Councillor Tony Belton’s Battersea July 2023, Newsletter (# 169)

1. Did you have a great June? My June was fairly quiet, but, as the years pass, I must confess that the humidity gets to me a bit. What’s more, mad as I am, I am off to Rome for the first week of July: Why Rome in July? Because it’s the closing conference of Penny’s four-year term as President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
   

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2. On 4th June we went to visit an old friend, Sara, for lunch – and what a great lunch it was. After a cool and damp May, it was the first very sunny day of summer. Before lunch we went for a cruise along the Thames, and afterwards, we socialised the afternoon away. Sara has a bungalow on the Thames at Shiplake-on-Thames just upstream of Henley – magical, though prone to winter flooding!
   

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3. Two days later, 6^th June, I paid a visit to the Randall Close development, being built on the Surrey Lane estate. Progress on this site appears to be excellent and certainly, the site manager has worked well to keep all local residents happy. As you can see from this picture, taken from Wolsey Court, the site looks clean and well-run.
   

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4. From 6^th-10^th June, East Shallowford Farm paid its annual visit to Falcon Road. Youth trips to, and working holidays on, the Devonshire farm for Battersea kids have been regular items on the Providence House programme for many years. The farm also visits Falcon Road on an annual basis. This year the visit was also combined with a reception on 8^th June, which was a celebration of this urban/rural inter-change.
   

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5. The 9^th June started with a Design Review Panel of the Ashburton Estate, near the Green Man pub, on the corner of Putney Heath and Putney Hill. The estate was one of the most successful post-war council developments. And now, Wandsworth’s Labour Council wants to add some 50-odd new council flats to the estate. The panel largely approved the design but made some positive recommendations for a few small changes.
   

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6. On the way back from the Ashburton Estate, I looked in at the unveiling of another plaque in Lavender Sweep. On this occasion, Deputy Mayor, Councillor Sana Jafri was joined by Councillors Leonie Cooper (holding the megaphone) and Rex Osborn (deep in thought about his speech to come?) to unveil a plaque to the Diederichs Duval family – on a house in Lavender Sweep, where the family lived. The whole family had been pioneers in the suffragette movement in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century – most notably the indomitable mother Emily and daughter Elsie, who were both imprisoned and force-fed on several occasions. Coincidentally, the Council’s recently completed tower block on Grant Road has also been named Duval House.
   

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7. On the evening of 11^th June, we went to the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham for a delightful evening with Junction Jazz. The band, which plays occasionally on the Clapham Common bandstand, was doing this gig as a Battersea Labour Party fund-raiser. They have become regulars in our diary, enliving us with skilfull and enthusiastic renderings of jazz classics. In the picture, Nikki, the septet’s promoter is centre left in the pink dress.
   

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8. A week later, on 17^th Jun, we went to see ‘The Return of Benjamin Lay’ at the Finborough Theatre, Brompton Road. Four feet tall Mark Povinelli, coincidentally President of the Little People of America, was simply magnificent and moving in this one-man, one-act play as Benjamin Lay in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Lay was clearly a very, annoying, radical Quaker, thrown out of several Quaker meetings – largely for expressing his horror and rejection of the whole apparatus of slavery. Born in Essex, he and his wife travelled to the American colonies some 40 years before the Revolutionary War, proving that abolitionism did not start with Wilberforce. In my opinion, Povinelli’s performance was quite stunning. After the show we had a drink with Mark, and the play’s co-author Marcus Rediker. The other co-author was Naomi Wallace, who was not in London that day. By the time that you read this, the play’s short run will have ended but if it appears elsewhere, do NOT miss it.
   

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9. The 20^th June started for me with one of our quarterly meetings of the North-East Surrey Crematorium Board, one of the least exciting meetings of the year – but someone has to do it! You will be pleased to know that business has settled back to normal after a couple of years of peak-Covid – and that we have ‘cleaned up our act’ with the installation of a couple of catalytic-like converters on the cremators. I warned you about the excitements!
   

