The air ambulance landed outside Charlton House at 10.20am (Photo: Steve Hunnisett/charltonchampion.co.uk)
King’s Troop horses ran amok in Charlton this morning, causing injuries and a flood of emergency services to descend on Charlton Village.
Photo: Steve Hunnisett/charltonchampion.co.uk
Service personnel were hurt and an eyewitness at the scene told The Charlton Champion that one horse was taken away injured after the incident at about 10am. Other service personnel were said to be looking shaken.
One horse made it as far as Charlton Park Lane before being retrieved, hoof prints were left round Charlton Park.
One person was being treated outside Charlton House. Photo: Steve Hunnisett/charltonchampion.co.uk
It is understood the horses broke free after a motorist sounded a car horn behind them at about 10am. Ambulances were on the scene outside Charlton House for about an hour. An air ambulance arrived but left without taking a patient on board.
The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, which is based at Woolwich Barracks, performs ceremonial duties at state occasions. It moved to the area in 2012 and the horses can regularly be seen being exercised in the neighbourhood, although training has been reduced to a minimum during the pandemic.
Hoof prints can be seen all over Charlton Park (photo: Steve Hunnisett/charltonchampion.co.uk)
In February 2017, a soldier broke her neck trying to stop a gun carriage and runaway horses on exercises in Charlton Park.
An eyewitness, Anne James, had just driven through Charlton Village when she saw “a stream of horses rushing towards me”. She called an ambulance after seeing a rider fall from her horse.
“I could see that they were army horses and assumed they were running blindly because something had upset them – the clattering of their hooves at speed made quite a noise,” she told The Charlton Champion.
“Each rider led a second horse, and things were clearly out of control. There were at least a dozen horses, and some of them were slipping and sliding on the tarmac. They ran in front of my car and across the pavement, where they jumped a small wall then the boundary fence at the front of Charlton House.
“As I watched them head off across the grass, I saw one rider fall to the pavement – she held on to the reins and was dragged for a few seconds, but then let go and curled into a ball to protect herself from the horses that were still hurtling past her.”
An Army spokesperson told The Charlton Champion: “We can confirm a number of military personnel and horses from the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery were injured whilst training this morning.
“The injured personnel are receiving medical treatment and the horses are being assessed. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”
Update: Six people were taken to hospital, MyLondon.news reported.
Modernise, repair and redecorate the sports changing rooms
Improve the playground
Help create the wildlife meadow
Various repairs: footpaths, benches, bins, the boundary wall, repainting gates and railings
New signage at the car park entrance
Marked and measured route markers
The Friends of Charlton Park is asking for your views on where the money should be spent. The group says: “Green spaces should be for everyone, so let us know what would tempt you outside! For example, better lighting in winter may help people who are concerned about safety to feel comfortable spending time outside even after it gets dark around 4pm.”
When the council asked for suggestions last year, the suggestions for Charlton Park included additional toilets and maintenance as well as picnic area improvements, more bins and floodlights in the skatepark.
The Valley is hosting lateral flow testing this weekend
Local residents who are not showing coronavirus symptoms can now book fast, free tests at The Valley this weekend to see if they have Covid-19.
The tests are being made available as part of a borough-wide community testing programme and are also available at locations in Greenwich and Eltham. Results will be sent to you within 45 minutes.
A testing station was set up at The Valley last weekend to test school students and staff, but there are slots available for all without symptoms this weekend. So to save you making an unnecessary journey to the Old Royal Naval College, you can book a test at The Valley at the Greenwich Council website. Results will be sent by text within 30 minutes.
If you have symptoms, don’t use this service – go straight to the standard testing service instead at gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test, or call 119.
Many people with the virus don’t show symptoms, so the fast lateral flow tests are useful at picking up these cases. If you get a positive test, you should always act on it – but don’t be reassured by a negative test, because analysis shows lateral flow tests only pick up half the active infections. It’s better than nothing – if people self-isolate as a result of taking these tests, then they have done their job – but not fool-proof.
If you need to self-isolate but need help with shopping or other services, get in touch with Greenwich Council’s community hub or call 0800 470 4831. If you cannot claim sick-pay from your employer and are a low income household, a one-off £500 payment may be available from the government to support you and your family. Find out if you are eligible to apply for this payment or call 0800 470 4831.
The cafe was unable to open for Christmas, but scores of people helped anyway
More than 120 customers of the Old Cottage Coffee Shop in Charlton Park rallied round to help 24 elderly people have a happy Christmas, writing cards and helping to deliver food.
The cafe usually invites older people round for Christmas dinner – but with that not possible this year, it asked customers – including readers of The Charlton Champion – to help with donations of gifts, food and money, and to help drive the parcels to the recipients’ homes.
