I HAVE a friend who has a friend who has a prayer mat. Every so often he gets it out, kneels down and prays the winds will blow down the East Street cranes on a Sunday when no-one is around. The whole, horrible hated scheme would then come crashing down.

In a very unwelcome and unforeseen way, our prayers, albeit temporarily, are being answered. The cranes are silent, movement is stilled and who knows when things will restart?

Let’s be clear. Even before Covid-19, the scheme was in a very bad way, and no attempt to shift the blame on to the virus can obscure that undeniable fact.

As an example, around the turn of the year, Crest Nicholson said it would be announcing a tranche of new uptakes for the site, while at the same time its agents invited town-centre shops to take up lettings there for two years free rent.

Failure to make the promised announcements suggests just how bad things were and that the company was bluffing – and Covid-19 has now called its bluff. What retail outlet will now be in any position to join up? They are folding at a rate, as the papers tell us.

In the present dire circumstances, would it not be good planning for the three key players to use lockdown time to reflect, regroup and devise a Plan B?

Pooh-poohing such suggestions, as has been done in the past, is now being shown up as the bad management it always was. A rethink is clearly necessary.

Of the three main organisations involved, Surrey is the one under most pressure. Having made an investment of £50-plus million, it has a lot at stake.

There are 25 possible retail outlets on the site and eight restaurants. Three of those eight – Carluccio, Byron Burgers and Wagamama – have fled the scene, leaving only Ask, along with M&S Food, Seasalt and Reel Cinemas remaining. Four out of 33, after more than six years, tells you all you need to know about the scale of the disaster old Waverley and Crest are responsible for.

With national chains in ever more headlong retreat, where will the income come from to bail out this increasingly-dodgy venture? Surrey is under the cosh.

New Waverley, having ousted the scheme’s original perpetrators in the local elections this time last year, has inherited a deeply-poisoned chalice and has its own challenges.

Old Waverley had predicted an annual site income of between £0.7m and £0.9m a year. New Waverley’s revised estimates predict between £215,000 and £415,000; depending on how the winds are blowing – and not until 2045, in other words not for 25 years.

Well, the winds are blowing in a way that makes £215,000 look not a little optimistic. Where will that income come from? What are the prospects?

Meanwhile, Crest Nicholson, the third leg of the tripod, and responsible both for construction and site lettings, has all along refused even to admit there is a problem.

But not even Crest, king of the ostriches, can claim the virus presents no problems.

Does it not behove the three local councils to pressurise the developer into acknowledging their Plan A has failed utterly and to insist it joins with them to devise appropriate and productive alternatives?

When this pandemic is over, the normal we go back to will not be the normal we have known up to now, and the challenge emerging is to identify the needs a post-coronavirus world will throw up and work out how best how to answer them.

Clearly the conventional high street outlets will not return in any number, so if not those, what?

Here are some suggestions:

* Something market-based, with a range of stalls for hire, to allow small businesses to rise from the ashes;

* Community-based outlets, such as a communal room to hire out by the hour, to help restore the life we all share;

* Craft rooms for a craft town;

* An internet cafe and/or games room; a police office; the repair shop… heavens, we might even get something we have asked for and want!

Could the library play a part, or the university, and what about what is suggested in the about-to-be published Farnham Design Statement, that a theatre might need to be part of the picture.

These are a few spur-of-the-moment ideas. Serious brainstorming will be needed, not just by the councils and Crest, but by us too.

We were the ones left out originally, with consequences for all to see. Now is the chance to remedy that.

Perhaps if we could go forward collaboratively, all of us, we could turn a calamity into its opposite.

* By David Wylde,

St James’ Terrace, Farnham