Northampton on the move

Heads up to all of you on this side of the pond and in the East Midlands area that I'll be at the Derby World Wargames show at Castle Donington International Exhibition Centre this weekend 1st & 2nd October. I'll be on the Northampton Battlefields Society / Society of Ancients stand with Phil Steele with my Northampton 1460 game. Hopefully some of you will find the time to come along, say hello and play the game. It went really well at Newark a month or so back, so hopefully you won't be disappointed.

For those of you interested in the Northampton battlefield a little update. The Borough Council is running a project to enhance the Delapre Abbey area and improve the walk ways round the battlefield. This should make it easier for disabled access, safer to approach certain areas by moving pathways away from the road and installing signage and viewing points.

It all sounds very interesting but as ever there's local politics involved. This is all happening at the same time as a major development project at the Abbey which will see a Wars of the Roses gallery and exhibit installed as well as other exhibits about the Abbey's history. It's all very exciting and long overdue. At the Northampton Battlefields Society we're actively involved in some areas and trying to get a greater involvement still. We're really keen to help out with the design, where the walk goes and what's put on the signs and information panels. That can be a challenge as for all of our various skills we're not a full time professional body and we have to balance what we like and what we want to support with what we think is destructive to the battlefield area or ill-informed in any explanations.

Which is a way of saying there haven't been many blog posts recently as I've been writing a submission for the local relevant committee members of the Council with the help of Phil (who is our Vice Chairman) & Chairman Mike. Hopefully they'll be impressed as I've wheeled out all of the report writing skills honed over years as a professional bureaucrat and my recent career as a management consultant.

I'm positive on this, and I'm really a half-full kind of guy, but there's always the fear when dealing with local politics that the glass is actually half empty. What we want to avoid is being in  the position of being consulted on a big project and then find we object to the outcome. There's the nightmare scenario of standing at a viewpoint on a battlefield tour next to a brand new shiny information panel and having to say it's wrong.

Or it could all go swimmingly!

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