Councillor Tony Belton’s Battersea, November 2025, Newsletter (# 197)

1. October started for me, with a couple of jabs, against Covid and influenza. It is really good that the NHS has for a few years now got onto the offensive against these highly infectious diseases. Let me urge you, especially if you are eligible for free jabs, if you haven’t got around to it, to get your free jabs now. And if you are one of those scared of injections or with other objections, or distrust, can I ask you to re-consider your position. These are infectious diseases and if you get them then you are also endangering the rest of us.
   

   ---

2. As Chair of the Planning Applications Committee, on 8^th October I attended a Design Review Panel (DRP) of a new council development on the Lennox Estate, Roehampton on 8^th The Council intends to build some 50 new flats on the estate and I think the DRP process is a really positive newish part of the process. It is in effect a peer review by architects, ecological/landscape experts, engineers, etc. of the architects’ and planners’ plans. The end result is better buildings and, hopefully, in the longer term happier residents.
   

   ---

3. On 9^th October I was off to the Civil Service club, Great Scotland Yard, for the annual summer dinner of the 07 Club. Founded in 1907, this club was established as an informal gathering of men (and I mean men, as women members are a 21^st century innovation), whose job it was to run London’s civil government. Originally, they were largely the leading lights of the London County Council or LCC – replaced in 1965 by the GLC and now the GLA, or Greater London Assembly, but now it includes the Fire Brigade, the Ambulance Service and the London Boroughs. Actually, of course, it is an excuse to go into central London and have a harmless jolly – which is what it was.
   

   ---

4. I was touring Battersea Park ward on 18^th October and by chance, as much as by design, I popped into the Carney’s Community youth club in Petworth Street. It was good to see that boxing training was going ahead as vigourously as ever. I also had an interesting chat with Mumtaz, Kyran and Malachi – pictured here, youngsters who were that morning running the club’s bicycle repairs and support shop. It is a positive and useful by-product of the youth club, so if your bike needs repairs and maintenance, or you have an old one that needs a new home, why not pop down to Petworth Street and have a chat with them.
   

   ---

   ---

5. d id you know that before the effective de-industrialisation of Battersea in the 1960s and 1970s, Battersea had a reputation as being one of the heartlands of the London boxing scene? There used to be regular boxing events put on in Battersea Town Hall (now the BAC). Probably the biggest star was Don Cockell, aka the Battersea Bruiser, who in 1955 went 9 rounds with the fiercesome, American heavyweight champion, Rocky Marciano. Cockell was British, European and Commonwealth champion. Here Cockell, in black shorts, takes a right-hook from Marciano – in Madison Square Gardens, NY.
   

   ---

6. I went from the Carney Community into Battersea Park, where I came across the Battersea Park Running Festival. It is an annual event run hosted by RunThrough Events for the benefit of the Battersea Cats & Dogs Home. There are several events such as a marathon, a half marathon, and a 1-kilometre junior race. Smashing!
   

   ---

7. I had a very sad experience on 22^nd I went to a memorial service for a significant Labour figure, being held in the famous de-commissioned church in Smith Square. Not surprisingly, the large audience was mature in years – unfortunately a member of the congregation had a heart attack just as the service was beginning. The occasion was cancelled, much to the distress of widow and family – imagine the emotional and nervous energy used up in preparation for the eulogies and the social sympathies involved in such an event. That was followed, in the evening, by the Council Meeting, but there isn’t anything to say about that routine event.
   

   ---

8. On the return journey, I popped into the Tate Gallery to see the Clive Branson paintings on display. Branson was a British artist, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and sadly died in WW2 in Burma, now Myanmar, in 1944. He was a true socialist, who lived for many years in Battersea. His most famous painting, Selling The Daily Worker outside the PECO factory, I have shown before but on display with it at the Tate was this social-realist painting Bombed Women and Searchlights. The building under the searchlights are public baths – probably the long since demolished Nine Elms Baths? Note, in this moving and historic picture, the giant barrage ballon overhead, the broken windows and the Dig for Victory poster.
   

