The sign-gobblers have been at it again. One has to worry about their professional dietary needs.
An innocent small business on the shores of Loch Fyne, below and largely hidden from the road, joyfully providing a real service to the area – and to passing visitors – has been haunted by belligerent haggery from Argyll and Council’s planning department over his signage.
Quarry Point Garden Centre and Coffee Shop is on the lochside, a little north of the renowned ‘Himalayan’ Crarae Gardens, sharing a promontory onto Loch Fyne with Scottish Salmon Farm’s Quarry Point establishment.
The planners made the salmon farm, just north of the garden centre and coffee shop, plant trees at the roadside to disguise its presence from passing traffic.
This was the planning equivalent of the hilarious middle class Victorian craze for hiding the roll of lavatory paper under the net skirts of a ballerina doll.
In a country guilty of selling itself on scenery while leaving it masked behind unchallenged acres of self-seeding scrub, this instruction was simply foolish. Whether one agrees with salmon farming or not, seeing the farms in our lochs is simply evidence of ongoing marine business, like prawn boats and creelers.
However, these trees obediently planted by the salmon farmers as visual smelling salts for the faint hearted, now obscure the presence of the garden centre and log cabin coffee shop that are its fellow business. Traffic going south into Argyll on the A83 cannot see it, tucked away behind the foliage and below the road.
Our top photo is the very most you will see as you drive past – and only if you’re looking. And that doesn’t tell you what it actually is.
This business – any business – needs signs and not just any signs anywhere but signs with the information potential customers need, placed with good advance warning and strategically located to preserve road safety without diverting drivers’ attention off the road.
So Frank Penman who, with his wife, Eileen, runs the Garden Centre and Coffee Shop, put up some intelligent signs designed to let passing traffic know of the existence of their services and to do so in good time to let them slow down to turn off the road into his generous lochside car park.
He had a simple sign (above) high on a tree, impeding nothing, giving information and distance and easily absorbed by peripheral vision without driver taking their eyes off the road.
That had to come down.
He had a couple of little mid-thigh-high sandwich boards (below) near and on either side of the entrance.
They had to go as well. He pointed out that these went out and were brought back in at the start and finish of each working day. That made no difference.
He was told he could put strictly controlled signage on the actual building – but given the position of the building, off and below the road and visible only in short glimpses on the approach from the north, this could no nothing except imperil road safety. Drivers would – serially – have to turn their heads 90 degrees left to get a notion of what was available.
A genial man (who does a neat double act in casual stand-up comedy banter with his wife – it’s her year to answer back, by the way) and with a dicky heart to consider, Frank Penman is not looking for trouble. In his many discussions with the planning dalek, he repeatedly said: ‘I’m not looking for an argument, hen. I just want to know what I can do here.’
He suggested that the planners design signage they would approve, indicate where it could be placed and he would pay for it. But no. One can understand this ‘No’ but the suggestion underlines the problem. of the expensive lottery of business signage.
Customer information and road safety
Me Penman simply needs to let his potential customers know that his business exists – and, in the interests of public safety, to let them know in good time to protect against road accidents.
Without the signs, we can testify to witnessing, on a regular basis, drivers seeing the coffee shop very late and, glad of a convenient place to stop, braking suddenly and hard at its wide entrance. (The main sign in the photograph below is for the Salmon Farm. There is none for the Garden Centre and Coffee Shop – They’ve all been forbidden.. The little temporary ‘progressive signs’ relate to a car boot sale.)
On this quite fast stretch of road, with cars and fleets of bikers headed into Argyll, this inevitable sudden braking is immediately dangerous.
We can also testify to seeing cars brake in this way, not get sufficiently slowed to make the left turn into the car park but stop when they can and reverse back – on the A83.
Traffic police have told Mr Penman that they welcome early warning signage as a significant contributor to road safety; and they, of course, recognise the risks of late braking and reversing. In a world which still seems incapable of joined up policy thinking, these on-the-ground professional perspectives do not seem to percolate to planning-wonks, who assume they know best.
Even locals, who make a regular meet-up for coffee and cake at Quarry Point part of the weekly pattern of their lives, can miss its entrance. They know where the business is but the trees at the roadside by the nearby salmon farm disguise the exact spot even to those very familiar with the area.
While we were there, a customer (above right) who was just leaving, told Mr Penman about a car he’d seen earlier, stopping beyond the entrance and reversing back to get in.
The business
This business serves a real purpose It offers a convenient, safe and attractive stopping place for refreshment and leg-stretching to passing private and business traffic. It has plenty of parking space. It offers real coffee – ground and percolated per cup; home baking, good soup and the endlessly seductive all-day breakfast.
You can sit inside, outside or take away snacks to your car and breathe in the tranquillity of the loch view (above) as an antidote to a long drive.
The grounds are attractive and well kept – the exit is photographed below – with points of colour from the plants in the garden centre end of the business. The generous parking area makes this an easy loading point for plants, Mr Penman’s signature hanging baskets, plant pots and other garden paraphernalia.
It also makes a safe and easy point for loading onto trailers or trucks the garden sheds he builds.
The name shared by the Penman’s business and the neighbouring salmon farm - Quarry Point – is quickly visible. The old Crarae Quarry soars to the sky just across the road, tree fringed, its grey and pink local granite riven and scored with the long gone ravages of quarrying and now softened with fluffs of hardy verbiage.
