The Crows Nest - genuinely popular with viewpoint users
On a summer Sunday, it can be a crush at the viewpoint car park – but if you leave your car at the bigger Fort car park, and stroll the last hundred yards, its a good place to go. There’s a tea stand, the Crows Nest, where you can get a drink or a snack.
In the winter, it can be a very different scene. The wintery blast whistles in from the icy North Sea, and on a cold day, it can be the Viking’s version of hell – freezing and nasty. But the tea hut is still there, supplying cups of tea and coffee, cheesy chips, burgers and bacon rolls, although maybe not for so many hours in the day as in summer.
How the hut’s operator, Sam Dorling, makes a living during the winter is a good question – it’s usually closed for a week or three after Christmas, for a big annual clean-up and holidays, but that’s not long. Sam has been at the viewpoint now for over twelve years and she’s a bit of a fixture. She knows everyone – the shipspotters who turn up for new vessels and cruise liners, the TV reporters who turn up from time to time to film their pieces-to-camera, and the visitors who turn up once a year from somewhere miles inland, for their annual glimpse of the sea.
But all that will be up for change this year.
Landguard Common, the peninsula of land on which the Fort and the viewpoint sit, is now under effective new management – the Landguard Partnership, its called, and its a body formed from all the official organisations with an interest in the area.
They’ve got a “vision” for the future which they seem to have found backing for, and they seem to be pushing it forward regardless of what ordinary people like you and me think about their changes.
When the Port of Felixstowe announced its southern extension plans, one of the things it undertook to do was to move the viewpoint to a new location, and to provide a temporary new building, followed by a permanent new building as a visitor centre and cafe/restaurant.
The site, a piece of dock beside the present viewpoint area, has already been fenced from the dock, and some groundworks done. The building, a temporary structure, could be moved in at any time that suits the Dock Company, and informed opinion says that might happen this coming August or September.
Temporary visitor centre - concept
What the Landguard Partnership wants to do is to find a tenant for the new building, with a lease term of (possibly!) ten years. But that same tenant will also have to equip the large new building with all of the commercial kitchen and catering equipment, plus furnishings, at a probable capital cost to them of between £30,000 and £40,000, and of course to pay rent, taxes and upkeep and maintenance on the whole structure for the whole period.
But the best of this deal is yet to come. After around 3 years, the Dock reckons it might need to extend the quay in its second stage, which means that the temporary building would need to be moved to the new Landguard Fort car park, with no view, and no tourist interest, for anything up to three or four years.
Then, once the new second stage extension is complete, the new permanent building would be constructed, and the existing tenant, and any other interested parties, would be invited to tender again.
All of this sounds very airy-fairy, in business terms, to me. Especially as It is based upon a whole string of assumptions about what the Port of Felixstowe will do over the next ten or more years – and that is a subject which I doubt that even the Port owner’s top management, in their Hong Kong executive offices, have a completely clear idea.
Final version of the cafe/centre - after the next dock extension is completed
Hutchison Ports UK have already postponed their Bathside (Harwich) terminal plans, and as their Felixstowe business comes under increasing threat from new port developments on the Thames and elsewhere, some pundits are saying that they’ll add berths to their Thamesport terminal, at the mouth of the River Medway, before doing more at Felixstowe.
So, what’s going to happen next?
The deadline for potential tenants to submit their tenders is the 11th July, just a couple of weeks away. At that point, the Landguard Partnership will be able to decide who (if anyone) will be taking on this first tender, although very obviously the final permanent viewpoint facility, when it is eventually built, will be a different proposition.
“With all of the potential variables in the melting pot, would you take it on?” I asked a very well known local businessman. His response was less than enthusiastic.
While he thought a well-promoted cafe might do well enough during the summer on the existing site, he didn’t believe that anything more than the present very low profile, low overhead operation would survive the winter. “None of the site’s winter population, shipspotters and older people on tight budgets, will be buying barista coffees at £2 a pop – they’ll be taking their flasks.”
He was even more scathing about the plan to reposition the cafe on the Fort Car Park for a number of years. “No-one will have a reason to go there with the port and sea views cut off . . so I don’t imagine anyone will buying much. A view of the Landguard Fort in December isn’t going to be too inspiring.”
http://www.felixstowenews.tv/
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