Here’s the latest on Charlton House and the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust (the body that runs it) from Charlton ward councillor Gary Parker…
This is a summary of the work I have been involved in with Board members, staff, volunteers and the public with regard to the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust/ Charlton House.
Councillor Gary Parker
Charlton House
Donald Insall Associates, who completed the Condition Survey for Charlton House, hosted a seminar about Jacobean architecture with speakers including Professor Malcolm Airs of the University of Oxford, who returned a key to the Charlton House team, gifted to him 50 years previously by a former caretaker!
Developed in collaboration with the people of Woolwich and the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The museum team talked to over 300 residents to discover their stories and histories of military life in Woolwich.
Opening addresses were given by Len Duvall OBE, Chair of Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust; Major General Nick Eeles, Royal Artillery; and Cllr Denise Hyland, Leader of Greenwich Council.
The gallery was formally opened by the daughters of Woolwich men who served in the First World War, and whose stories are shared in Making Woolwich. The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Royal Regiment of Artillery, Royal Artillery Museums Ltd, Friends of the Royal Artillery Collections and the Royal Artillery Historical Trust.
41 Pattison Road
Focusing on one Plumstead home, this new exhibition at the Heritage Centre explores the lives of the residents of 41 Pattison Road, through the museum & archive of Royal Greenwich. The story – spans one hundred years including two World Wars – and tells the story of the day-to-day life of the Downar family and features items including motor car ration books, national identity cards and aircraft damage insurance details.
Horn Fair
Moved back to the original date in autumn to coincide with the Feast of St Luke, Horn Fair took place on 16 October 2016. In its second year the event was a great success with craft demonstrations including stone masonry, stone carving, decorative plasterwork, and a Delft tile design workshop. Traditional music was again provided by Trustee Malcolm Woods and friends. A marketplace featured stalls from local businesses including Roger Wharf, Charlton House beekeeper who did a roaring trade in sales of our very own honey!
We will begin planning for Horn Fair 2017 in the new year, with a proposed date of 22 October 2017.
Charlton noticeboard
The Trust have recently refurbished a community notice board at Charlton Assembly Rooms. Requests for items to be posted should be made to the Trust at office[at]rght.org.uk.
Greenwich Council formally launched the Charlton Riverside masterplan consultation last week. We hope to publish more on what’s inside over the next couple of weeks, but there are council consultation sessions over the next month where you can ask questions and make comments.
Sessions are being held at The Valley, Charlton House, Greenwich Trust School and New Charlton Community Centre between 4 and 22 March.
In true local paper style, here’s the council’s press release…
Residents are being invited to participate in our consultation on the proposed Charlton Riverside development.
Charlton Riverside is an exciting opportunity for a mixed use neighbourhood, characterised by medium-rise development. The proposed development will continue to be an important employment area, which could add space for around 5,000 more jobs, as well as up to 7,500 new homes, schools, open space and community health facilities.
Future development could integrate modern, clean, hi-tech business and industrial with residential and community uses to create a dynamic living and working environment.
Consultation drop in sessions will also be held on the following dates where people can ask questions and make comments on the proposals:
Saturday 4 March: Charlton Athletic, Floyd Road, SE7 8BL from 10am to 12pm Tuesday 7 March: Charlton House, Charlton Road, SE7 8RE from 1pm to 3pm Tuesday 14 March: Royal Greenwich Trust School, 765 Woolwich Road, London SE7 8LJ from 7pm to 9pm Wednesday 22 March: New Charlton Community Centre, 217 Maryon Road, Charlton SE7 8DB from 7.30pm to 9.30pm
Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Sustainability, Councillor Danny Thorpe, said: “The proposed Charlton Riverside development respects the industrial heritage of Charlton Riverside, natural environment and local community aspirations while delivering the new homes, businesses and thousands of jobs required.
