FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 6 Putting the Pieces in Place

So, some of the pieces of our jigsaw were falling into place. At Chelsfield, we had the space to store the planings; at Mulberry Way, we had the facility to treat them; and we could recycle it all at our Asphalt Plant in Erith. That corner of the jigsaw puzzle was looking pretty good. And I have to add that we were very lucky with Chelsfield. The site used to be a high-security location where the Ministry of Defence kept munitions during the last war. It consisted of eleven bunkers, where they kept the explosives, and a wide security perimeter enclosed by a high-security fence. Because it was a MoD site, it had no planning permissions; and because it had no permissions, it didn’t cost a lot. It seemed, from the sales particulars, that there was nothing you could use the site for. But we took a different view. Once we had bought it, we made an application for an Established Use Certificate, saying that the site had been used for storage and distribution – which it had. That was granted, because it was true. Then, when Kent County Council tried to limit us to using only the bunkers for storage, we appealed. It was a fifteen-acre site; why couldn’t we use the whole site? The Planning Inspector who judged the appeal agreed with us: if the site was designated suitable for storage and distribution, the designation applied to the whole site. Our gamble had paid off. We had the depot we needed to store our asphalt for later recycling.

But there was one more piece of the jigsaw that we put into place in 2010, perhaps the most precious piece of all. Once a year, the Conway Board would take time out, and go for a ‘Future’s Day’. This was a day when we allowed ourselves to think further ahead than we normally

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