Atlas and Derrick Gardens would become part of a conservation area under the new plans
There’s a week left if you want to comment on Greenwich Council plans to create new conservation areas by the riverside at Charlton.
Two new areas are planned – one to protect the housing at Atlas and Derrick Gardens, the Anchor & Hope pub, Vaizeys Wharf and the Corys barge works; the other to protect areas around the Thames Barrier such as the old Victoria pub, the former Siemens works, and surviving parts of the old Woolwich Royal Dockyard.
The council also wants to locally list several buildings in the area, from the 1985 East Greenwich fire station (“an example of late 20C public sector design”) to Stones Foundry and Windrush Primary School.
The former Clancy’s pub at the end of Warspite Road is also scheduled for listing, under its original name of the Lord Howick.
Route 53 will be a rarer sight at night from 20 January
Transport for London is to reduce night services on bus route 53, which runs from Whitehall to Plumstead via the Old Kent Road, New Cross, Blackheath, Charlton and Woolwich.
From 20 January, all-night services will run every 30 minutes from Sundays to Thursdays, and every 15 minutes at weekends. The night 53 service currently run every 20 minutes during the week and every 12 minutes at weekends. Daytime services are unaffected.
TfL says the change is “to match demand”. Passenger numbers on the night service have fallen from a peak of 447,000 in 2013/14 to 405,000 in 2016/17.
The neighbouring N89 service was also trimmed back last month.
The change will badly hit those who depend on the all-night service to get to and from work as well as people coming back from nights out in central London.
It will also make it harder for those who live on the 53 route to take advantage of the Night Overground rail service, which began running between Dalston Junction and New Cross Gate earlier this month. Mayor Sadiq Khan said the weekend service would “help thousands more who are working through the night or out enjoying our capital’s nightlife”.
Many London routes, both and day and night, have been cut back as TfL grapples with its financial problems. Other cuts planned in south-east London in coming weeks affect the 484 service which runs through Brockley and the 269 between Bexleyheath and Bromley.
Local London Assembly member Len Duvall has asked Khan for details of which other routes in Greenwich and Lewisham will be cut. He is still waiting for a response.
As 2017 draws to a close we thought we’d take a look into the Charlton Champion‘s site stats to find out what stories had been most popular this year. But first we’d like to say:
Thank you. For reading our stories, commenting, contributing, sharing, ‘liking’, retweeting, sending us local information, and so on. We have no promotional budget (or – for the moment – any revenue to support one), so it makes a tremendous difference to us when our readers help spread the word. This year we’ve acquired a lot of new followers on our social media accounts (if you’ve not already done so you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and – most recently – Instagram). So, ‘Welcome’ if you’ve recently joined us (you can find out more about how we got here here); and ‘thanks for sticking with us’ if you’re a longer-term reader.
If you find the stories you read here useful, please let people know about us: tell your friends, relatives, the local businesses you frequent, and your elected representatives… We’re grateful to councillors Gary Parker and John Fahy for providing us with their ward reports in 2017, and we’d welcome contributions from other councillors in Charlton and the surrounding wards.
We believe The Charlton Champion is a great platform for anyone wanting to communicate with an engaged local audience, and we know our readers have an appetite to lent more about the issues and developments shaping the local area.
And secondly we’d like to say:
Please get in touch if you’d like to contribute to The Charlton Champion. We’d love to have a wider range of contributors and a more diverse set of voices on the site in 2018. If you’ve got a Charlton story, project, campaign, idea, event or other local interest, get in touch and let us know.
This year The Charlton Championjoined the Independent Community News Network, which aims to champion and support journalism at the local and hyperlocal level, where news coverage is most at risk of dying out because of continued cutbacks by the major publishing groups.
Our membership of ICNN gives us access to the expertise built up by the University of Cardiff’s Centre for Community Journalism as well as the experiences of our fellow members. It also enables us to feed into their discussions about how the sector should grow. Our sister site 853 is also now a member.
The top 10 most-read Charlton Champion stories in 2017
Charlton history: The man who took a bullet for the PM. October saw a sudden flurry of interest in a post from 2011 from viewers of ITV’s Victoria drama, searching for the facts on the death of Edward Drummond, private secretary to PM Robert Peel. A reminder that we’ve not posted any local history for a while – let us know if you’d like to write some!
What’s going to happen in the new year? We’re not fortune-tellers, but we think at least some of the below will shape Charlton and the topics we write about:
Work will likely start on significant new developments: the first phase of new building at Charlton riverside will start to reveal the transformation of that area from light industry to residential.
If our Twitter mentions are a reliable guide, congestion on the roads around and leading to the retail barns will be an even bigger local theme in 2018 – and with Greenwich Ikea, a cruise liner terminal, and possibly the Silvertown tunnel to come, won’t be going away any time soon. Parking permit zones are also due for review during the year.
Council elections in May will see at least two new councillors elected to represent Charlton ward, following the deselection of two sitting councillors; Woolwich Riverside will also see new faces. Labour will win the election, but the internal battle for control will show just how much the new councillors take note of calls for more meaningful engagement with local communities.