“Working with and for residents and businesses is central to making Charlton Riverside successful, which is why we are asking local people to come along to next month’s meetings and have their say on our proposals.”
The consultation starts on 22 February and will remain open to receiving any written or email comments by 5pm on 12 April. To give us your views, please go online to: www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk/haveyoursay
Alternatively, you can give us your comments by letter to:
Regeneration Team, Fifth Floor, The Woolwich Centre, 35 Wellington Street, Woolwich, London SE18 6HQ
Or by email to: charlton-masterplan[at]royalgreenwich.gov.uk.
We’re lucky in Charlton to have some very good schools. Our Lady of Grace Primary is lucky enough to have the newest school, having moved into just-completed buildings on Highcombe last month.
Unfortunately, some of its parents could do with some lessons themselves. Back in 2015, when planning permission was granted, there were fears about the effects of parents driving to school on the streets around the site, which sits in between two other schools – Sherington and Fossdene.
Now Highcombe is a mess at chucking-out time, with parents parking all over the pavement and even using the tiny Littlecombe cul-de-sac to reverse their cars. Greenwich Council says it will pass details onto its parking enforcement teams.
Elsewhere in London, Camden Council is taking a different approach. It’s closing a road in Covent Garden during school hours to protect a primary school from traffic and parking. This was covered by Tom Edwards on yesterday’s BBC London News, while here’s a video from charity Living Streets.
The issues facing St Joseph’s in Covent Garden are slightly different from ours in Charlton – it’s in the centre of London so there are a lot of delivery vehicles and taxis trying to get down the road, our streets are wider and more residential. The catchment for Our Lady of Grace may also be bigger.
But our streets are still clogged by double-parking, bad parking, and traffic that really shouldn’t be there. It’s dangerous for children and other passers-by and adds to the area’s already poor air quality. We design out anti-social behaviour in housing estates, so why not our side roads?
The thinking is that if you block the roads at the start and end of the school day, it becomes more difficult for people to drive their children to school and for others to use that route as a rat run. The parents take the hint and take their kids another way, the rat runners return to the main road. In theory. (It’s a very light version – a pop-up version, shall we say – of the Walthamstow Mini-Holland scheme, but targeted at schools and for just a short time in the day.)
Already, we’re seeing a couple of Charlton streets closed for a couple of hours on odd days to encourage children to play out. Should we be doing the same in Highcombe, Wyndcliff Road and Sherington Road to help them get to school safely?
Rockwell’s plans include a 28-storey tower close to Charlton station
A little while back, while alerting people to a meeting about the new masterplan for the Charlton riverside, we touched on plans for a 28-storey tower block on Anchor & Hope Lane, along with other big blocks behind Atlas Gardens and Derrick Gardens. What we didn’t know is that a planning application had already gone in. We’re grateful to those who took the time to let us know – here’s an update on what’s happening.
What is planned? According to planning application 16/4008/F (search via here), developer Rockwell wants to put up nine buildings ranging from 2 to 28 storeys on the site of the VIP Trading Estate and Industrial Estate – the old British Ropes site off Anchor and Hope Lane, providing 975 homes with retail, community and leisure facilities. “Affordable” housing is set at just 13%.
How come I didn’t hear about this earlier? Good question. There had been two consultation sessions, one in September, and one on 24 and 27 November, billed as Charlton Conversations. However, that second consultation didn’t take long to digest, because Rockwell put in a planning application on 5 December. It was published by Greenwich Council in mid-January, but Rockwell doesn’t seem to have alerted people on its database to respond, and no amenity groups or residents’ associations kicked up a public fuss. Nor did the nine ward councillors who represent areas within a few hundred yards of the site, although we know a lot happened behind the scenes.
One factor which complicates matters for those of us who choose to look at this kind of stuff in our spare time is that Greenwich Council no longer publishes many of its planning applications in a newspaper, making them harder to seek out. (When Greenwich Time closed, only notices about conservation areas moved to the Mercury, whose print edition is rarely seen but a digital version can be found online.)
