Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere March Newsletter (# 58)

February highlights

1. For many of you, February’s Council Tax decision will be the most important news of the month. It will not be officially confirmed until the Council Meeting on 5th March but the decision has been taken to freeze it at the current level. Actually many of you will know that this is the third year in a row that it has been frozen. Actually this is no great surprise as Government nowadays gives a grant of the equivalent of 1% of Council Tax receipts, if your Tax is frozen, whilst, if it were increased by 2%, then the Council would have to go to a referendum to levy it! I don’t think that many will do that although Brighton Borough Council is debating increasing it by 4.75% and triggering a referendum – bet they don’t! But good luck if they try it!

2. Of course freezing Council Tax comes at a price! With Government grant falling by £18.5 million this coming year and, according to the Director of Finances estimates, over £20 million next we are going to see plenty of cuts, a continuing increase in Council fees (the ones that many will be familiar with are parking fees and fines) and redundancies at the Town Hall. In February, for example, over 60 Town Hall staff have been made redundant. Clearly some services are likely to suffer and we will no doubt see by how much.

3. One thing that will not be affected, however, is progress on the so-called regeneration of the Winstanley and York Road estates. The general strategy was agreed at the Housing Committee on 25th February. In the coming months the Council’s housing people will be talking to everyone in the main blocks due for demolition, namely Pennethorne, Scholey and Holcroft about their re-housing requirements. But don’t expect immediate signs of demolition! The residents need to be re-housed in new flats designed to be built around York Gardens itself and along Grant Road, but they are not yet on the drawing board, let alone started, so it will be quite a while yet. If you are one of these residents and are concerned about your prospects then do get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do to help.

The news is better for Penge and Inkster Houses. These two blocks all needed re-furbishment, which had been put on hold until the overall plan had been agreed. Now that can go ahead but, again, don’t expect work on site tomorrow. Specifications have to be drawn up and tenders received before that happens.

The future of Gagarin and Sheppard Houses, and of Ganley Court, along with many of the smaller blocks on the estates is still to be resolved.

4. Many of you will have seen the scaffolding up on Sporle Court, previous page After many years of campaigning and lobbying by residents the Council has at last got round to double glazing the whole block (along with some external decorations and new floor coverings) and not before time. If any of you think that is a big luxury, then let me tell you that life in the top floors of Sporle Court was very noisy and amazingly draughty before – I know I have experienced it. The work is due for completion in June, 2014.

5. On a very different but equally important scale Harling Court, opposite the Latchmere Baths, had security doors fitted some months back. Unusually this work was paid for by Barratt’s the builders of the new Rutherford on the left and Chadwick Houses, which have just been completed on the Travis Perkins site opposite Dovedale Cottages. New residents have moved in and I have written a welcome letter to them. I know some of the Harling Court residents were very unhappy about the building of these new blocks. If you were one of them, then I’d be interested to know what you think now that the work has been completed.

6. I went to the WoW (Women of Wandsworth) organised inter-generational launch and dinner marking the Chinese New Year at Haven Lodge. The point of this lunch was to encourage the meeting and being together of children, mothers and the much older generation of pensioners living in Haven Lodge sheltered accommodation. Here am I with a Chinese resident of the Winstanley.

7. Simon Hogg, Wendy Speck and I, your three Labour councillors, held a surgery in Battersea Fields residents’ hall and if you have any particular issues you would like to talk about then I am doing the regular Council surgery in Battersea Library on 22nd March. But if you are reading this then why bother to wait until then – send me an email now.

8. Moving on to other matters, some of you may have been surprised by the demolition and construction work starting to take place at the Falcon Road Mosque. You may have remembered that the mosque’s last application for extension and growth was refused but forgotten that the mosque had already an approval for a different extension. It is the scheme, as earlier approved, that is now being built.

9. The Strategic Planning & Transport Committee on 18th February was really dull and there wasn’t much on at the Planning Committee, certainly as far as Latchmere was concerned, although some of you will be able to see one scheme, which was approved and that was adding a storey to Falcon Wharf development.

10. Last month I talked about GCSE Success. Well this month I am delighted to announce that this great scheme is getting a £1,885 Big Society Grant and meanwhile the Mercy Foundation at 64 Falcon Road is receiving £2,780. Led by Ella Spencer, GCSE Success is designed to improve Maths and English results at GCSE level for students at secondary school in the Latchmere area. Victoria Rodney’s Mercy Foundation grant is aimed at increasing digital literacy (i.e. IT and internet skills) amongst the residents on the York Road and surrounding estates.

11. And finally a worrying report from London Sustainability Exchange (LSx) shows that air pollution in parts of Latchmere is at levels 5 and 6 times higher than European Union targets. The worst spots are at Battersea Park Road junctions with Albert and Battersea Bridge Roads and, worst of all, under the Falcon Road railway bridge. The levels of pollution are of course also high just outside the boundaries of the ward in, for example, Clapham Junction. I will be using this research to press for early improvements to the Bridge! LSx is, by the way, run by Samantha Heath, who many of you will remember was a Latchmere councillor 1994-98.

My Programme for March

1. There is a Council meeting on 5th March and the Planning Applications Committee on the 18th. However, Council activity is winding down in the period prior to the May 22nd Council and European Elections. The theory is that all of us councillors will be out on the doorstep pestering you residents with personal questions about your political tastes. Actually given my health situation I will be doing it mostly on the phone. Don’t be too hard on us and please don’t slam the door in our face or put the phone back on the receiver. If we do canvass you we will, of course, arrive at an inconvenient time and if we don’t, then we get accused of never talking to anyone. We canvassers can never win! Oh, and most of all don’t tell us we are all the same. To be likened to one of “them” is the biggest insult of them all. So if I call on you remember, that it is just part of the job!

Did you know about Christ Church, Battersea?

The picture on the right is of the modern church in Christ Church Gardens, which was consecrated in 1959. I wouldn’t mind betting that most of you have never noticed this modest self-effacing 1950s building in its very prominent place at the junction of Battersea Park Road and Candahar Road. Indeed given its prime setting it really is rather too modest.

Well its Victorian predecessor, which was consecrated on 27 July 1849, was very different and full of all the confidence I associate with Victorian times. According to ‘Parish Churches of London’, Basil
F L Clarke, Batsford, 1966, it was a cruciform
Middle-Pointed building with a spire.

There is actually a rather splendid photograph of it and the hustle and bustle of Battersea Park Road in the 1930s in a Wandsworth Town Hall Committee Room, which I will try to get a reproduction of for next month. But in the meantime here is an artist’s representation of it sometime in the late Victorian years.

Unfortunately, the old Christ Church was a casualty of war being obliterated on 21 November 1944 by a V2 rocket, which destroyed both it and the neighbouring vicarage. Christ Church Gardens alongside it now has a little known memorial to the dead of the Second World War and note the magnificent London Pplane tree by the Cabul Road entrance to the church, which must have had a very close escape from the bomb!

Yours sincerely
Tony Belton, Latchmere Labour Councillor
Tony Belton
99 Salcott Road | Battersea | London SW11 6DF
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