VE Day (Victory Europe) was the day the nation threw off the constraints of war. The hoarding of string and brown paper for recycling, the blackout to prevent chinks of light aiding enemy bombers.

In 2005, 60 years after the event the Society in collaboration with Beverley Town Council published a collection of memories of the war and of that day.

Go here for THE VE DAY MEMORIES

The Projects Sub-Committee has been working on a plan to create a sensory garden in Beverley, for the particular benefit of people with a disability, but which has universal appeal. We have sought the advice of representatives of disabled people in identifying the right location for such a project.

The East Riding of Yorkshire Council have co-operated fully with us in agreeing to the use of the western end of the Coronation Garden in North Bar Within for the development of a sensory area and in undertaking its future maintenance. St Mary's Parish Church Council has also given us valuable help in obtaining a Church Faculty to carry out the work. In addition we are most grateful to both the ERYC and the Beverley Town Council for their assistance in obtaining the necessary funding to employ a Landscape Architect and to meet the main construction costs.

Construction work started on January 31st 2005 and is due to be completed by April. Although of limited scale the garden will include a range of planting with year-round interest in colour, texture and scent, a water feature, a pergola, some tactile sculptural forms and increased seating. We hope this project will enhance the Coronation Garden in its 50th Anniversary Year and provide a real community facility.

In a straw poll of no statistical significance, members of the Civic Society voted Westwood what they most liked about Beverley. The Society has since its beginning tried to protect those aspects of Westwood that caused it to be called in the mid 19th-century ‘The People’s Park’.

The Society has opposed the building of public toilets, car parks, hard standing, new footpaths, commuter parking, mountain bike trails, skate-parks and the like, realising that the wildness of the land is part of its charm. It published Westwood Study (two editions). Recently (2004-5) it has commissioned a survey of Newbegin Pits/Union Bushes, and also organised the planting of 35 new trees (oak, beech, ash, chestnut and field maple, with holly, hawthorn, sweetbriars) to replace decaying forest trees, with money obtained from ERYC’s Commuted Sums Fund.

The Westwood Group of the Society will continue with members’ help to protect and enhance the land: possibly by commissioning a survey of Limekiln Pits, repair to the verges where grass is destroyed, further tree planting, a new edition of Westwood Study, additional information boards about archaeology, history and ecology, and possibly a nature trail and associated leaflet. Any suggestions welcomed!

In Beverley the car is king. The streets through the town are communication pipes down which travel steel containers cocooning their drivers as they move rapidly between A and B. At points of greatest vulnerability cars are protected from pedestrians by lining the pipes with steel railings. Throughout the pipe system there is a multiplicity of navigation and prohibition signs that the system designers think vital to its working efficiency. Cars are moving quickly, there isn’t the time to think, drivers need to make quick decisions so the signs are big, colourful and often lit up so as to stand out from a visually confusing background.

The visible result, to quote Matthew Parris is ‘Oppressive. Crushing. Numbing. Our urban environment is a tangle of steel, plastic, glass and tin in a forest of poles…’

Parris continues ‘Road safety must remain a priority, but much signage is aimed less at safety than at depriving drivers of the courtroom excuse that “nobody told me”’.

The Society is campaigning to win back our street environment from the command and control culture of the highway engineers. More.....