Councillor Tony Belton’s Battersea, April 2025, Newsletter (# 190)
- The Council Meeting on 5th March confirmed the long-discussed Council Tax freeze, already agreed at Committee level. The somewhat academic discussion centred on when a freeze is a freeze and when it is not. I doubt whether the public is as interested in the finer points of the argument as leading councillors are. What I am sure residents are interested in is that Wandsworth is now the only Council in the country where the standard Band D Council Tax (the gold standard) is below £1,000 a year, only just perhaps but definitely below £1,000.
- On the 6th March, I attended the North-East Surrey Crematorium Board’s quarterly meeting at Sutton Town Hall. The main discussion this quarter was whether we should spend potentially £1/4 million on providing separate pedestrian access along the
main access to the Crematorium. I do not think that the clash between car traffic and pedestrians is a major feature of cemetery concerns in the UK today – see picture! For aesthetic as well as for financial reasons, I was opposed – a real Clochmerle story if ever there was one. (If you haven’t heard of Clochmerle, then let me tell you it was a comedy novel about French rural small-town politics by a man called Gabriel Chevallier, which centred on the location of the town’s proposed new public lavatories. It’s an amusing read, and I am rather afraid that I might be at the centre of a similar story!)
- Off to the Renaissance Hotel, St. Pancras, on 14th March
for the very classy launch of Penny’s latest (of six) book, called Time-Space We are all in it together. (She says that it has to be Time-Space and not Space-Time because that would be a physicist’s book and not a historian’s!) The picture is of me introducing the author to the audience, which, although not obvious from this scene, was over 100 strong. It was a great evening, enjoyed by all.
- On the 21st March, I joined our MP, Marsha de Cordova, and the local police team on a walk-about on the Doddington Estate. The main focus of our concerns were drug-dealing criminals, but we were also concerned about fly-tipping and problems with damp and mould. Marsha is really good at these walk-about events; chatty, welcoming and friendly to all passersby. We left having plenty of practical issues to follow up.
- On the morning of the 24th March, the members of the Planning Applications Committee went for a site visit to the Wandsworth Gasworks site. It is a large, derelict, noxious, industrial ruin of a site, covered with gas pipes, concrete, scrap metal and the detritus of a century of heavy industry. The water in the picture is NOT the Wandle but the drowned, very deep, very large foundations of the old gasometer.
- And two days later on the 26th, I chaired (pictured centre, along with Nick Calder, the head of planning
development and the clerk) the Planning Applications Committee, where the main decision to resolve was the application for the development of the Gasworks site. The choice we were presented with was to accept the current application or leave the site as it is now and wait for some hypothetical future application, which would need to be as viable in
financial terms as the current application, but also better in policy terms. Better in policy terms would, in reality, have to mean more than 40% affordable housing and/or less than 29 storeys of height. But we are where we are with a dangerous, toxic, empty, under-used site so we accepted the application by 6 votes to 3. One possible beneficiary of a much-improved site was this heron spotted in the Wandle Estuary foreshore.
- Between these two occasions, on the 25th, I had the Conservation and Heritage Advisory Committee largely uneventful and business-like. And then on the 29th Penny and I decided to have a day in Weymouth. For those, who don’t know the town, it is well worth a day return from Clapham Junction, with a delightful harbour, a really, great very long, sandy beach, good very British food next to the harbour – my fisherman’s pie was terrific – if it had been a hundred miles away in Normandy/Brittany we’d have been raving about French cuisine!
- The Borough’s March highlights:
- In the last year, Wandsworth has recycled an extra 5,000 tons – the equivalent weight of 400 double-decker buses.
- The next phase of the Cleaner Borough Plan starts soon, including additional bins in town centres, jet washing and more regular sweeping of high streets, as well as clearing fly-tips on private land not owned by the council.
- Wandsworth has the biggest bike hangar programme of any local authority in London. Residents told us that more safe storage would make it easier for them to cycle, so we’re installing another 120 hangars around the borough, taking the total to almost 350.
- Wandsworth has helped secure thousands of pounds in Attendance Allowance through our campaign to sign up eligible residents. This benefit, for pension-age residents who need regular support, is not provided automatically by the government, so we’ve used data from the Low Income Family Tracker (LIFT) platform to target a campaign at those who should benefit. Since the start of our campaign, £230,000 has been put in their pockets, and they will be set to receive an extra £1.5m over the lifetime of the claims. We will also investigate ways to support disabled residents who may be impacted by proposed reductions in their support
My April Programme
- On the 3rd April, we are off on Eurostar to Brussels, Cologne and Essen, Germamy, for a history conference, where Penny is giving the Keynote speech and we will be staying for three days. We will take the opportunity to visit Cologne Cathedral, one of the great European cathedrals and which neither of us has previously visited.
- I have the Wandsworth Town Together event on the 11th. I have not been to this before,but it looks like a great celebration of the Borough’s youth.
- The April meeting of the Planning Applications Committee (PAC) is on the 24th.
- The official launch of the Wandsworth Borough of Culture Year takes place with the Strictly Wandsworth event in Battersea Park on 26th April.
Did you know?
Last month I asked, “Do you know where Leo lives and why did he settle there?”
I am afraid that you clearly were not very interested but Roy did point out quite correctly that I had asked that once before and the answer is simply Macduff Road, off Battersea Park Road, but neither of us knows exactly who put him there or why.
And this month?
So, ok it’s a wall. It is not a Roman wall or a last remaining Medieval London wall? But what is unique about this particular wall? And where is it? And why? And what is it called?
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 