EastSheenMatters

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EastSheenMatters reported on 20 March 2026 that Richmond Council had decided to prefer Forest to Lime in the e-bike battle. ESM asked whether Lime might seek to review the decision in the courts.

Edit Post “E-biking in Richmond” ‹ EastSheenMatters — WordPress

Lime seems to have adopted a different approach. It is reported today in the Times that Lime has been promoting a petition urging residents to press the Council to reconsider their decision.

The Council reports: “It has been brought to the council’s attention via a resident that they have been contacted by email, phone and content ‘pushed’ to the resident and presumably other residents of the borough, via the Lime app promoting a petition.”

The term astroturf lobbying seems to have entered the local lexicon!

The Council have issued a ‘cease and desist letter’.

The long awaited decision from the Department for Education on the future of Livingstone Academy at the Stag Brewery site has now been published.

The East Sheen Branch of Waitrose is about to embark on a £5 million renovation of the store and the car park. Although there is no information posted in the store, enquiries of staff made by EastSheenMatters have revealed that work will start on Tuesday 7 April 2026. Fears that the store would close for a month are unfounded, and internal changes will be undertaken aisle by aisle.

It is not known what work will be done in the car park other than repainting lines. Sadly it is doubtful whether that will influence drivers who ignore the one way system.

It also remains to be seen whether Waitrose will be able to take into account the warnings they have recently been given about potential accidents between pedestrians, cyclists and car drivers using the car park.

It’s a bit rich to accuse the report of “playing politics” …..

SEE Edit Post “Thomson House: Cllr Cambridge replies” ‹ EastSheenMatters — WordPress

…. when the report was complaining about precisely that in the councillors’ behaviour – that they were having a great time trying to outdo each in rubbishing the proposal.

And as Councillor Cambridge must know, the idea is not simply to require DfE funding for a new school but to tie it to the development of social housing on the existing site.

There may be all manner of flaws in the plan but that does not excuse councillors from treating the request for it to be studied with such flagrant contempt.

Charles Miller

A safe solution was proposed in evidence put to the STAG Brewery Public Planning Inquiry by a transport witness, Howard Potter. SEE

Edit Post “Stag Brewery Public Inquiry: Transport : Day 4” ‹ EastSheenMatters — WordPress

Whether or not a change is made to the presence of Thomson House Primary School in the locality, the extra movement demands caused by the major part of the STAG permitted proposals warrant a significant safety improvement at the Sheen Lane level crossing.

A sensitively designed stepped-ramp footbridge to replace the original bridge would attract pedestrians and cyclists to use a far safer and easier means of crossing the railway rather than leaving them to wait for long periods spilling over the Sheen Lane carriageway.

EastSheenMatters comments

But sadly that requires approval from National Rail and Transport for London who both, inexplicably, gave evidence at the Public Planning Inquiry that the full Stag Brewery proposals were ‘safe’. At the time and hearing and reading the evidence it was impossible to avoid the feeling that the four organisations, those two plus the Council and the developers, had joined forces so as not to weaken the case against the development, and the School in particular.

In the shadow of the local elections what will the Council now say?

The talk by MESS Chair will be held at All Saints Church and will start at 7.30pm.  Forty years ago almost to the day the GLC, who managed the South Circular, was abolished and the Government seized control of the road.  Residents of Mortlake, East Sheen, Barnes and Kew dreaded what was going to happen next and MESS engaged in the battle, with the Chair in the vanguard. 
 
The MESS AGM will follow the talk.

To ensure that this response is given full exposure the reply from Cllr Cambridge has been copied from Comments to a full posting. Slight editing has been done, solely to highlight separate issues, ie no content has been added or removed.

I am, as ever, happy to rebalance your narrative. See Edit Post “How to Help Thomson House: The End of a Bright Idea?” ‹ EastSheenMatters — WordPress

Thomson House, although part of a Trust and not under the Local Authority, is an incredibly precious and popular school.

I hear they want to look to move to the STAG Brewery site and the council has said, despite the school being leaseholders of 27 Sheen Lane, they are at total liberty to explore every option with the DfE and the Developers, There is no block whatsoever for this.

Regarding safety, the council has taken strides to help, including [making] Vernon Road [a] School Street, 20 mph [speed limits], Idling Action Days, a consultation on Idling Zones of which this area would be priority, new pedestrian markings on the crossing and a push for a countdown clock with SWR/Network Rail.