   ---

9. On 23^rd October, I chaired Wandsworth’s Planning Applications Committee. There was a contentious application for a hotel in Tooting, but we were assured that this hotel was incapable of being converted for hostel use without a secondary planning application. The liveliest debate affecting Battersea was consideration of another application – but one submitted after the building had already been constructed. The Committee does not like construction proceeding without permission, but on this occasion, we decided to approve it anyway.
   

   ---

10. I was invited to the opening, on 24^th October, of a large new industrial building in Lydden Road, off Garratt Lane, that my committee had approved a couple of years ago. I went there but I had the wrong date, or they had re-scheduled without telling me. It looked all bright, shiny and new and hopefully it will stimulate the Borough’s industrial economy.
    

    ---

11. Whilst there I dropped into the Font climbing and social centre in Lydden Road for a cuppa. I knew, of course, that climbing is now an Olympic sport with thousands of new devotees, but I did not know that we had a thriving centre for it, just off Garratt Lane. Even if it looks quiet here, early on a Friday morning, it is apparently so busy at weekends that they are hoping to expand to a larger place in the Southside Shopping Centre. Good climbing to them all.
    

    ---

12. The following day, I went again to Battersea Park to see the unveiling of a plaque to Bob Marley, who lived across the river in Chelsea, but regularly played football in the Park. Self-confessedly, the soccer he played displayed none of the gentleness and love to all men that he sang about. The unveiling was a passionate and cheerful occasion attended by some of his soccer team-mates, our MP, Marsha de Cordova, my fellow councillor Maurice McLeod and launched by the High Commissioner for Jamaica. In this photo Marsha and I are pictured in front of the two plaques – one to Marley and the other to the first football match ever played in the world under FA rules.
    

    ---

13. October 27^th was a sad day for all of us in Battersea Labour Party, being the day that Prunella Scales died. She and her husband Tim West were, as well as being truly great actors, substantial contributors to the party – and not just financially. They occasinally hosted summer garden parties at their home facing on to Wandsworth Common; and they acted in a couple of revues, which my partner Penny wrote. Prunella will be best remembered as Sybil in the hilarious Fawlty Towers sit-com, and for the range of meanings she managed to convey in the five letters B_A_S_I_L. But if they show it on TV in tribute, I recommend making a point of watching Hobson’s Choice a classic of British film, starring Prunella and many others. RIP Pru, true friend and comrade to Battersea Labour Party.
    

    ---

14. Lunch with Battersea Park Rotary Club at the Albert 30^th October and a talk given by Syeda Islam on Moghul art, design and architecture in the 15^th-18^th century India. She took us through the six great Emperors, from Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan, who led an invasion of India from central Asia to the golden age of Shah Jahan, who romantically built the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife. This painting of Babur, is a portrait of a learned and cultured man and a fine example of Moghul art.
    

    ---

My November Programme

1. I have my Council surgery at 11 am at Battersea Park Library on 1^st November.
2. On the 4^th there is the Conservation and Heritage Committee.
3. I am attending a National Gallery lecture on Wright of Derby and his paintings on 5th November. Wright is an interesting eighteenth-century painter who loved painting works about the Age of Enlightenment, of science and the origins of the then Industrial Revolution, which could almost be centred on the growth of engineering in the West Midlands – still the home of Rolls Royce.
4. I will be at the Remembrance Day Service in Battersea Park on 11^th November in the morning and the Council’s Civic Awards presentation in the evening.
5. The Planning Applications Committee is on 19^th November, followed by the Transport Committee on 20^th.
   

   ---

Did you know?

Last month I asked which fragrant flower grew wild, and was cultivated commercially, in Battersea, before full urbanisation? But still left its name to SW11.

The answer was, of course, Lavender, as answered correctly by many of you. There are, of course, Lavender Hill, but also Lavender Sweep, Gardens and Mews. And notoriously the Mob!

And this month?

I took this picture of a pastoral autumnal scene during one of my recent tours around Battersea Park ward but it is NOT in the Park. Where is it?