AFTER months of speculation, expectation and veiled excitement, the electoral greyhounds are well and truly out of the traps.

We can now look forward to six weeks of wall-to-wall coverage, posters and banners plastered on every conceivable vantage point and being door-stepped by complete strangers extolling the virtues of their respective candidates.

Still, it makes a change from lost delivery drivers, charity collectors, ‘missionaries’ on recruitment drives or tourists lost off the beaten track.

Having already been privy to nuggets of electoral gossip from behind the scenes, I eagerly await more – especially if it is as hilarious as the tale of the hapless candidate who left out a considerable amount of posters mounted on boards to be collected by supporters. Unfortunately, the bin men mistook them for rubbish and accidentally throw the lot in the parish dustcart.

In a week of nominations and last-minute declarations, my mind was elsewhere. The distant musical thuds from the direction of Trinity, and yet more annoying pyrotechnics on my doorstep, were not enough to divert my mind from its main focus – Jersey’s discarded art and historical architectural features.

Much has been made of late of the Percentage for Art planning condition that has delivered statues on the Esplanade, decorative wall plaques in Colomberie, car park ventilation grills resembling a mosaic of tiny cars and yet more ornate and over-the-top security gates.

While all this was being commissioned at great expense – with money that would have been better donated to charity – discarded works of arts and architectural features have lain forgotten and neglected.

Hats off to Alan Holmes, then, who, having discovered the delightful bronze sculpture of geese in flight which used to grace the Airport departures hall and the granite arch from St Paul’s Gate did his public duty by exposing yet another case of woeful neglect of public assets.

If Mr Holmes has a nose for sniffing out such things, perhaps we could ask him to seek out the old prison granite façade. Having been removed nearly 40 years ago, block-by-block, with each carefully numbered so that it could one day be reassembled, this very important example of the Island’s built heritage is still languishing in a secret location.

The granite once formed the impressive multi-arched façade of Newgate Street prison, which was demolished in the 1970s to make way for an extension to the General Hospital. Entrusted in the care of a forerunner of Transport of Technical Services, it reportedly remains camouflaged by a covering of vegetation in a field ‘somewhere in Jersey’. Over the years it has been rumoured that parts have gone missing and, more alarmingly, that those numbers so carefully applied have worn off with time. Though the most worrying is that the location has been forgotten.

The original plan was to incorporate the façade in a suitable imposing public development, with the new Magistrate’s Court suggested as a likely candidate. Well, nothing came of that.

There was a suggestion six years ago that before deciding where the façade should be rebuilt, there should be a public debate about its future. We are still waiting.

I know we do things slowly here, and also annoyingly have the habit of going over old ground again and again, but surely there is a developer out there who could take it off the public’s hands and put it to good use.

Likewise with St Paul’s Gate and the delightful flying geese, which knock the spots of statues of boring blokes in suits, flying naked women and ornate gates designed to keep the public out of luxury developments.

With winter approaching and vegetation dying, let’s get on our walking boots and start searching for the prison granite just in case Transport have forgotten where it is.  Who knows what else we may find hidden from the public gaze in the process. The flagpoles that until last year flanked Victoria Avenue?

It says a great deal about a society that spends inordinate amounts of money on new public art in times of budget and service cuts affecting those most in need. But at what volume would you speak of one that allows public assets worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to languish neglected in the corner of a field and for more than four decades?

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde:  ‘To lose one arch may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose an entire façade looks like carelessness.’
Now that Google Earth has mapped the Island, we could all conduct the search from the comfort of our homes. Having gone online to check out what’s been happening behind the high hedges and security gates of the Boulivot heights, I was most disappointed to see that the rock was mapped at high tide. What a missed opportunity to entice visitors to our shores.

It could be worth calling the pilot of the helicopter that flew over the Island last week to film for the next series of the excellent BBC2 series Coast, to see if he spotted the prison granite.

Fortunately, the Coast team were here at high and low water to film the inter-tidal reaches of the Royal Bay of Grouville at the lowest tide of the year.

Hats off again, and this time to Jersey Tourism, for securing what promises to be yet more brilliant coverage of what is best is about Jersey and in a programme with a worldwide audience.

It is nice to know that when we get it right, we can get it very right.