PARKLIFE
Green
Park
Westbourne
Green Park
is looking unusually green at the moment, but is still largely inaccessible to
the public. This is a huge frustration, but I suppose we should be grateful
that at least it looks green, even if we can’t actually get onto the grass. The
reason it’s so green is that it has just been re-turfed, and there have been
multiple sprinklers playing on it for the past couple of weeks. The re-turfing
was actually quite impressive, with the fresh turf coming off a roller, like so
much carpet, but the newly turfed area remains fenced off, accessible only to
men in hard hats and high-vis jackets.
Thames Water
The reason the Green had to be re-turfed is that it has been
dug up. Thames Water have just put an enormous sewage tank under our park,
twenty metres in diameter and twenty-three metres deep. This tank is then
connected by means of a deep-level tunnel to a major sewer junction about a
quarter of a mile north, so that when sudden downpours overwhelm the system the
excess sewage flows into the tank instead of into people’s basements, as had
been happening.
Victorian Engineering
Now you will be objecting that rainwater has nothing to do
with sewage, and that’s certainly true under modern regulations, which keep the
two separate, but we are operating with a Victorian system, where rainwater
does indeed flow into the sewer. In fact, the sewer in question is one of the
great Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s pioneering works, and not only does it use
rainwater to ensure a flow, but a natural watercourse as well, because our
sewer is the old Westbourne
River in a culvert. The
river had already been dammed to create the Serpentine before Bazalgette got
his hands on it, but he put it all into a culvert (and detached the Serpentine)
and made it a main sewer emptying into the Thames at Chelsea. You can see its pipe crossing above
the platform at Sloane Square
tube station, but it’s deep beneath Westbourne Green, and far beneath the
Canal. The problem in modern times has been that it’s just not big enough to
cope with a sudden influx of rain, and people living in Shirland Road and Formosa Street have really been
suffering. A second, smaller, tank has been dug under Tamplin Mews
Gardens to address a
second area of flooding, near the Chippenham pub. The noxious flooding went on
for quite some time before Thames Water were pressed into doing something about
it.
Problems and Solutions
Obviously Thames Water needed to stop sewage flooding
people’s flats, but some of us campaigned hard to try to achieve a different
solution. A couple of years ago I appeared on the front of a local paper,
looking very grumpy, alongside the chair of our Neighbourhood Forum and one of
the councillors, under a “save our park” headline. The councillor (Labour) was
very concerned that it was just us in the photo and so it looked like an
“elite” protest rather than something coming from the community; I muttered
that he shouldn’t worry because we were a vanguard, but he doesn’t seem to know
his Marxist-Leninism. The point was that another section of the park had just
been requisitioned by Westminster Adult Education Service for a temporary
building to replace their local centre in Amberley Road which they had sold to
property developers, and so people on the Warwick Estate were losing two chunks
of open space. It was clear that Thames Water had looked for publicly-owned
space on which to site their tanks because that would involve far less legal
bother and potential compensation than private land, and that the perception
was that placing one on the Warwick Estate would be fine because people there
could just be ignored. We proposed a number of alternatives, but it was clear
that the Westbourne Green tank was much easier and cheaper for Thames Water,
and would create less traffic disruption than the alternatives. Some of us did
feel that there was a bit of an injustice in blighting the lives of people in
W2 to solve Thames Water’s problem in W9, but to be fair to them, some of the
sufferers in Formosa Street would have been perfectly willing to have had the
tank right there if it had been possible.
Seasons in the Sun
So our campaign then turned to trying to mitigate the impact
of the tanks, and we extracted the assurance from Thames Water that the parks
would not be out of use for two summers. That was true for Tamplin Mews, (where
a much-improved children’s playground is being enjoyed as I write) but
certainly not for Westbourne Green, where the actual work seems to have been finished
some time ago, but handing back the park does not look imminent. We had also extracted
a promise to renovate and landscape an area known as “The Pit” on the corner of
Bourne Terrace, so that this could provide a bit more outside space for people to
enjoy during the works, but incredibly, that has still not been completed.
Thames Water say that was all held up by Westminster
planners, and profess ignorance of the idea that it should have been done first
to provide an alternative. We had provided evidence of groups that used the
park, and so Thames Water were required to mitigate this loss of amenity, which
they did by providing some extra sports facilities for young people, and some
support to local clubs. The problem really was with informal use of the park,
and its intangible benefits, because what Thames Water provided was never going
to address the issue of the damage to people’s mental wellbeing from losing the
open space. A colleague and I tried to fix something up, but our lack of
facilities (and volunteers being stretched) made it a non-starter, and when I
suggested that Thames Water might support the local community choir, which has
a demonstrably good effect on wellbeing for a significant number of people,
that was politely forgotten. It was frustrating that academic research proving
the value of access to recreational space for mental wellbeing among the
poorest in society has become available this spring, about two years too late
for us, and that we couldn’t fix up more projects in mitigation for Thames
Water to fund.
Development Opportunities
One of the people at Thames Water said to me that we could
rest assured that Westbourne Green could not now be developed because of their
enormous sewage tank, which I agreed was something, but it seems unlikely that
the City Council would actually sell off one of their relatively few
significant parks. In fact they are from time to time put under pressure for
not having enough public parks (for, bizarrely, the royal parks don’t count)
and so their planners are rather jumpy about public open space. It may be worth
pointing out, though, that a large chunk of what appears to be park alongside
the Canal is not: the canalside open space west of St.Mary Magdalene’s School
is housing land, maintained by CityWest Homes (the City Council’s housing
subsidiary) rather than the Council Parks Department. That land was part of a
recent masterplan that failed to obtain sufficient public support to proceed,
but there is nothing to stop the Council going ahead with piecemeal development
in future (which would undoubtedly have fewer community benefits than were
included in the masterplan).