It’s a classic example of how checks and balances can fail, because it’s so easy for these things to pass completely under the radar, particularly now there is no effective local press and we’re all scrabbling to do this in our spare time. (You can tip us off on our open thread if you get a heads-up before anyone else about an issue like this.)
Plans show blocks looming over Atlas and Derrick Gardens (left and centre) and the tower block overlooking Anchor & Hope Lane and the Makro car park (nice)
No public campaign against it – this must be fine and dandy then? Nope. Basically, this drives a coach and horses through the 2012 Charlton Riverside masterplan, which cites the area shouldn’t have buildings of more than five stories. I’m grateful to the Charlton Society for passing on its objection letter, which brands it a “completely inappropriate use of the site while setting a fundamentally misleading precedent for Charlton Riverside as a whole”.
While building a tower close to Charlton station makes sense (in theory, whether the transport network can cope is another matter), what’s planned looks ugly. And the other blocks loom over Atlas and Derrick Gardens, the two cul-de-sacs off Anchor & Hope Lane.
But isn’t there a new masterplan? Yes. It’s out this week. And it sticks two fingers up at that, too. The new masterplan allows buildings of up to ten storeys, not 28.
What does Greenwich Council think? It had been pretty widely assumed that this was fine by the council. Recent highly controversial planning decisions in Greenwich and Woolwich together with the imminent redrawing of the masterplan suggested to some that this was going to be another done deal. This actually wasn’t the case.
We know (and thanks to commenter The Hebridean for mentioning this to us) that Greenwich Council suggested that Rockwell might like to hold off with its plans until the new masterplan was ready to go. This was confirmed at last week’s public meeting into the new masterplan. Rockwell ignored the council, and claims the (original) masterplan is “not deliverable” because of the complex land ownership on the site, a criticism that would surely apply to the new one.
We’ll deal with the masterplan in detail another time, but reading between the lines, it looks as if Greenwich wants a lot more control over what goes on at Charlton Riverside than it has had at Greenwich Peninsula or in Woolwich. There’s talk of compulsorily purchasing land, a tactic it’s using to revamp the town centres in Eltham and Woolwich. With this strategy, you don’t want a developer barging in and calling the shots. And yet this is what Rockwell is doing, even calling the development Charlton Riverside Phase 1.
So what happens next? Objections by councillors mean this is all set go to the council’s main planning committee, the planning board. If the planning board objects, Rockwell can resubmit something new or appeal to planning inspectors.
One potential spanner in the works is London mayor Sadiq Khan, who can call in planning applications if he thinks he can do better, as his predecessor Boris Johnson did to Lewisham Council over Convoys Wharf in Deptford. Khan has already acted on two rejected applications, a tower block in Tottenham and another development in Wealdstone, in an attempt to secure more affordable housing. This doesn’t feel as likely with Khan, but you never know.
In any case, this will probably rumble on for ages. So watch this space.
And the new masterplan? Coming this week. Details were revealed at a meeting last week, and it actually looks like a very carefully thought-through piece of work – those used to holding their head in their hands at Greenwich Council development plans may be in for a nice surprise. Again, watch this space…
Friends of Charlton Lido are organising introductory meetings this week at the White Swan pub, on Wednesday 8th February at 7pm and Friday 10th February at 12 noon. Find out more – and let the organisers know if you’re coming along – at the Friends of Charlton Lido website.
If you want to find out more about the plans to redevelop Charlton’s riverside industrial land, then there’s a “stakeholder forum” on Wednesday 1 February at 7.30pm at the Old Library in Charlton House.
Greenwich Council deputy leader Danny Thorpe will be updating attendees on the borough’s slow progress on rewriting the Charlton Riverside Masterplan, which is running a year late and is widely believed to be ditching plans for it to follow the “principles of a garden city” in favour of riverside tower blocks.
The Charlton Champion 