This week Gerry Brooke looks back at the weather and 1960s planning issues

If you thought we are having an especially chilly winter then how about the one in which lingered on into March 1965.

Forty-five years ago this week the whole country, but especially the North of England and Scotland, was hit by arctic type weather.

It was, said the weathermen, the coldest March night since the hard winter of 1947.

In the West, freezing temperatures (minus 5 degrees centigrade) and icy roads were the order of the day.

In the Post conservation issues - or rather demolition ones - were very much to the fore.

Bristol’s Civic Society was pleading with the Corporation to save historic Brunswick Square and St James’s Square from the bulldozer.

The society said that, though superficially shabby, the squares could be restored with old a new standing side by side in any future development.

“If this is not done, the present rate of destruction means that in a few years Bristol’s collection of historic buildings will be reduced to a few churches, King Street and Georgian Clifton” said the society’s newsletter.

Despite the please, St James’ Square was lost.

Planned for it at the time was a multi storey garage, a small group of shops, a bank, a pub and a restaurant.

But the tide was slowly on the turn in the brash new world that was the 1960s.

Lindley Steen, the city’s deputy planning officer, made a plea for a national fund to be set up to refurbish and maintain historic buildings.

It was unfair, he said, to expect local authorities to restore these properties out of their own income.

“When you are dealing with the expenditure of public money” he said, “there are no finances for restoration unless the building becomes economically viable.

“ I might be a Philistine but Brunswick Square seems to me not the best example of Georgian development.”

Out in North Somerset the planning committee woke up just in time to stop a Mr F.J.Burnett from ruining “Little Switzerland” - a beauty spot at Rowberrow, on the edge of the Mendips.

A storm of protest had broken out when bulldozers had moved in to start work on 11 houses.

Mr Burnett, it appears, had been given permission to build 15 houses in the valley some 20 years previously, before certain planning legislation was in force.

In Easton, however, is was agreed that a multi storey car park could be erected to garage cars for people living in a 17 story block of flats, four blocks of maisonettes and 29 houses in the Lion Street area.

The nine acre site, due for completion in 1969, was due to house 770 people.

In other news a soon to be restored GWR steam engine, built in Swindon in 1905, was being heralded at a star exhibit for a new Museum of Bristol planned for Wine Street.

In North Somerset it was announced that, once the railway track between Yattton and Cheddar had been cleared, then a start would be made on the planned £200,000 Axbridge by-pass.

And finally, a yacht tragedy in Rhodes led to the death of the Duke of Beaufort’s heir, “Bobby” Somerset.

His 50 foot boat had capsized in a storm.

Although the crew of four survived two young women were also found drowned.