Yesterday I went on a walkbout around Gatley (not the whole village – there’s only so much you can cover in 90 minutes!).  It was with our new Area Conditions Officer Julie Henshall and Richard Daniels, also from Environmental Services at Stockport Council – I’m grateful to both of them for coming out with me.

Here are some of the things we identified for action:

• Bags of rubbish dumped by station car park – Environmental Services will be tracing the owners.
• Poor state of land around electricity substation -vegetation needs tidying.  It should be United Utilities’ responsibility.
• Concrete bollard by station underpass broken, needs repair
• Poor state of path along the back of the station car park – always gets muddy.
• Litter is starting to build up around Gatley Station again, so we need Network Rail to clear up inside the railings and the Council to clear up on the verges.
• The alleyway running down from the Station car park past the end of Brentwood Drive to Gatley Road is in poor condition.  The fence leans out dangerously in places and whole fence panels are missing in others.  Vegetation grows over the top of the path in several places, blocking light from some of the streetlamps. There’s also some graffiti on the panels and the lampposts.
• Although not too bad at the moment, we identified the area where the motorway slip road comes onto the South Park Road Estate as often troubled with litter, graffiti and overgrown vegetation.
• On Kingsway southbound where the motorway slip road meets the A34 there’s obviously been an accident, probably with a car coming through a bush on the slip and hitting the fence by the A34.  The bush is broken and the metal fence is, at one point ripped out of the ground.
• Along the east side of Kingsway north of Gatley Road there’s quite a bit of litter on banks, verges and parking bays.
• We took a look at litter around Kingsway High School.  Environmental Services do go into the school to do assemblies around littering and have been known to hand out £75 penalty notices when the warnings remain ignored.
• The state of the electricity substation at the end of Foxland Road (by Springfield) is poor, with litter strewn around the front area.  The Council will chase up United Utilities to get it cleaned.
• There’s a lot of litter on Network Rail land around the railway bridge at the end of Foxland Road, plus overgrown brambles on the north side.
• More litter along the path from Foxland to Hawthorn, which I’ve asked the Council to sort out.
• The streetlight outside the entrance to Gatley Primary’s nursery school is faulty.
• Some graffiti on signs at the Gatley Green entrance to the Recreation Ground (I was very pleased to see graffiti on the skateboard ramps and old pavillion has been cleaned off).
• Detritus on the land at the back of the Tatton needs to get cleaned away.
• Brown wheelie bin someone left in front of the Tatton to be cleared away.