Parklife

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).