East Bergholt Parish Council, Chairs Report, 9/7/26

Nigel Roberts
It’s been a very busy month with all the Constable events, but the single most significant matter
affecting the Parish Council was the passing of Nigel, our friend and highly valued fellow councillor.
We have a separate item on the agenda, item 3, to acknowledge Nigel’s work but there are also
some practical issues to address to try to fill the gap that Nigel leaves. At item 7 we will elect a Vice-
Chair and other appointments but there is a lot of important work that Nigel was doing that we will
need to address and ask other councillors to volunteer to take on.
1. Lead the PCs Road Safety project along B1070 from St James place to Constable Gardens,
working with PJA
2. Web site content oversight
3. PC policy revisions

Constable Celebrations
On 11 June I was up early for a live Radio Suffolk interview to introduce Constable’s birthday. I
mentioned the Conservation Area Extension which conserves our Constable Country and which is
the Parish Council’s long term legacy for this Constable year. I also covered the Summer Fair and the
Community Councils community art “Paint- Constable-by-numbers’ project. The Summer Fair was a
huge success and thanks are due to Cllr Marion Burns who led the project team, as well as to Louise
Smith, Nicki Reed who made this the biggest fair we have ever had, and thank you to all the parish
councillors who worked hard to make the day such a success in bringing our community together.
Thank you also to all the village organisations who took part and put on spectacular events. I must
also mention that the EBCC community art project was a great success with over 300 village artists
taking part and I am pleased to be able to say that thanks to the EB Twinning Association our twin
village in France, Barbizon, is also painting a twin picture to one of the paintings which they will
launch on 20 September at their history fair.
We are also grateful to Marion for establishing a working group (in Our View group: East Bergholt
Society, National Trust, St Marys Church, Constable Hall, East Bergholt Community Council, with
representation from Brantham and Dedham PCs) of the core village organisations who combined to
work together to make this a very busy year of Constable activities. The group met from October
2025 to May 2026 and found it very helpful to work with each other, coordinate diaries of events,
and share resources. The success of this group has made the organisations think that it would be a
good idea to continue to meet for the longer term and no doubt there will be further proposals on
this to the Parish Council in the near future. This is another legacy of Constable’s celebration year.

Conservation Area Extension update
Babergh’s consultation was successful. Written responses were light in number and positive, but this
is likely to reflect the fact that most people who talk to me about the project are entirely in favour,
expressing a very positive view on conserving our Constable views. I put the information on the PC
stall at the village fair and there was a great deal of very positive inspection of the plans by residents
who stopped to examine the details. The next stage is the paper goes to full Babergh Council for
decision on the 21 July for decision. The next steps after that is to write a Conservation Area
Management Plan and the Parish Council will continue to be consulted by Babergh in the
construction of this.

Letter to St Mary’s to support their lottery bid
St Mary’s church asked if the Parish Council could write a letter of support for their next stage bid to
the Lottery Fund. They have completed the first phase, the evidence gathering stage, and are now
asking for the money to do the work of saving the grade 1 listed building by mending the roof and

other internal alterations to help the church run even more community events. You will see my
letter in correspondence papers.

CPSO
East Bergholt and Brantham have both signed the Service Level Agreement and we are now waiting
for recruitment to be completed. We hope that a PCSO to be ready and trained and walking our
streets by the end of September.

Joan Miller, 8/7/26