Inevitable expansion of the Dartington Trust? Maybe a Dartington Watch should scrutinse the developments?

By Gadfly, on Sunday, January 17, 2010

New contributor Gadfly suggests a Dartington Watch to scrutinise developments at the estate

Let me make a prediction for the coming year, in fact, to be even more ambitious, the new decade as well. Sadly, no great revelations here about upcoming X Factor winners, or next techno gadget, just the gloomy realisation that we are now due for an inevitable expansion of Dartington Trust.

Recently, I’ve searched the internet to find out what has happened to the organisations that protested about the removal of the Dartington College of Arts to Falmouth. That removal was astonishingly quick, given the level of support to prevent it that was allegedly pledged by many art, music and educational luminaries.

Naively perhaps, I imagined that bigwigs in the arts world had good access to tame barristers to delay the process for years. Anyway all clearly a done deal now, so no use going back over tired old ground an’ all. No surprise then, that the protest blogs and sites concerned with the direction Dartington is taking, either don’t seem to have had any traffic for a while, or have been shut down.

Of course, I can’t claim my searches were exhaustive, or even very good, so I look forward to being corrected. In the meantime, the question remains, where is all the critical appraisal of the potentially even bigger changes that are likely to take place at Dartington?

Surely there is a danger that now all the hissy fits over the move are safely confined to the noughties, the real job of ‘re-configuring’ the estate can begin in earnest and without troublesome killjoys bleating on about the original aims of the Elmhirsts whose dosh set the place up. Moving the college attracted a large amount of hot air and tutting that turned out to be totally useless, so does the ‘protest fatigue’ from this failed campaign, mean that the trust calculates it has a free hand in divvying up the estate?

With the year barely off and running, my predictive powers are quite uncanny. Already there is an announcement of plans for 120 retirement apartments at the Foxhole site. A Marriott Golf and Country Club on a soon to be razed Higher Close can’t be far behind.

Ah, hold on you say, each new ‘re-configuring’ will have to go through a lengthy public/community consultation phase. Yeah right.

The college of arts was lost, but subverting the ethos of the Dartington estate would be an even greater disgrace. I suggest a Dartington Watch to scrutinise each move the trust makes. Anyone out there agree?

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(Image: In the Cider Press Centre The Cider Press Centre is a complex of shops housed in a number of old buildings. Profits go to support the Dartington Hall Trust charity © Copyright Tony Atkin and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.)