EastSheenMatters

The Rally at Hammersmith Bridge this Saturday now promises to be more devisive than might have been planned.

According to the Barnes Bugle today there are two separate rallies. The first at noon is for those who do not want it to reopen to cars and standard buses. The second at 2pm is for those who support reopening to bridge.

The occasion will no doubt be viewed as an influential photo opportunity. So if you turn up early there is every prospect that you will be viewed as a supporter of closure to cars.

It is rare for EastSheenMatters to engage in international politics but such is the state of the world that it seems necessary to bring every attention when truth is spoken to power.

Below is the full transcript of Mark Carney’s speech to the G7 yesterday. It was delivered against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions between great powers like Russia, China and the United States, and as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens allies with tariffs and pushes to acquire Greenland from Denmark, a member of the NATO military alliance.

It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry — that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won’t. So what are our options? In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

The Parish encompasses Mortlake and East Sheen. St Mary the Virgin in Mortlake High Street had served as the church for the whole of the Parish since 1543. By the middle of the 19th century, with an increasing population and new housing at some distance from the parish church, there was a clear need for a new church at the southern end of the parish.

In 1860 parishioners who lived in East Sheen, notably Edward Penrhyn of The Cedars, see https://childlawobserver10.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2329&action=edit made a call for funds. A Building Committee was formed, whose members read like a directory of the grand houses of East Sheen and Mortlake: James Stuart Wortley of East Sheen Lodge, Octavious Ommanney of The Planes, Charles Bagot of The Gables, Joshua Bates of Sheen House, Charles Ellis of The Orchard, William Gilpin of Palewell Lodge, Henry Kendall of The Limes, Josceline Percy (from whom Percy Lodge is named), Adolphus Liddell of Park Cottage, Henry Taylor of Uplands, Rev. FJH Reeves of Spencer House, Ottiwell Waterford the headmaster of Temple Grove School, and James Wigan of Cromwell House; with the perpetual curate Rev. John Manley as Chairman. 

The Committee chose Arthur Blomfield as their architect. His work include numerous churches, the Royal College of Music and Selwyn College, Cambridge. Thomas Hardy, the novelist and poet, then aged 21, joined Blomfield’s practice as assistant architect in April 1862. He worked with Blomfield on Christ Church, East Sheen.

Blomfield drew up plans for a church with a nave, chancel, south aisle and tower at the east end of the aisle. Provision was made for future enlargement by the addition of a north aisle, which was added in 1887. The church was designed to seat 400 in the nave and 125 in the aisle. The architectural style was 13th century northern French.

By early 1863 the building of the church was well advanced, and consecration planned for 16 April. But on Sunday 15 March, the tower collapsed, carrying a portion of the roof with it and destroying the main arch at the altar end.

It is not thought that Hardy was responsible! The Builder reported that there had been no clerk of the works appointed and, in the absence of the architect, the lower walls had been packed with rubble rather than being built of solid masonry. The work of clearing the site and rebuilding progressed quickly and the new church was consecrated on 13 January 1864.

The building is Grade II listed as are the wrought iron railings around the buildings.

The Hammersmith Bridge Rally will take place on Saturday 24th January 2026 between noon and 3pm. It is well beyond the time that this major arterial road and bridge should be restored to its former glory and capacity to link important parts of London.

Between numbers 54 and 56 Palewell Park there is an alley known as Pale Lane, with grass along the verges left from the 17^th century. It is a fragment of an ancient way from East Sheen to Palewell Common.

Pale Lane began on the east side of Milestone Green at the East Sheen crossroads leaving Sheen Lane near Larches Ave. It ran southeasterly, the Lane being part of what is now Park Avenue and on the West side of All Saints Church.

At the western end is the estate wall of the former Sheen House built by EJ Darley in 1867. Running along the wall was Alley Hill Footpath, originally intersecting with Pale Lane on the east side of the wall.

Pale Lane below: at the far end there is a path to the right behind a locked gate.

In 1807 Henry Hope of Sheen House wished to stop up and enclose the part of Pale Lane running through his estate on the South side of his kitchen garden and field. Under a writ of ad quod damnum he was given permission on condition that he made another road which is now the section of East Sheen Avenue between Park Avenue and the Upper Richmond Road.

On what is now Park Avenue at the crossroads with East Sheen Avenue was also situated the Mortlake Pesthouse described as a barn and garden for the isolation of people sick with the plague. Four poor families lived there until 1845 when Mortlake Vestry resolved to sell it for £200 to William Gilpin of the nearby Palewell Lodge.

On the east side of the Pesthouse, Pale Lane turned south and then southeast to Palewell Common. In present terms its course was on the east side of All Saints Church through back gardens and coming out at the southern end of Park Drive. On the way it passed on the east side Palewell Lodge which was demolished in 1925.

Pale Lane petered out near the end of the present Park Drive becoming a footpath shown on old maps but now gone. This ran along the common in a curving southeasterly fashion past the vanished original Palewell Pond in the northwest tip of the common. The footpath continued diagonally halfway down the common where it turned east across Palewell Fields and a bridge over the middle ditch. It crossed the Beverly Brook on a two arch brick bridge and thence into what is now known as Priory Lane.

Alley Hill Footpath became a back way to the houses in Palewell Park. Richmond Park Road was built on the western side of the Sheen House Estate wall part of which remains. All the rights of ways subsisting in the former footpaths were diverted into the pavements of the new roads.

With acknowledgement to the Barnes and Mortlake History Society

Alleyways of Mortlake and East Sheen by Charles Hailstone

from which this post is extracted and edited

Original edition published in 1982; latest edition published in June 2009

Ad quod damnum is a Latin phrase meaning “according to the harm” or “appropriate to the harm”. It is used in tort as a measure of damage inflicted, and a remedy, if one exists, ought to correspond specifically and only to the damage suffered. 

Anyone remember him?

On 12 January 2025 it was noted here https://childlawobserver10.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=4601&action=edit that it was rumoured that the DfE was minded to cancel Livingstone Academy.

The position is gradually hardening. You should be able to read a confirmatory statement to that effect on: Free_schools_pipeline_list_December_2025.xlsx , except you can’t because going into that link produces ‘error’. And who produces a ‘pipeline list? or as it elsewhere described a mainstream pipeline review worksheet? Civil service speak. And it has taken them over a year to produce a ‘worksheet’, while local plans and the site fester.

Meanwhile there is a statement floating around confirming that ‘the Secretary of State for Education is minded to cancel Livingstone Academy West London, following careful consideration of evidence gathered for this project’. Stakeholders have been informed and there is an opportunity for them to provide any further relevant information (not already provided) that they think should be taken into account, before the Secretary of State makes a final decision.

We still do not know when that final decision will be taken, although speculation is for January, but it would be difficult to see how at this stage there could be further relevant information not already provided, sufficient to move the SoS mind.

So if common sense finally prevails, what happens next? A Viability Review is required in accordance with the section 106 agreement attached to the appeal decision. But what that means seems to depend on how the Council and the Developers interpret it.

Mortlake and East Sheen get everywhere. No doubt many of you have been there and perhaps someone contributed this map, probably in Ceylon days.

Displayed in the Royal Bar & Hotel, 44 Raja Vidiya in Kandy.

Contributed by Brian Coope

The further High Court proceedings between the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and the Save Wimbledon Project (SWP) start in the High Court today.

The AELTC obtained planning permission in 2024 to build a new stadium and 38 more tennis courts on the old Wimbledon golf course area. The point at issue is whether the land in question is subject to a ‘statutory trust’ for public recreation.

The AELTC’s court application is opposed by SWP who believe the golf course land is
protected as an open space for the benefit of the public.