Crarae Quarry was once the scene of a major national disaster. On 25th September 1886, a pleasure steamer with a load of Glasgow civic dignitaries aboard landed by arrangent at the now disused quarry pier at Crarae – to witness a quarry explosion.
The bang went off on schedule and as the dust settled, 300 sightseers – the dignitaries and others interested – pressed forwards into the quarry to see the outcome.
Those in front stumbled and fell. Those behind saw this as misfortune and pressed ahead.
They too fell before it was realised that this was more than coincidence.
Seven died and around fifty suffered from after effects of what was later understood to be the release of natural methane gas from the dislodged rocks in the quarry. The eager visitors had crowded in too quickly after the explosion for the gas to have safely dispersed. The event was known in Glasgow as ‘Black Saturday’.
Today peregrine falcons nest in the disused quarry face. Sometimes when Frank Penman comes in to work, long before the normal working day, there is a peregrine on the tree just above the plant racks in his garden centre.
He loves this place and its easy to see why. The greenery and the plants at Quarry Point sit snugly below the drama of the old quarry face just over the road – which becomes irrelevant. The hoarse caws of crows and the high cry of the peregrines are audible almost all the time. If you watch closely, you are virtually bound to see the hawks wheel and soar around and above the quarry.
And then there’s Loch Fyne.
This site has seen a progression of failed businesses over the years – most of them eateries of one kind or another. The Penman business sees the Garden Centre subsidise the Coffee Shop, sometimes almost entirely.
By coincidence, Frank Penman and his son built this log-cabin structure around 20 years ago. He has now established his own business there and the combined services have so far, seen it survive longer than its predecessors.
Of course he is feeling the pain of the recession but he is angry at the artificial obstructions to the continuation of his business that the unexplained attitudes of the planning-wonks have brought down upon him.
This is not a profit-driven business. It exists to make enough money to keep the Penmans going and to offer employment. But it is driven by a service ethic.
We all need road safety and drivers need places to stop where they don’t have to worry about parking, where they know they can get a good cup of coffee and something to eat – and the peacefulness and scenic attraction of Quarry Point are a huge bonus.
This all depends on drivers discovering in time that this facility exists.
Without adequate signage the Penman’s are looking at one of two damaging scenarios:
- losing business, with the traffic that sees the existence of the coffee shop and garden centre too late and, with more traffic behind, has no choice but to drive on;
- hearing the screech of brakes – a regular occurrence – and living in hope that the sound will not be followed by the harsher sound of impact.
Muddled concepts and poor practice
There seems to be a conceptual muddle around the whole issue of signage.
Mr Penman was told that his signs, which needed planing permission anyway, required an advertising licence. When he asked how he applied for one of those he was told, without explanation, that they wouldn’t give him one anyway.
After the energetic entry into the matter of Highlands and Islands MSP, Jamie McGrigor, in support of Mr Penman, this was revised by a more senior officer to a more careful written statement that it would be unlikely for a advertising licence to be granted him. This statement too was unaccompanied by any attempt at an explanation.
This is again evidence of the autocratic and rather stalinist administration that has come to typify local government in Argyll and Bute, It simply will not do. This is not aimed an enabling anything.
When the current Scottish Government came to power originally in 2007, Cabinet Secretary for Finance, John Swinney, made it clear that the entire drive of the government would be to find ways of saying yes. of freeing up the drive to succeed in business that Scotland so badly needs.
We need to see this in practice, down to local level, where the bread and butter of a sustainable economy is slapped on most people’s plates
And any sign of any kind is, in the fullest sense, ‘advertising’ something. We need to sharpen u pand if it means shipping out the jobsworths, that’s been a long time coming.
Selectivity, discrimination and poor practice
It is a manifest fact that the road between Inveraray and Minard has many business signs – all necessary to the survival of the small businesses vital to the struggling economy of this dispersed rural region.
Many of these signs are much more visually invasive than those Mr Penman has been compelled to remove – and all are easily acceptable as a normal sign of life and work.
When he asked his tormentor ‘Why me, when there are plenty of others?’, the response Mr Penman got, on more than one occasion, was an aggressive challenge: ‘Do you want to report them?’
And of course he doesn’t – and didn’t. This sort of invitation is a shameful abdication of professional responsibility on the part of the planner concerned.
Either there is a defensible rule for signage or there is not.
If there is, it must be applied to everyone.
If it is not defensible – and we contend that it is not – is should be abandoned or radically revised.
Doing a gannet swoop on a single unfortunate and challenging him to shop others in his own defence is professionally inexcusable on both fronts.
Argyll badly needs as many small business as it can get. It needs them to sustain and grow its local economy. They are crucial to breaking the sick dependency on public sector employment that aeons of short-termism in incompetent local government has inflicted upon us.
It is ironic but inevitable that it is a wage slave from the sheltered public sector that has so piously been haunting the mildly entrepreneurial Mr Penman.
As things are, we cannot see our scenery anyway. The modest amount of signage from the very few businesses that exist in rural Argyll is a least a sign that there is some commercial energy around.
We know that there are some first class people in the planning department but it cannot achieve as it should without better conceptual thinking, more comprehensive and connected policy-making, a more realistic sense of purpose and priorities – and a public-facing presence that is a damned sight more defensible than Mr Penman has met.