Councillor Tony Belton’s Battersea April, 2018, Newsletter (# 106)

1. On 7th March, Wandsworth’s Mayor Les McDonnell and I presented certificates to Mercy Foundation students of English. The Foundation is organised and very considerably financed by Victoria Rodney; she is the driving force behind the Foundation, which is in effect a one-woman voluntary organisation. Her main objective is to improve the life chances of many of the, frankly, poorer and less educated people of Battersea. Her clients come from all over the globe, with on this occasion, graduation certificates awarded to a couple from Portugal, a man from Afghanistan, a Bulgarian woman and a dozen others, largely from eastern Europe.
   

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2. However, Victoria surprised me by finishing the awards with a certificate for me(!) and my contributions to the Foundation’s efforts – very nice of her but apart from helping in a few simple English conversational classes and helping her to apply and win grants, I don’t think I have done that much to deserve a certificate.
   

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3. Later, the same day, we had the last Council Meeting before the Borough Election. It was the usual pre-election antics, but with one outrageous ploy played by the Tory majority, the like of which I haven’t seen in 40+ years of Council meetings. The Tories, without giving any notice or any apparent thought and certainly without due notice, moved a motion about spending an extra £10 million on Council services. This tactic was absolutely outside Council rules, but they avoided censure by using the weasel words, that they would “investigate” spending the money. In other words, the motion meant nothing. But it didn’t stop the Council producing a Council press release the next morning, giving the appearance of making £10 million available for local services – talk about playing politics on the rates! Although I suppose that this resolution does, at least, demonstrate that even the Tories recognise that austerity has gone too far.
   

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4. On March 9^th, I went to the funeral of ex-Councillor Gordon Passmore. Gordon was a bit out of the ordinary as a councillor. He was elected as a councillor to the old Metropolitan Wandsworth Borough Council in 1960 and on nine occasions to the new London Borough of Wandsworth (1964, 68, 74, 78, 82, 86, 90, 98 and 2002). His long service as a councillor included leadership in a myriad of roles, most notably finance and planning. He and his wife, Shirley, were also for many years the driving force of the Wandsworth Society.
   

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5. However, the most extra-ordinary episode of his life was his war experience. He was called up to the Fleet Air Arm, aged 18, on December 7^th 1941, the day Pearl Harbour was bombed. He was a gunner starting in a biplane. He flew over 230 sorties, about one in every four days, in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and finally, in 1945, off Japan. On 6^th June 1945, he was shot down in the Pacific and spent several hours “in the drink” until he was picked up by a Royal Navy destroyer. He was a hard-line Tory councillor, but polite and decent with it, and I suspect his wartime experiences gave him a broader outlook than some of his colleagues. Gordon Passmore was a quiet, mild-mannered man – very different from most of today’s Tory councillors.
   

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6. On 12^th March, I went to Preston to hear a debate about the Preston Model, which has been much touted in the local government press as an exciting new way to organise services so at to avoid some of the enormous cuts being imposed on local authorities. I was not over-impressed, but largely because I doubt that the methods used in one medium-sized, essentially self-contained town of 114,000 people, would work for Wandsworth’s third of a million embedded in a vast metropolis. However, on a typically (for this March) cold and wet afternoon, I did have an hour to spare in Preston Town Centre and as ever, up North, was over-whelmed by the nineteenth-century grandeur of the centre, clear I hope even in this rainy picture of the court house.
   

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7. Earlier in the month, Harris Academy, in Battersea Park Road, asked our MP, Marsha de Cordova, and me to be two of the five-strong panel of judges for a fun competition being run for Year 8 students. The competition was held on 15^th March, between six teams of kids. They had been asked to devise a presentation on behalf of a charity, local or national, with the prize of £1,000 being given to the successful charity. The teams were inventive. The presentations included songs, poems, rap and speeches. The winners were the group advocating Cancer Support. Marsha presented the winners’ cheque.
   

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8. On the 16^th the Wandsworth Design Awards were presented at Roehampton University. The first prize went to the design team who created Roehampton University’s own Chadwick Hall students’ accommodation. I mentioned this in my February edition of this newsletter (#104), but here is a reminder of Chadwick Hall. The presentations were made in the “Portrait Room”, one of the University’s grandest rooms. As this part of the University had been a women’s college it was not surprising that most of the grand portraits were, indeed of women. But, nevertheless it was striking that these imposing nineteenth-century portraits were nearly all of women, and made me reflect on what an incredibly male dominated history tale we tell.
   

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9. On Monday, 19^th March, I had the Passenger Transport Liaison Group. There were two items of real interest to Battersea. First, on the railways, it was reported that there have been more than 7,000 respondents to the consultation on the proposed new rail timetables. The new timetables are part of an ambitious expansion programme with longer trains and platforms, and increased capacity right across the system. However, to allow a greater number of services on the Reading lines out of Clapham Junction, there was a proposal to cut as many as half the trains stopping at Queenstown Road railway station. The reaction was antagonistic – so antagonistic that I feel certain the planners will re-consider! (PS I have heard today, 4/4/18, that these cuts have been postponed awaiting further consideration).
   

