Championing heritage and solving the traffic problem - new mayor’s vision for Warwick’s future

Cllr Higgins (Con, Warwick West) is a member of a reformed core group of people - including deputy district chief executive Andrew Jones - who regularly meet to come up with imaginative suggestions for development over the next 25 years.

And traffic, car parks, museums and an altered approach into the town from Warwick Castle, are all part of the vision.

As the current road improvements continue to cause controversy in the town, Cllr Higgins can precisely date her own involvement in local politics to what she describes as a “damn silly” traffic scheme proposed by Labour which led to their defeat in 2004.

A year later she stood for the county council and failed, by just 47 votes, to win a seat. But the woman with a history degree who lectures on the Great War at Warwick University was not deterred.

In 2007 she was elected to the town and district council and quickly carved out a role as a champion of local heritage.

She is particularly interested in any feasibility study into the future of the leper hosptial, which is a scheduled ancient monument, and very quickly saw to it that a tangerine painted door in the Warwick town conservation area reverted to a more conventional shade.

Above all she hopes the discord between traders and members of the council can be resolved and hopes the free parking offered this weekend and next (the last in a series of three) will go some way to ameliorate the hard feelings.

As far as she is concerned the work was only delayed due to bad weather rather than bad planning.

Along with her group of long-term stategic thinkers, Cllr Higgins knows the town has to find a way of diverting the 76 per cent of traffic that should be bypassing Warwick.

But she says: “People say it is difficult to find a parking space in Warwick but a recent survey we carried out found that there were 40 per cent of spaces underused.

“One of our ideas is for the county council staff in park in the Linen Street multi-storey car park and free up the Barracks in the town centre for visitors and residents.

“I’d also like to see a continuing pedestrian path, open all the time, between St Nicholas car park and the Jacobean St John’s Museum which would become a museum quarter with another 21st century museum built behind to hold other exhibits.”

More controversially, Cllr Higgins envisages the possible long-term change of use of the Market Hall museum to a retail development with an upstairs restaurant.