Last week canvassing on Whiterails Drive I got my first complaint about the mushroom farm off Cottage Lane. To be fair it’s more like a mushroom factory than a farm, but I thought I’d hear more about it on the doorstep. It wasn’t mentioned once on Redgate, nor Halsall Lane but I’m guessing that a session down Cottage Lane will put me right.

I must confess to having been ambivalent about the farm. I had noticed it when leafleting the other week but it wasn’t overwhelming and I remember Val Hopley raising it back in the days when I was a young Skem Cllr. My default position was broadly – “well, they make mushrooms… and mushrooms are good, aren’t they?”.

It’s tricky. Unlike, say, Edge Hill where the side-effects of expansion can be mitigated through additional campus accomodation, planning, etc. There isn’t much to mitigate a farm’s smell. Realistically, all that can be done in the short term is for local residents to keep on top of every planning application that comes in; for them to assess what effect it will have and to agree / oppose as necessary.

Obviously one complaint gets it on the radar, but I need to schedule in a canvass down Cottage Lane to try and gauge what people are really thinking.