Trevor Cotton, member of the Alsager Station Friends volunteers, has been awarded the Outstanding Volunteer Contribution Award 2014 by East Midlands Trains.

The award was made at the train operator’s annual meeting and lunch for station adopters, held at Derby on Friday 11 July. Trevor was chosen by EMT from a host of nominations made by EMT’s route station management team staff and community rail officers.

A volunteer at Alsager since 2007, Trevor is one of the original members of the station’s steadfast volunteer team, whose work has transformed the station gardens to make Alsager a more welcoming and attractive station, which is much appreciated by passengers.

Faye Lambert, Community Rail Officer for the North Staffordshire Line, which includes Alsager station, said: [Read more…]

Milton Park community garden is blooming again – thanks to an attractive revamp supported by Cheshire East Council.

The £40,000 refurbishment has been carried out at the Milton Park Community Garden, which is the main gateway to Alsager’s Milton Park, off Crewe Road.

The extensive scheme has transformed a dilapidated area into a pleasant place to sit and relax. It also now forms an attractive backdrop for photographs as well as weddings and Christenings conducted at the Parish Church of St Mary Magdalene opposite.

The improvements project included [Read more…]

On Saturday August 23 the Civic Centre is having it’s official re-launch. 

There has already been extensive refurbishment since Alsager Town Council took over the running of the Centre, with more still to come.

The official opening will be at 11am and during the whole day there will be events in the town, outside the Civic and on the new Town Square outside the Co-Op.

Everyone is welcome to come along and see this exciting community facility.

Developers held an exhibition at the end of July to display their latest plans for the MMU site in Hassall Road.

David Wilson Homes and Barratt Homes presented their proposals for the sports development and new residential development.

The plans include up to 500 homes and new sporting facilities of all-weather and grass pitches for football, hockey and cricket, along with a new clubhouse.

The developers wanted to give residents the opportunity to make comments – a number of whom were keen on having some form of University Technical College included in the plans – before submitting their final application in the next few  months.

Cheshire East’s Local Plan has been formally submitted to the Secretary of State, representing more than 4 years’ worth of public consultation and consisting of thousands of responses.

More than 40,000 responses from residents and organisations were collated, assessed and fed-in to the Submission Version of the Local Plan Strategy.

The strategy has undergone nine rounds of public consultation since 2010, and the final six-week consultation, when even more comments were received, over March and April this year, attracted 3,458 responses alone from 657 individuals and organisations.

Deputy Leader Councillor David Brown, who oversees the Local Plan, said the Council’s planning team had carried out a phenomenal job. “A Local Plan for an authority this size, and with such character and heritage, is indeed a minefield, but we have done it – and we have done it well! “ [Read more…]

Permission has been granted for the new Sainsbury’s supermarket to be built on the former Twyford’s Bathrooms site off Linley Lane.

The application that split opinion in the village was voted in by 9-0 in favour by Cheshire East planners. Many traders and business fear that the out of town development could be a death knell for the high street but a number of residents and shoppers (up to 90 percent according to some surveys) say they want the extra choice a new supermarket will bring. [Read more…]

A lasting tribute to long-serving Alsager station volunteer, Mark Hampton, who died last year, has been unveiled at Alsager station on the North Staffordshire Line.

The tribute is a memorial plaque, funded by North Staffordshire Community Rail Partnership (NSCRP) and East Midlands Trains, which has been installed on Platform 2. [Read more…]

Academics are on a mission to help the UK’s high streets – by teaming up with 10 towns, including Alsager, to bring cutting-edge research directly to them.

Researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University are leading a pioneering £250,000 project to breathe new life into the high street over the next six years, called High Street UK 2020.

Traditional British high streets have been facing ‘unprecedented threats’ in recent years as competition from the internet intensified as well as shoppers’ pockets being hit by the economic downturn. [Read more…]

North Staffordshire Community Rail Partnership and Alsager Station volunteers are celebrating again after taking yet another award, this time at the 2013 Cheshire Best Kept Stations Awards.

For the third year running, the station has been recognised at these awards for the great support it receives from the community, this time receiving the Youth Challenge award.  [Read more…]

Alsager skier Rowan Cheshire has been named in the Team GB line-up for next month’s Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The 18-year-old competes a new event, the halfpipe, at the Winter Olympics which start on Friday, February 7 in Russia. Cheshire takes her place in the team in good form after becoming the first British woman to win halfpipe World Cup gold earlier this month in Calgary, the first time a British woman has won gold in a World Cup event since 1992 when Jilly Curry claimed the combined title in Oberjoch, Germany.