Forum Topic

Threat to Gunnersbury Park

The joint committee on Gunnersbury Park have been actively considered measures that would involve selling of bits of the park to private developers. According to the minutes Ealing Councillors have been the most active proponents of this. The park and buildings has been and continues to be badly neglected but schemes to provide funding to public assets in this way rarely provide lasting solutions.The current official position is that there 'are no plans' to sell off bit of the park but board papers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act make it very clear that a sale of land is very much under consideration.

Paul Cavanagh ● 6600d17 Comments

The funding gap is £10 million - where are you going to get the money from?

Andy Jones ● 6600d

The rumour going round a few weeks ago was that the south side would be sold for housing. Given that houses there would be pretty much under the Chiswick flyover, it's hard to see anyone lining up to build them or buy them in the present economic climate.Doesn't mean we should be complacent, though; when the housing market (inevitably) picks up again, it could become a viable scheme.

Susan Kelly ● 6599d

I assume the land sale would be on the eastern side of Lionel Road down towards Potomac Lake, thus completing development of the park's boundary.

Alan Brainsby ● 6598d

That wouldn't be illogical, given that Popes Lane and a lot of the North Circular were developed. You wonder why they didn't go on down Lionel Road in the first place back in the 30s. It's not prime property in a stalled market, though; long way from public transport!

Susan Kelly ● 6598d

Funnily enough, Susan, I thought of public transport as I wrote.Currently the only bus is the H91 from Hounslow West to Hammersmith -  Great West Road and Chiswick High Road.That location must be one of the furthest from any useful public transport link in our area (I would put Tentelow Lane higher), but that's off-topic.

Alan Brainsby ● 6598d

You can walk to Kew Bridge station in a few minutes. Not ideal, certainly.

Susan Kelly ● 6598d

If flats are not viable then why not a hotel or a school? It seems to me doing nothing is not an option.

Paul Cavanagh ● 6597d

I got a letter from Ann Keen this morning; she's writing to every household in her constituency. She says that the committee to decide the future of the park is meeting in secret and she's getting up a petition to demand that they publish their minutes and that Ealing and Hounslow state publicly that they won't give planning permission for housing.I must say that it doens't seem right that their deliberations should be kept secret.

Susan Kelly ● 6592d

The irony is that if they had published the minutes of meeting nobody would have bothered to read them and none of this fuss would have resulted.

Paul Cavanagh ● 6590d

Good point, Paul. Clearly the best way to bury bad news is to make it look as dull as possible.

Susan Kelly ● 6589d

The latest is that rather than publishing minutes they are now proposing not to take any minutes at all!

Paul Cavanagh ● 6582d

Can't they find anyone who understands English?

Alan Brainsby ● 6582d

They'd have to note action points though, at the very least, and those would be FOI-able.

Sara Nathan ● 6582d

They have now announced that meetings will in future be open to the public. Personally I think in some ways this is a backward step for the future of the park. Clearly what was happening at the meeting before was a bit of 'blue sky' thinking was taking place with board members trying to come up with imaginative ways to deal with the massive funding problem the park has got.Now with a noisy but not necessarily representative group of local residents at the meeting nobody is going to dare to suggest anything unpopular even though something unpopular is what is required to save the park and the mansions.

Andy Jones ● 6574d

"Now with a noisy but not necessarily representative group of local residents at the meeting nobody is going to dare to suggest anything unpopular even though something unpopular is what is required to save the park and the mansions."This suggests that local people aren't intelligent enough to make decisions themselves and need a cabal meeting in secret to tell them what needs doing. Once we accept the principle that we need to give up some of park space to 'save' what is left then there will beging a creeping erosion of green space in London. I don't believe for one minute that building on Gunnersbury Park is the only way to save it.

Andy Jones ● 6569d

Christine, the only other way to 'save' it would be the investment of large amounts of public money. If this has not been available in times of prosperity it is certainly not going to appear with the country about to go into what is a very deep recession.The leader of Hounslow Council gives a lot of non-commitments in the article 'Setting the Record Straight on Gunnersbury Park' on the front page as well as some waffle about stakeholders. He never says that Gunnersbury Park will not be built on.

Andy Jones ● 6562d

This does cut both ways. A recession may mean that there is less money to preserve the park but it also means that the returns developers get for building on it will be far less. It could be that the sale of land in the park will now not yield enough to make it worthwhile or if you are really pessimistic they will have to sell a lot more to cover the shortfall.

Paul Cavanagh ● 6558d