There is now a Site Management Agreement in place in Cheltenham that (amongst other things) restricts chugging to the High Street between Pitville Street and Winchcombe Street. At 11:44 today,
I found a Greenpeace chugger in the section of the High St between Winchcombe Street and Rodney Road.
So, I snapped him with the camera on my phone. In this picture, the chugger is the guy with the dark green top wearing a rucksack underneath the "C" in "Cheltenham & Gloucester". At the time I checked that the top had a "Greenpeace" label and there were similar tops being worn by 3 other chuggers. He was actually "working", IE, I saw him approaching members of the public. The street in the foreground is the High St and towards the left, you can see into Winchcombe St. On the extreme left you can see the temporary fencing for the building works at the Regent Arcade. Perhaps the consequent narrowing of the foot way attracted him?
Next, I rang the Council and told them what was going on. I was told that the Council themselves don't regulate chuggers but they'd pass it on to the PFRA "hot line" who would get in touch with Greenpeace.
It will be interesting to see if any action follows!
What is it about environmental charities? Just over a week ago, I reported misbehaviour by Greenpeace and today Friends of the Earth were committing an almost identical offence around 15:26 (which was when I reported them to the Council) This time, the chugger was about 10m further out of the chugger zone than the Greenpeace one and I got much better pictures of him at work. To be fair, the two girls seem to be enjoying his sales patter. As the Council promised they'd act immediately, I hung around to watch the action. It wasn't quite what I expected. At 15:39 two fairly cool, confident twenty-something guys joined the girls and the chugger and cheerful conversation continued for about a minute before the chugger suddenly left in the direction of the official chugging zone. I'm not sure if the two other guys were just friends of the girls or if they were plain clothes reps from FoE smoothly extracting the erring chugger from the situation. Or maybe two guys "rescuing" the "damsels in distress" and trying to chat them up?
