You would think Haverhill would be a nicer town considering its position not far from Saffron Walden a very posh London commuter town and Cambridge, where TV personalities, politicians and royalty go to university. Unfortunately the town has many problems. The first being the lack of transport infrastructure, it has a population of almost 30,000 set to grow to nearer 50,000 if plans to build 5000 homes go ahead. Yet the town only has two A roads, one connecting it to Bury st Edmunds and another to Cambridge. That’s it, there’s no main roads down to Saffron Walden or to Stansted airport, the roads to Sudbury, Halstead, Newmarket and Braintree are very poor.
Especially Sudbury which goes single track at times which is no good for the massive container lorries that use it. There was a Train station in Haverhill but that was closed by the Tories and the buses provided to Cambridge and Bury st Edmunds are overpriced and slow taking about an hour to get to either of the towns.
The second issue is public services, their used to be an NHS drop in centre which was used by a lot of people as the only other option is waiting over a month for a doctors appointment, however, the Tories descided to close this meaning people had to wait a month or more to see a doctor. The town’s fire station is only day crewed during the week, so as long as you don’t have a fire on a weekday evening or weekend you’ll be fine. The police have been cut too, there are no longer village police meaning there about six police officers covering 20 villages and the police station in Clare a village not too far from Haverhill was closed forcing the police officers from there to share the station in Haverhill. Education is very poor, the most convenient college is West Suffolk College (WSC) which is effectively at a service station on the side of the A14 and course quality their is pretty poor. The other college is Cambridshire Regional, but that’s over an hour’s journey and two buses away. In the town there are a couple of primary school’s but not enough meaning kids have to go outside the town to go to school. As far as upper school’s go, there is Samuel Ward which is large and overcrowded and Castle Manor, which is closing it’s sixth form despite plans for 5000 more homes.
The final issue the town is everything else, there are factory jobs but they are low pay with horrible hours where they literally give their employees bonuses in the form of a net of chocolate coins and that’s if your lucky enough to have a job. There is a huge amount of poverty and unemployment in the town. The highstreet reflects the poverty with it’s wall to wall betting, charity and pound shop’s. The living conditions in part’s of the town are only a step up from a favella. The houses are cramped up, damp, dark and with about a square millimetre of garden space. This town needs real investment in infrastructure and could do with a revamped shopping area, for a town of it’s size you expect better. The public services in the town need to be invested in instead of cut. The housing really needs improvment and the way the large corporations who own the factories in the town exploit their workers is disgraceful, the don’t support the communities at all. In all I would say that this town could be good but it is currently suffering mainly due to goverment policy to cut every last thing and invest nothin at all. It’s a whole world away from towns like Cambridge and Saffron Walden despite only being a few miles up the road.
