By Ian Herbert

There is a hidden tragedy about the threat to the future of Cheshire's Jodrell Bank observatory. It comes at the very time that the Manchester University establishment had been looking at major development plans for the site's visitor centre, which will harness our renewed interest in planetary matters.

A sum of around £500,000 had been secured by Jodrell to begin feasibility studies into how the current, visitor centre might be developed - it's fairly basic. Prosaic issues like traffic were to be looked at with that money: Jodrell's location, amid a labyrinth of rural lanes, presents challenges. Meetings are being held with design consultants his very day, in the hope that sense will prevail, the Science &Technology Facilities Council's initial conclusion that Jodrell's e-MERLIN facility is a lower priority will be reversed, and that the new centre will be built.

By Ian Herbert

They told us that things were on the up for those who wanted to swap the car for the train, when the new West Coast Main Line franchise agreement took the number of direct, high speed services to London from Manchester to three an hour from the end of this year.

But at what cost to other services? The true picture is only just beginning to emerge. While the Department for Transport was eager to trumpet the headline, big city services there has been considerably less noise from its direction about the resulting decimation of cross country services - which might have a lower profile but which are just as important when it comes to reducing volumes of traffic.

By Ian Herbert

There have been few more perverse threats of deportation in the past few years than the one placed over Perparim Demaj, a man described by Manchester city council’s leader as "the kind of citizen we would like all our citizens to be."

Demaj fled to Britain in fear of genocide in 1998, shortly before Serbian forces invaded his rural village in the Drenica region of central Kosovo, then a stronghold for the Kosovan Liberation Army, and took up work as a social worker assisting HIV and Aids patients. He was the kind of employee Leese’s staff found impossible to find. Who, among the local workforce, is willing to undertake social work for £13,000 a year? No one. That’s why the council started hiring Canadians to make good the gaps in its child protection team a few years back.

By Ian Herbert

Ringo Starr's ode to Liverpool is a source of embarrassment to many people in Liverpool. You only have to bear witness to the collective groans which go down when they insist on playing it at Anfield to be clear on that one. But the city made more of a mistake than it could possibly have realised when it scraped the bottom of the barrel and made him the centre of its Capital of Culture celebrations.

By Ian Herbert

Take a walk down the road where Freda Clowes was once surrounded by neighbours whom she’d pop in on after a morning’s shopping and you get a sense of what new money has done to places in what once might be called the commuter belt and is now the footballer belt of south Cheshire. It’s mansion after mansion down there, thrown up by the nouveaux who’ve demolished the houses that once stood and and replaced them with gargantuan homesteads with 10ft gates which make 'popping in' a thing of the past. Wayne Rooney is one resident of Mrs Clowes' street, though she's never clapped eyes on him of course.

That’s in Prestbury (pictured above). But down the road in Alderley Edge, an individual you might have described as the celebrity local in an era before Andy Cole moved in (followed by Rio Ferdinand and others) is going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his place won’t be massacred when he’s long gone.