Page 11 - Redditch New Town Centre Success or Failure

Redditch New Town, Success or Failure? Redditch Heritage

Of Oursleves

The Corporation has been a happy ship and the working groups have provided
both excellent corporate advice to the management team and given good
interdisciplinary experience for professional officers. Four members of staff have

received Queen's Honours in recognition of their work and six have given twenty
years or more of service each.

We have been graced by formal visits of very many national figures, most
significantly in 1983 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. The significance of our
activities has been studied by a considerable number of foreign dignitaries and

students.

Our presence in the town has touched residents both new and old, for better or
worse they might say and certainly we have been the source of much local

journalism-turning decidedly more favourable to us in the years following the announce-
ment of our demise. We have endeavoured over the last remaining three years

to emphasise a degree of normalisation and one measure of our success will be
indicated if our demise is noted hardly at all.

But the Development Corporation cannot go without the story being told and Mr
Gordon Anstis, serving as a Board Member for 20 years, has compiled and written
"The History of Redditch New Town 1964-1985" in which he has amplified

REDDITCH-SUCCESS IN THE HEART OF ENGLAND.

In Conclusion

Your predecessors were right to designate Redditch a New Town and right to

establish a Corporation to carry out the work. Such progress, such standards and
such a town could not have been so developed in any other way and in such a
relatively short period. The Corporation's work gives credit to this form of central
direction when harnessed to a combination of public and private activity.
Redditch Development Corporation is proud of its work; the co-operation of
Board and Staff, and the dedication shown by them, have proved a tremendous
stimulant in achieving the Corporation's task and whilst recognising the failures
and shortcomings, nevertheless, all leave with a sense of a job well done.

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