Coming up after May is a meeting I have facilitated between the school and Cllr Ehmann to connect the key people.

One plea, perhaps instead of playing politics with a much loved school’s concerns and issues, you come on-board with workable solutions to the safety of the site because it may be the DfE are not for funding a Primary School new build, having shown ambivalence to a Secondary School. It will be vital to continue to listen and act on safety concerns.

Editorial Comments

EastSheenMatters does not ‘play politics’; it merely seeks to draw to local public attention matters which might otherwise not be made public or adequately explored. But we leave readers to draw their own conclusions!

Safety concerns should certainly be in everyone’s minds, so if you have ideas beyond those raised above, send them to Cllr Cambridge – preferably with a copy to EastSheenMatters! But it does raise the question of whether, say, having buggies (or 1200 secondary students) make their way across the level crossing at rush hour times can ever be adequately safe.

One important difference, of course, between a primary school and a secondary school is the size of the footprint.

Will there be any response from Richmond Council?

PEST circulated this closing email over the weekend.

It is almost the end of the road for us and we are handing over the reins to you to hold the Council to account to maintain the field as a community resource. We are expecting to hear soon from Companies House about the striking off from the register of Pensford Field Environmental Trust Ltd after which the Trust will cease to exist.

In our email dated 30 January 2026, we explained how the Council had failed to deliver its promises on community access in the new lease granted to Dose of Nature.  One of our members wrote to Cllr Gareth Roberts on 28 January 2026 demanding that the lease be changed and explaining why it was deficient – you can read an extract of the lease for yourself at the end of his letter.  There has been no reply but the Spring Lib-Dem newsletter carries the headline “Pensford Field remains a community asset for all.”   This claim is highly questionable – but we live in an era when assertions trump facts.      

The Council is still withholding information about how the decision was made to terminate our lease.  A request was made by us in November 2024 for communications to and from four named councillors and officers – the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ordered disclosure of internal communications on 9 January 2026 on the grounds of public interest and we received documents from the Council on 12 February 2026.  The ICO then investigated why the Council had not included an email from Cllr Piers Allen dated 5 September 2024 in the bundle and was given an explanation that the Council was interpreting “from and to” as “between” the named individuals.  This is at odds with the ICO’s own interpretation but frustratingly, it has no powers on issues raised after their decision.  Our only remedy is to go to a Tribunal with yet further delays. However, the ICO has logged the Council’s stance on their intelligence tracker for Richmond Council which may help others in the future.

So what have we discovered from the information recently provided?  Probably the most surprising email is one from an official dated 30 July 2024 which says

“X just confirmed that we have tried unsuccessfully to broker a compromise between the parties. Apparently there is tension between the parties and PEST (sic) threatened to stop hiring the premises to DoN altogether. X’s judgement is there is very little chance of reaching an amicable solution.”

This statement is simply incorrect – we have no idea who X is but s/he never approached us.  We had not heard a whisper from the Council since 26 May 2023 when Cllr Vollum told us “The council has no grounds to prematurely end the lease with Pensford Field.”  We had certainly never threatened to stop hiring the premises to Dose of Nature altogether.  

Subsequently this erroneous statement was used in communications between officers and  councillors including the email from Cllr Piers Allen dated 5 September which embellishes it further “PET (sic) have been given many opportunities to change their stance to working with DoN, including the involvement of Kew Ward Councillors, so I am afraid it is their intransigence that has led to this course of action.” Someone, probably a councillor, did ask for information on 19 September about the Council’s dealings with us and whether there were notes of the meeting – the Council says that no written reply was ever provided. We had by this time told the Council that no one had been in touch but nevertheless they served the lease termination the next day.

Well I doubt that anyone in the Council will check how these erroneous statement arose. After all, it took over 16 months and an Information Commissioner decision to find they existed.   All too late now for us but it does beg a number of questions which I am sure some of you will wish to pose to any candidates knocking on your door in the next few weeks ahead of the May local elections.

As for Pensford Field, we wish it well.  Dose of Nature have laid a lot of bark chippings and built a number of dry fences so it remains to be seen whether it will apply a sufficiently light human touch so as be regarded as a wild field.  Sadly very little sign of frog spawn or tadpoles this year and there are no bees in the hives as a result of this wet and cold weather.

Goodbye from us and I hope you will not forget what an oasis of green calm was created by the community over the past third of a century.