The biggest changes in nearly two decades on on the trains – a revamped London Bridge station is about to fully reopen, bringing an end to (some of) the disrupted services of recent years. Then May will see a major service rejig, introducing Thameslink services to Blackfriars and Luton from the Greenwich line. December sees Crossrail come to Canary Wharf and Woolwich – revolutionising many trips to work and freeing up space elsewhere, for a time.
Will eccentric tycoon Roland Duchâtelet finally relinquish control of Charlton Athletic? Can the Addicks get out of the third division they tumbled into after the Belgian’s blunders? Will there be more protests on the streets of SE7 – or parties?
Finally, if you’ve read this far, we’d like to say thanks once again. We wish you a happy 2018.
Mendoza bought the freehold to the White Swan in March 2015
The firm which owns the freehold to the White Swan has had its third attempt to build housing on the site refused by Greenwich Council planners.
Isle of Man-based property developer Mendoza Ltd, which makes its money from buying pubs and converting at least part of the land to residential use, had wanted to build a three-bedroom property on land behind the pub’s beer garden.
A letter sent to the firm’s agent before Christmas said it was rejected because the property’s “scale, bulk, site coverage, contemporary design and cramped appearance… would fail to preserve the character and appearance of the [Charlton Village] Conservation Area”.
Planners also say the scheme broke several London and local planning policies.
The letter also notes that Mendoza did not seek advice from the council before putting the application in, and that it should talk to planners before submitting a new proposal.
The rejected proposal was for one house, sunk partly below ground level
The house would have been partly built below ground level to reduce its impact on the surrounding conservation area, and would have had no windows that could open onto the beer garden.
Bermondsey-based architecture firm Milan Babic said in the application: “We believe that the new proposal preserves, enhances and uplifts the character of the site, thereby creating a habitable, functional and aesthetically woven architecture.”
The proposed house would have sat behind the pub’s beer garden
Attention will now turn to what Mendoza will do next – whether it will appeal, revise its plans once again, or look at the pub itself, which is rented by the team behind Greenwich’s Pelton Arms.
Earlier this year the firm lost a planning appeal against Camden Council’s refusal to allow it to turn the Carpenters Arms in King’s Cross into flats. However, in May it won an appeal against Tower Hamlets refusing it permission to build a hotel around the Duke of Wellington in Spitalfields.
Greenwich Council’s main planning committee will meet to decide on the application on Tuesday 9 January, but the plans – which feature two 10-storey blocks, one 9-storey block and three 8-storey blocks – have attracted local opposition due to their height and design.
Peninsula ward councillor Stephen Brain and Charlton’s Allan MacCarthy and Gary Parker have raised concerns about the proposal, along with the Greenwich Conservation Group, the Charlton Society, and 125 individuals.
10 members of the public supported the application, some citing the 35% “affordable” housing provision – 23.3% social rent, 11.7% “intermediate”/shared ownership.
Brain calls the development “out of scale” and complains about loss of light – concerns echoed by residents in Dupree Road and Gurdon Road – while MacCarthy says it is “too large”, “out of keeping with the principally Victorian and other later housing of the area” and will worsen existing congestion, posing particular risks to pupils at Fossdene School.
View up Victoria Way taken from the original application
The Charlton Society has branded it a “monolithic, totally alien imposition” that is “devoid of human scale or any sense of enclosure”, suggesting the smaller next door development as a template to start from.
Transport for London wants to see most of the parking spaces removed from the scheme, which sits between both Westcombe Park and Charlton stations, while the Greater London Authority has also raised concerns about the high level of car parking spaces.
The level of opposition from councillors marks this out as a particularly sensitive application within Greenwich Council’s ruling Labour group.
Worth watching will be whether council leader Denise Hyland and deputy leader Danny Thorpe take their places on the planning committee – Greenwich is rare among London boroughs in having the council leader directly involved in these decisions – and whether the relatively high number of homes for social rent have helped seal the deal.
Consultation for the proposal has been handled by Cratus Communications, whose deputy chairman is former council leader Chris Roberts. In July 2016, Hyland and fellow planning board member Norman Adams joined Roberts on a town twinning trip to Berlin.
A much more modest development close to Eltham station was rejected by the same committee in September on the grounds of lack of car parking.
@charltonlido pool and gym opening hours for Christmas and New Year. Huge thanks to all the wonderful staff who’ll be working over the festive period! pic.twitter.com/5rEkjLlF6x
For those thinking of trying the lido in the cold weather for the first time, this writer can’t recommend it highly enough. The water’s at a good temperature for swimming (around 24 degrees), and the poolside staff have been doing a great job of maintaining a friendly welcome on chilly days.
My wife Isobel and I have started a new folk club in Charlton. it’ll be on the first Monday of each month, upstairs at the White Swan in the Village. We had our first evening last week and had a wonderful musical time, attracting singers and musicians with a love of traditional music plus some locals who just came in to listen. It was them that suggested I get in touch with you and we are keen to attract more people. Would you give us a mention?
We certainly can…
The next one will be on New Year’s Day at 8pm, with £2 admission. Feel free to get in touch with Jim and Isobel via the Roving Folk Club Facebook page in the meantime.
(You may know Jim and Isobel from their band Bruise.)
The Charlton Champion 