Tower and Town, September 2018 (view the full edition)Marlborough Civic SocietyThere has been a Civic Society in Marlborough for eight years now, and I wonder what you know of it? Sorry, if you're a member, of course (there are nearly 200) and even if you're not you get the Society's Newsletters distributed with the morning papers. Well, what do you think of it? Not about the Civic Society, I mean, but about Marlborough, because that's what the Society is all about, not just about our old buildings, either, as though who lived in them or what went on in them wasn't important, but about the surroundings that we residents continue to prefer to our daily lives. Ask any tourist and he'll tell you about the High Street and clearly that's a focus of everyone's attention. Why do passers- by admire it? Why do we like it? It can't just be a matter of individual taste - red brick, tile hung walls, red-tiled gables, the market, the Town Hall, the two Churches and so on - making a harmonious whole. Not only can we see what we like, we can know why we like it, and we'd know, too, if any detail was wrong or out of place. This sounds like a recipe for smugness, for traditionalism and getting "conservation" a bad name. But we change and must do so, and the Civic Society recognises this; individuals have their freedom to design, build and develop their own properties as well as their lives, but as we are not "islands" so inevitably there are conflicts of interest. Believing, as it does, that what surrounds us affects the way we are, the Civic Society makes its views known to, disagrees with, or supports (variously) the Town and Kennet District Councils in their attempts to solve these conflicts, and it maintains, on the whole, that the colours, shape and textures of the Marlborough that we have is more or less what we like and need in the future. To be specific (after all it's the specific issue that stirs us here), would you like a river walk by the Kennet, are you concerned about the number of vacant or dilapidated buildings in the Town Centre, could you be a paid up active member of a St Peter's Church "Trust"? There's a lot to think about and do, and we're all involved. John Osborne adds today "The Marlborough Civic Society was the busy and influential brain-child of Michael Gray. The town owes him an enormous debt, but at the moment there is no active Civic Society in Marlborough". John Osborne (1977) |