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10. Ironically that morning, so I later heard, ex-councillor (1971-90) Mike Williams I mention Mike’s death here because some of my readers will have known Mike and might not otherwise have heard. Mike was distinctly old school Labour; he was implacable in his opposition to the hard-line Thatcherite, Tory-controlled Wandsworth Council of the 1980s. He had a commanding presence, a ready-wit – and was one of the best of hecklers. He liked his sport, both soccer and golf, but first and foremost, cricket. He lay in bed the day before he died watching the first Test – and probably one of his greatest regrets will be missing the rest of this dramatic Ashes series.
    

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11. I chaired the Planning Applications Committee that same evening. It felt as though I chaired the meeting rather poorly, but on reflection it was OK, and all the applications were processed properly and, I believe, correctly. Some of the applications were really interesting:-

• the most contentious was for an industrial site in Lydden Road, just off Garrett Lane. Local residents were understandably not best pleased, and I am sure that the development will be annoying and disturbing during the forthcoming building works, but I firmly believe that the new industrial buildings will present a better long-term environment for them than does the current chaotic jumble of industrial detritus.
• the most eagerly anticipated application was for a residential development on the corner of Earlsfield and Algarve Roads – anticipated because, as you may have noticed, the site has been successively a ruin, an empty site and boarded-up for at least thirty years. Hopefully after many false starts the development as pictured will proceed relatively soon.
• The most ‘political’ was the change to the Randall Close site (see para 3 above) from a mixed tenure development to 100% council housing, in line with Labour thinking that we should help those facing the worst of the housing crisis, who are the least affluent members of our community.
  

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12. Off to the House of Commons on Wednesday, 21^st June, for MP, Marsha de Cordova’s, annual reception for new members of the Battersea Labour Party.
    

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13. On 24^th June we saw ‘Dear England’, James Graham’s play about England football Manager, Gareth Southgate. It was about Southgate’s emotional growth after missing a penalty kick in a critical game in 1996; and, more importantly, how he taught a lesson about team unity and collective responsibility, first to the English team and subsequently, maybe, to the British public. It is most simply expressed in the phrase, “We win as a team, and (if we lose then) we lose as a team” – an expression of community and not of individuality. The play owes a great deal to musical theatre; it is visually stunning and expressive; but more than that, it demonstrates playwright’s, James Graham’s, ability to address cultural and political issues through popular and appealing stories – good stuff.
    

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My programme for July

1. At the end of June, I am off to Rome, to join Penny in her last week as President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
2. I will be missing the 6^th July Finance Committee, which is unfortunate as the Council will be making some important decisions; but I have been part of the background work on those decisions, of which more next month.
3. On the 13^th July I have an interesting campaigning meeting on the Ethelburga Estate, when residents will be launching a campaign to get photo-voltaic cells installed on their very large flat roof area. On the same evening, I also have a meeting of the Labour councillors and the Battersea Society’s Annual Summer Party at St. Mary’s Church on the river-front.
4. On the 18^th July I have the Planning Applications Committee.
5. And on the 19^th Wandsworth’s full Council Meeting takes place.
   

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Did you Know?

Last month I asked, ‘As well as naming one block after William Wilberforce, the old Battersea Council named six blocks on another nearby estate after supporters or sympathisers of the Abolition Movement. Can you name all six, or even three of them?’

No one could name all six and some of you argued with my definition say, for example, of William Pitt Jr. or Charles Fox being sympathisers of the movement – but note that this is not my definition but in the opinion of the members of an LCC committee in 1946. The others were Thomas Clarkson, effectively Wilberforce’s PA and pictured here; Edmund Burke; Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who took over the leadership of the abolition movement after Wilberforce’s retirement; and James Ramsay or Ramsey, a very well-known abolitionist.

At least two other blocks in the immediate area of Hope Street, Milner House and Chalmers House, bear the names of yet more abolitionists – indeed perhaps even the name Hope Street is connected to the Movement.

And this month? 

Talking of plaques, and the subject matter of one of the plays I saw in June, there is in Battersea a plaque to a single event that occurred in Battersea in the nineteenth century, which is of international significance in the history of sport. Do you know what the event was, where it took place and where the plaque is located?