behaviour and dangerous driving must be resolved by safety improvements first to make this car park an attractive and safe place to park for visitors and residents. St John's now closes at 7pm which has resolved much of the anti social behaviour but St Mary's still issues at least weekly. One of our residents recently recorded cars racing each other on a Sunday evening around the car park while car park users were returning their cars. Is that the experience we want for visitors? Especially if the new hotel is built in the old post office building - this will be a key car park for that.

Our residents suffer on a regular basis and have been reporting the issues since 2016. The lack of management and control over this car park leads to a loss of peaceful use of residents homes, this loss of amenity means that residents, be they newborns to the elderly, key workers and shift workers, are unable to use their homes as a place of peace and safety. We know that the police back safety measures such as barriers so we can't understand why this is not included in the masterplan.