We were walking from the campsite at Sandy Haven into Milford Haven, following the coast path through Gelliswick, when we came across a planning notice.
Normally, planning notices are about as exciting as a council tax bill. This one wasn't.
The former Gelliswick caravan park is being brought back into use, but the plans go rather further than simply reopening a campsite. First comes camping and parking. Then, if the scheme develops as intended, woodland walks, sports areas, a coffee shop, workshops, a community resource centre, green space, eco-therapy and rural crafts.
In other words, somebody has had the radical idea of taking a redundant coastal site and turning it into something useful for both visitors and local people.
It immediately made us think that, once it opens, we might come back in the motorhome. It is right by the sea, on the coast path, with Milford Haven within walking distance. Given that the old caravan park took touring caravans and motorhomes, it is exactly the sort of place we would use.
And that made me notice something else. A surprising amount of parking around here is free.
No app. No QR code. No machine demanding your registration number, inside leg measurement and first-born child. You can just park and go somewhere.
It turns out there is a reason for some of that. The free car park at Sandy Haven isn't Pembrokeshire County Council's at all. It belongs to Herbrandston Community Council, which describes it as one of the few car parks in Pembrokeshire that remains free to use. Around Gelliswick there is also plenty of roadside parking where, remarkably, nobody has yet found a way of monetising the act of stopping a car.
Pembrokeshire County Council charges quite happily elsewhere.
At Christmas, though, the County Council has made its car parks free at weekends specifically to encourage people to visit the towns and support local businesses.
So they know perfectly well that free parking can encourage people into town to spend money. It just seems to be an insight with a rather short seasonal shelf life.
And that is what makes the Gelliswick project interesting. The whole idea is based on encouraging people to come, stay, walk around, drink coffee, spend a bit of money and perhaps wander into Milford Haven as well. The point is to make the place worth coming to, then make it easy to stay.
Councils do have a habit of looking at a car park and seeing a tidy little revenue stream. Charge £5 and the spreadsheet says you've made £5.
Except perhaps somebody takes one look at the charge and doesn't bother. That's a coffee or lunch not bought, a shop not visited, perhaps an afternoon spent somewhere else. None of that appears in the parking department's figures, naturally.
Of course parking sometimes needs managing. Where spaces are genuinely scarce, sensible charges can encourage turnover and stop someone leaving a car in a prime town-centre space all day.
But there is a considerable difference between managing parking and treating every arriving visitor as a source of income.
We were already doing exactly what this sort of regeneration is supposed to encourage. Staying nearby, walking into town, buying things, looking around and thinking about coming back.
If you want visitors to bring money into your town, perhaps don't start by charging them for the privilege of arriving.
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