Interesting to consider the details of this application for a conservatory addition to the Longboat Café with concurrent reports of Exmouth Seafront buildings collapsing in Storm  Pierrick and the need for “pebble resilience” in Budleigh’s new loos. – Owl  

Rockfish has provided further details about its planned takeover of the Longboat Café in Budleigh Salterton.

Philippa Davies www.exmouthjournal.co.uk

As reported in the Journal last week, the restaurant chain has submitted a planning application to upgrade the venue and turn it into a seafood café.

It will serve breakfast and coffee in the mornings, with fresh seafood on the menu from lunchtime: local crab rolls, shellfish, grilled and fried fish, along with cold beer from Salcombe Brewery and a small selection of wines. 

There will be a conservatory over the courtyard with a retractable roof for the summer and a log burner for the winter months.

Rockfish’s founder and chief executive Mitch Tonks said: “We are really looking forward to opening our seafood café in Budleigh that will carry all the much-loved hallmarks of a Rockfish, with fresh seafood, community and sustainability at the core.

“We know how much everyone in the town loves the café and how important it is to local life, so we will continue to build on the great work that Lisa, Myles and the team have done to ensure it remains that way.”

Rockfish’s planning application cancels out a previous planning permission, granted in 2013, to demolish the site and construct a two storey building.

This latest application will be determined by East Devon District Council at a later date.

An Exmouth coastwatch building had to be evacuated after it was battered by stormy weather last night. It’s feared that the building may have to be condemned.

Mary Stenson www.devonlive.com

Exmouth has suffered some of the worst Storm Pierrick as a dramatic video showed waves crashing over the sea wall, drenching passers-by. A weather warning was put in place by the Met Office for gusts of 45-55mph for Monday night, while the Environment Agency warned that flooding was possible.

Volunteers at Exmouth’s National Coastwatch Institution (NCI) arrived to their lookout station this morning (April 9) to find that the foundations of one of the two buildings had collapsed into the sea. They said that the building was evacuated and had been “propped up” temporarily by East Devon District Council.

In a Facebook post, NCI Exmouth said: “Coastwatch House suffered damage last night in the storm. The property has now been evacuated, with the council propping it up temporarily. Looks like we will need a new home.

“Some people refer to this building as the “old First Aid Hut” but it’s been a Coastwatch building for the last 25 years.”

Station manager Peter Oliver told the BBC that contractors have started work to make the area safe. He says the other lookout tower has been unaffected and that their operations would continue there.

Peter said: “We believe the decision will be to condemn the building. We’ll lose our training facilities which is problematic but not insurmountable.

“We’ve been able to recover most of the materials inside and moved them into people garages, the team has been absolutely brilliant, you just can’t beat the sea.”

Coastwatch House in Exmouth was severely damaged during the storm (Image: NCI Exmouth)

Following the storm, the Environment Agency says that flooding is expected to continue to impact parts of England today. They have advised people to take care in coastal areas and avoid driving through flood water.

Harry Walton, Flood Duty Manager at the Environment Agency, said: “Due to a combination of spring tides and strong winds generating storm surge and large waves, minor coastal flooding impacts are probable for parts of England on Monday and Tuesday.

“Environment Agency teams are out on the ground, taking action to reduce the impact of flooding and support those communities affected. We urge people to stay safe on the coast, take extreme care on coastal paths and promenades, and we advise people not to drive through flood water as just 30cm of flowing water is enough to move your car.”

Paul Arnott

This week’s column hangs on two well-known sayings. The first phrase, often but apparently wrongly known as a Chinese curse, is “may you live in interesting times”, by which it is actually meant, may your whole life is afflicted by chaos.

And interesting times have afflicted this week’s column. I had actually intended to focus on the superb new Pump Track opened recently in Cranbook. It’s a cracking example of Cranbrook Town Council and East Devon District Council working with others to fund a facility I would have adored when I was a kid. It’s a landscaped, profiled area in the Country Park, given an undulating hard surface to provide loads of fun for bikes, skateboards, roller blades etc. It opened, albeit in torrential rain, just in time for the Easter holidays, and I am told it has been packed with children ever since.

The reason I would have written about this is to show that with all the amazing hard work of local people in Cranbrook, facilities are arriving, albeit somewhat belatedly, and that East Devon will do all we can to try to cut through the red tape to help where we can. I might then have gone onto a bit of a serious think piece about how East Devon, having originally dropped the ball in planning the development of Cranbrook, with landowner and developer gain seeming to have been the priority under the Conservatives, is as keen as mustard to make amends for that.

However, that will have to keep for now. Because a second old saying has also come into view in these interesting times: “Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery”.

For there I was eating my Shredded Wheat on Friday when I was astonished to read in the i Newspaper online that someone had set up web addresses purporting to be for local Lib Dem MP Richard Foord which, on being innocently visited, took readers directly to a website for Conservative MP Simon Jupp. It’s almost a hundred years ago that the inimitable P G Wodehouse wrote a comic satire called “Something Fishy”, and heavens above, there’s something fishy going on here.

The story then gathered national attention from the likes of LBC’s James O’Brien and the very brave mathematical whizz-turned-commentator Carol Vorderman. Top class national broadsheet and broadcast journalists then spent hours trying to elicit from Mr Jupp any explanation. I understand that it was like getting blood from a stone and resulted in a six-word gnomic comment that he was “not responsible for the web domains”.

The problem for all people of East Devon is that with a general election looming this can’t be just written off as a bit of a lark. This week William Wragg, another Conservative MP, has been forced to resign various senior positions in the unfortunate matter of pictures of his anatomy and his somehow then providing personal data on other MPs to someone he met online!

With Donald Trump in the USA, and Conservative strategists in the UK, openly planning smear-based campaigns for 2024, we don’t want any of this chicanery in East Devon, and demand better. Mr Jupp can help with this by expanding his tight, six-word comment into six full paragraphs of what he knows, and who was responsible. And soon.

In the meantime, my thought for the week is directly attributable – to Sophocles – and has stood the test of time for two and a half thousand years: “I would prefer even to fail with honour than win by cheating.”