Thank you very much for your huge support and help this challenging this Christmas. The community spirit was unbelievable. Donation was £1619.50 we still can donate to the Greenwich and Bexlay hospice. You helped many people. Thank you very very much 🙇🏻 pic.twitter.com/RG1vnl2mdQ
As well as the gifts and food, 280 cards were written, and a total of £1,619 was raised – meaning £1,031 can be given to the Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice.
Help came from as far away as St Thomas a Becket primary school in Abbey Wood, whose pupils sent cards, while the Co-op in Charlton Village, Tesco in Woolwich and Hachi Sushi Grill, also in Woolwich, helped out too.
The Charlton station mural showed that good things can happen here
It’s been such a bumpy year that we missed an important date – this website’s 10th birthday. The Charlton Champion began as an experiment on October 18, 2010. Could a small slice of SE London sustain a hyperlocal website? A decade on, we’re still here. Site founder DARRYL CHAMBERLAIN looks back and says thank you.
Strange time to have a birthday – we couldn’t even meet up in the pub. But here we are, marking 10 years since The Charlton Champion appeared for the first time. Whether you began reading last week or were here when we published 10 good things about Charlton, thank you for reading.
In publishing terms, we’ve survived despite a revolution. During 2010, a rash of hyperlocal – strictly speaking, aimed at a small geographical area – websites sprang up in London. I was still running 853.london more or less as a personal blog, and had always wondered whether Charlton could sustain something of its own. So I gave it a go. The local papers weren’t great, even then, and there was a terrible weekly council propaganda rag, Greenwich Time. There was no way it could be worse than them.
A threat to the Maryon Wilson Park animals was our first big scoop
Many of those other websites are long gone – their owners lost interest or moved, or readers weren’t interested – but we’ve survived. Our first big story – Greenwich Council’s plan to stop funding Maryon Wilson animal park – got us ahead of the pack. Back then, the local press was competition – and amazingly, they did appear to take us seriously. A Charlton edition of the Mercurywas briefly launched, showing the commercial acumen which would later kill off the whole paper. And the News Shopper experimented with a Charlton Live website, which quickly turned up its toes. Now the Mercury has gone, barely missed, and few noticed the Greenwich print edition of the Shopper disappearing earlier this year. We don’t have a traditional local media left any more.
Instead, we’ve got Twitter, Facebook and Nextdoor, and those who feed from them. Social media has become an existential threat to any form of sustainable independent local publishing and to a certain extent we’re here in spite of them, not because of being able to promote our site on them. It’s striking how many do huge favours for these American giants by regularly sharing their news with them, giving them material to sell advertising around. Then they wonder why the local media struggles. A couple of years ago, I wrote to the local police to suggest they share their crime messages with us rather than on a registration-only social media site. I didn’t even get a reply.
The Old Cottage Coffee Shop is one of the best things to happen in the past decade
The Champion has kept going with lots of help, for which I’m hugely grateful. The readers who pay into PressPatron each month help us cover the bills; without Neil Clasper’s much-appreciated help in recent years, this site would probably have closed. It’s been a real treat to host Kevin Nolan’s Charlton Athletic match reports after growing up reading his write-ups in the Mercury. Champion alumni have done well – Linzi Kinghorn, who helped in the early days, is now at BBC Radio Solent; Matt Clinch is now an early riser with CNBC. Lara Ruffle Coles has gone higher than any of us, blogging from all the way up Shooters Hill. More help is always appreciated; and if you’re studying for a journalism qualification and can bring some ideas we can offer you a place to practice your skills and get a few bylines.
We’re remained unashamedly parochial – the odd sally towards Mycenae House or East Greenwich Pleasaunce notwithstanding, we don’t feature anything more than a few minutes’ walk from the boundaries of SE7; the point of this has been to help people discover their own neighbourhood, not to get in their cars or on the bus and head off elsewhere. It’s come into its own in a pandemic when people are urged to stay at home. But this does mean some fringe issues, such as the Silvertown Tunnel and Ikea, have never had the showing they maybe should have done here, because they’ve been covered for 853 instead.
We tended to ignore the retail parks, but made an exception for Primark as it recognised the local community
We’ve also tended to ignore the retail parks, even though if we slavishly covered their ins and outs we’d have healthier page views. (Our most-read stories were the ones we did around the opening of Ikea.) Most can’t even be bothered to acknowledge they’re in Charlton, and the retail parks’ design make them outwardly hostile to anyone trying to walk there. Indeed, the traffic-clogged Greenwich Shopping Park is one of the worst neighbours you could hope to have. (Fun fact: it was wondering why the hell the council was still allowing retail parks on the riverside that got me digging around local issues.) Primark Charlton invited us to their opening, though, and were absolutely lovely. And they don’t pretend to be in Greenwich either.