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10. There were also interesting developments on the bus front. Mayor Sadiq Khan announced that, by 2020, all London’s buses will be of the new, cleaner, non-polluting variety and secondly that two new Chariot bus services will be confirmed. One is the Battersea Bullet, from Battersea Park to Kennington station, and the other the Wandsworth Wanderer, from the Wandsworth river-front to Clapham Junction. The American Chariot pictured here is ordered online. I must confess that I haven’t even seen one, although the service was meant to have started by now. Have any readers tried the booking system or actually ridden on one?
    

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11. On Tuesday, 20^th March, I had another meeting of Wandsworth’s Labour Shadow Cabinet. Again, we discussed our draft manifesto, which will be published in the next few days – see last month’s newsletter for my comments on the importance of manifestos in the political process.
    

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12. The March meeting of the Planning Applications Committee was on the 22^nd. There were several planning applications of importance to Battersea. There was one from St. George, the Battersea Reach property development company. The application was designed both to cut some and privatise more of the underground parking spaces at the giant riverside development. It clearly would have affected the residents of Battersea Reach but it would also have increased the pressure on parking in Petergate and Eltringham Street. The Committee unanimously rejected the application.
    

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13. Another application was for a 10-storey tower block in Havelock Terrace, which would have light industrial uses on the first three floors and offices on the upper floors. The block would be hard up against the railway tracks and away from residential units; it also looked rather an attractive building – supported unanimously.
    

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14. But by far the most important application was the first of many relating to the Winstanley/York Road Regeneration Project. The application comprised of three separate buildings, from 6 to 20 storeys in height. One of the buildings is designed to house jointly a school and a chapel; another is for 46 council homes in a six-storey block at the junction of Grant and Plough Roads; the third is for 93 private residential units in a 20-storey block at the junction of Grant and Winstanley Roads.
    

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15. This application posed three problems for me, in particular. First, I am not happy with the proximity of the six-storey block to Time House. Secondly, I am opposed to the march of 20+-storey blocks across North Battersea, especially when all the units in this block will go to the private sector. However, I am committed to trying to improve the environment and the housing conditions of the people, who live on the York Road and Winstanley Estates. To do that, the Council needs to re-locate the Thames Christian College and the Battersea Chapel and to build council properties to allow relocation of residents. But in addition, income received from the private block is required to pay for the re-construction, and, if we are to have 20-storey blocks for sale then having one almost on top of Platform 1 of Clapham Junction station seems the best place to do it. I am sure that I will be coming back to this project on many occasions before it is completed.
    

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16. On the 26^th March, I attended a meeting of Battersea United Charities (BUC), united because it is the marriage of several small charitable bequests and possibly best known for its Christmas Day dinner party for pensioners from all over the Borough. BUC makes small grants to individuals in training, to primary schools for holiday trips and to voluntary groups providing services for any number of Battersea people. On this particular occasion, we agreed to support, through a small grant, the visit of a Devon farm, with associated livestock, to Falcon Road – keep a look-out for sheep pens outside Providence House! If you have plans and needs of your own and feel a small grant would help, then let me know and we can discuss whether BUC might help.

My Programme for April

1. 1. The Planning Applications Committee will meet on the 18^th April.
   2. On the 24^th I will be representing the Labour Party at an election-hustings meeting organised by the Battersea Society in York Gardens Library.
   3. On 27^th April, I have been invited to attend a meeting of ACAN, Afro-Caribean Nation councillors, at City Hall. You might well be surprised at that and I was when I received the invitation! I can only imagine that it is because last year I spoke at a Black Lives Matter debate at the East Anglia University in Norwich.
   4. Finally, on 28^th April, I have the Council organised surgery to run at Battersea District Library. It will be curious to do that with only five days left before the Council Election on May 3^rd.
   5. Preparing for that election will clearly take up much of the rest of April!

Do you know?

Last month, I used this picture and asked, “What was the connection between it and Britain’s greatest engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 – 1859), who built the Rotherhithe Thames Tunnel, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, most of the Great Western railway and the first iron ship?”

I also said that the connection might just have appeared right at the top of this picture. To my surprise, quite a few of you knew there was a connection, but disagreed about the exact nature of the connection. Actually, his father had a sawmill near to the current Battersea Bridge and a factory, where he made army boots used in the Napoleonic Wars. Isambard, who worked very closely with his father on many major projects, was a regular visitor. Congratulations to those that got that right.

Thanks to Christine Eccles and Battersea Memories for this one. Pretty easy, I know, but I like the picture: Where and when was this photo taken? And do you know the current use of the church on the left-side of the road?