Councillor Tony Belton’s Battersea May, 2019, Newsletter (# 119)
- April, Brexit continues or does it? It now looks certain that we will be taking part in the European elections on 23rd May. I imagine no one is happy about that. True Brexiters presumably are very unhappy about the UK still being “in Europe” and the most ardent Remainers will be almost as unhappy about fighting a pseudo-election, which many will not take very seriously. So, apologies to all those of you, who get interrupted during your spring cleaning or whatever by canvassers, and commiserations to all those canvassers having to fight what some people think, wrongly, will be a pseudo-election.
- But I think it is massively important that we all go out and vote on the 23rd. Remainers must show the country at large, our political so-called leaders in particular and, not least, Europe as a whole that we are forward-looking and optimistic, outward-looking and welcoming; that we look forward to the future and not just backwards in nostalgia. I do hope that the Leavers take it seriously and take part but I have no doubt that I hope the Remainers win.
- Meanwhile Brexit has become such a dominant issue that the Tara Theatre, Earlsfield has now put on a comedy, written by Tom Corradini and Samuel
Toye, simply called Brexit. I went to see it on 13th April. The action is between the father and son and is about different generational approaches to Brexit. It has its amusing moments, but is not, I think, a weighty addition to English drama. The father is played by Tom Corradini; the son by Samuel Toye.
- On 2nd April we went to York for an aunt’s 100th birthday party. Aunt Averil was in truly great form for her family dinner on the 2nd and a party the following afternoon. Remarkably it was also the second 100th birthday party, that we have been to in the last five years – both of them aunts. Aunt Averil did get a personal message from the Queen! I saw it but for how much longer will we maintain this tradition? So many of us are now getting to 100!
- A visit to York is hardly complete without
going for a walk on the City Walls and taking in the views of the city and York Minster (this pic is of Minster from the Walls) and going to the Railway Museum to see Stevenson’s Rocket, the Mallard and Queen Victoria’s carriage along with many other iconic engines. In the month of the tragic fire at the Notre Dame it is perhaps worth remembering that York Minster was badly damaged by a similar fire thirty-five years ago. It took some years and lots of money to repair but it was done and hopefully the same will happen now in 
Paris.
- As a councillor, one deals with all sorts of individual cases, large and small. However, one doesn’t often get quite such cheerful thanks as I did from David de Miccho, when at his request I got this street sign re-installed in Falcon Grove! Thank you, David.
- As a member of the Council’s Passenger Transport Liaison Group, I was invited to visit the Railway Control Centre for south west London. The Centre controls all the lines from Waterloo and many of the
Victoria lines. I had a nice fantasy that it would be like the films of old signal boxes, but of course in this electronic age the reality was very different. The nearest film version that I recall is the control centre, which features in the original version of The Taking of Pelham 123. But actually that New York Subway control centre was positively glamorous compared with the very anonymous shed that hosts the control centre in London. Interesting it was, important of course,
but very unglamorous. I rather suspect that there are security reasons for keeping the installation so secret and so inconspicuous.
- My birthday was in early April and we went to a Streatham Jazz Venue called Hideaway to see and hear Mudibu and The Jezebel Sextet. They were presenting the music of Otis Redding. The vocalist, Mudibu, strutted “his stuff” in Mick Jagger style – not that the music was at all like the Rolling Stones but it was excellent – a very enjoyable evening.
- On 13th April, we went to the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium! Wow! Spurs beat Huddersfield 4:0, but that was hardly the point. The new stadium is magnificent. Acoustically it is brilliant. I am not a natural singer of soccer songs (typically at Spurs “When the Spurs go
marching in”), indeed I doubt whether I have ever really let rip before but this stadium sucks out one’s inhibitions. It was what it must be like in the Welsh national stadium when England is the opposition. As someone, who grew up less than a quarter mile from White Hart Lane, I always feared for its modern replacement but this manages to maintain the old intimacy with players and pitch whilst increasing the crowd capacity to over 62,000.
- On 25th April we had the Planning Applications Committee (PAC). Most of the agenda was of little consequence but there were two large and important decisions. One related to a very large (catering for 700) pub/restaurant complex planned in the Putney Exchange. The Committee accepted this application on a very divided vote. The other was for an application to build three blocks of 10-14 storeys, containing 168 residential units, with some ancillary offices and a restaurant. 35% of the housing will be, so called, affordable. This latter application was in Osiers Road, Putney, just across the Wandle from Fairfield. It was resolved on an equally split vote but in this case refused. Although these applications were both in Putney they are so big, as to have Borough-wide significance.
- However, perhaps the most interesting political news of the month has been the Extinction Rebellion campaign of demonstrations and the rise of Climate Change as a major issue of the day. Who, indeed, amongst us had heard of 16 year-old Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, as recently as 1st March? But now Climate Change is the hottest political topic of the day. And yet the words Climate Change were not uttered once during the debate on the two planning applications on 25th April. Given the scale of those developments I wonder whether that omission was either sensible or credible.
My Programme for May
- The Planning Applications Committee is on 14th May.
- The Annual Council Meeting, commonly known as the Mayor Making meeting takes place on 22nd May.
- The EU election is on 23rd May. I do realise that many of us will not be very keyed up for that event but I do hope that there is a decent turnout. For the 70+% of us Battersea residents, who were in favour of remaining in the EU, I think it is important that our support is demonstrated by a decent turnout for the election, and a vote for “remain” supporting parties.
Do you know?
How many trains go through the Clapham Junction complex every day? Do you know? Of course not, but have a guess. I asked the rail control staff, who were operating the Railway Control Centre and perhaps surprisingly it was not a number that they had at their finger-tips. However, they put their heads together and decided on a number to the nearest 100, which they thought was likely. Any ideas? 1,100 or a lot more? Take a guess.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 