We kicked off with a 10 great things about Charlton list; it’d need some updating now. Blackheath FC sloped off to Eltham a few years ago, so they’re out. The Old Cottage Cafe would definitely be in there, we’d have to find room for the Village Greengrocers. The skate park has proved more popular than its backers ever hoped, and is attracting an increasingly diverse crowd – a relief after a truly dispiriting squabble over its construction. Charlton Lido has come into its own, and I suspect those who took lockdown walks there would add Maryon Wilson Animal Park. The White Swan would have been in there had it not closed with remarkably fortunate timing – its closure was the biggest non-Ikea story we’ve run on the site, a testament to the amazing work put into the place before the rent got too much.
In the next decade: More hard hats, construction, and photocalls
We’ve never been an uncritical cheerleader. Just as 10 years ago, the state of The Village remains a worry – is it us or are there more closed shops than open ones now? And what’s the plan for its future? We may be “defiantly unfashionable” (all the hipsters moved to Catford instead) but austerity, insularity and complacency continue to hold our neighbourhood back – thousands of people have moved into Charlton in the past decade and more will come, many with expertise and experience of other parts of London: where are the forums for them to feed in their ideas?
Relations with the council are better than they were 10 years ago (remember the “Royal Greenwich Lido” fiasco?); but we’re still a neighbourhood that has things done to us rather than having things done with us. If we’re to see The Village – and more besides – out of the doldrums, that has to change. For our part, we’ll keep trying to alert you to things when we can, though we’re sometimes the last to know too.
What about the next 10 years? After a few false starts, it’s highly likely we’ll have a couple of thousand new Charlton residents down by the river – the biggest question is which will get planning permission first; closely followed by whether government changes to planning laws will completely screw up a carefully-calibrated masterplan. Hopefully we can avoid the huge mistakes being made on the Greenwich Peninsula and – even worse – across the river in Silvertown, and create a community that knits into the 9,000 existing households in Charlton. Plus we’ll have a rebuilt Morris Walk Estate next to Maryon Park – the designs look good, though developer Lovell could learn a thing about talking to the community.
We wanted to do something on this mural – but ran out of time this year
Transport and infrastructure is going to remain an issue – especially with a new bit of Charlton appearing. Chronic rat-running to and from the retail parks and may see the introduction of low-traffic neighbourhoods if the council has the courage – while with even more development on the peninsula, it may be time to accept that North Greenwich tube station just ain’t all that convenient any more. And will a cycle lane on the Woolwich Road lure you into getting on your bike?
Thousands of new residents could also be an opportunity for local media – I knocked up a small print version of The Charlton Champion on an InDesign course a couple of years back and it looked great. But I juggle this with two part-time roles that can balloon out across the week, Neil squeezes his work here with a full-time job and a family. Time and resources will always be a major issue – but with enough people on board, we could do something special if there’s the demand.
And with that, time to kick 2020 into the bin where it belongs, but raise a glass to 10 years of The Charlton Champion. Here’s to the future.
Seen the Christmas wreaths on the walled garden at Charlton House? They’ve bene placed there by the Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society, whose volunteers have been restoring the Old Pond Garden this year between the lockdowns. The society’s KATHY AITKEN explains what’s been happening.
If readers are out on a walk over Christmas, perhaps they might like to go past, admire the wreaths and peep in to see what the Old Pond Garden Volunteers have been doing to restore this lovely garden. The garden looks a bit bare and new at the moment but there is such promise for spring, when we hope the gates will open again, and 2,000 newly planted bulbs, primroses and Hellebores will brighten everyone’s view!
Our volunteer scheme to restore the Old Pond Garden was started by the Charlton & Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society in February and has been going from strength to strength this year despite the intermittent lockdowns.
Just before the latest one, we decorated the iron gates between the Old Pond Garden and the Long Borders garden at the back of Charlton House, sustained by mince pies from the Charlton Bakehouse. The garden is perfect to work outdoors and be able to keep a safe social distance but still manage to be sociable!
Our volunteers have been a fantastic support all this year and have had lots of fun in between doing some very serious weeding and pruning. The beautiful new planting scheme for the garden is by Charlton garden designer Jason Carty, and helped by the recent mild weather, we have got some beds fully planted up already. There is much to look forward to, and that is so important at the moment!
New volunteers are welcome, any gardening ability, details are on our website. The scheme will start up again once Tier 4 restrictions are lifted.
You can find out more about the Old Pond Garden project at cahbas.com.
A few weeks back, we mentioned the St Luke’s and St Thomas’ churches were asking people to leave messages that could go on their Christmas trees. Well, the trees are up, and at St Luke’s, it’s good to see some familiar names on them. Something to take a look at if you’re having a Christmas Day walk…
The Charlton Champion 