A MAJOR holiday season facelift planned for Minehead town centre, involving impressive new floral displays, was this week put on hold for a year after Minehead BID and town council officials agreed that the scheme was impossible while coronavirus restrictions were in place.

In January, plans were announced for installing an additional 65 hanging baskets and four flower towers in the town centre. And traders were also given details of a £25,000 investment for follow for The Avenue, involving more plantings and bunting.

Now the whole scheme has been postponed for 12 months.

Minehead BID – the company set up in 2018 with the support of more than 240 local traders – already had to postpone the April eat:Festival until August and cancel the May Day celebrations, and the town’s second Steampunk Festival, scheduled for May 2 and 3.

Minehead Town Council has also had to cancel the planned weekend of events to celebrate the 75th anniversary of VE Day due to take place in early May.

Minehead town councillor and BID director Terry Venner said there had been no option but to freeze the town centre improvement plans.

“One of the major problems was that our plant supplier in Bristol has had to suspend trading while the emergency lasts,” he said.

“We have no idea when social distancing precautions will be lifted enabling contractors to get back to normal working. It simply wasn’t possible to reschedule the work with any degree of certainty.”

Minehead’s Mayor Cllr Sandra Slade said she realised traders and local families would be saddened by the delay.

“We had such positive reactions to the way the town centre looked last year, thanks to the work the town council and BID put in, and we really felt we had made an appreciable difference to the attractiveness of Minehead as a shopping and holiday destination,” she said.

“We were all ready to build on the momentum and enthusiasm that had been generated but, clearly, with so many restrictions on so many aspects of everyday life, it is really out of the question to even think about any large-scale project of this kind at the moment.

“The only consolations to take from this are that we aren’t by a long way the only town to have summer entertainment and decorations shelved.

“Funding for the flower displays and bunting will remain in place so that by next year we may well be in a position to come back with something even bigger and better.

“Either way, we are determined that what we achieve in Minehead in 2021 will go a long way towards making up for the disappointment of 2020.”