Our very own Richmond Park Road singer releases her single RUN today
DAISY DACHSHUND MEETUP: A REGULAR MONTHLY MEETUP GROUP FOR ALL WELL-BEHAVED DACHSHUNDS AND OTHER SMALL BREEDS THAT MEET AT SHEEN GATE IN RICHMOND PARK (SW14 8BJ)
IT’S A FREE EVENT, AND THE GROUP WILL MEET AT 2PM, WITH THE WALK LEAVING BY 2:20PM.
ALL WELL-BEHAVED DACHSHUNDS (AND OTHER SMALL BREEDS) WELCOME.
FOR MORE INFO, YOU CAN CONTACT THE ORGANISER ON INSTAGRAM: @DAISYDOGTHERAPY
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The Planning Inquiry to consider the applications for development at the Stag Brewery will commence on 29 May 2024. The Twickenham Exchange is now fixed as the venue for the hearings. Somewhat apt you might think as the Exchange is at Brewery Wharf opposite Twickenham Railway Station.
The Mortlake Brewery Community Group has now raised more than £41,000 to provide representation to oppose the proposals in their present state. This is from over 600 donors. The Council’s own website shows 681 objectors. It shows eighteen letters of support. I have previously reported on the veracity of those. (See below)
Is the Council starting to ponder whether their decisions in June 2023 and January 2024 were wise? Will their evidence to the Inquiry show any degree of flexibility? Probably not given their tunnel vision and disregard for local thinking.
Meanwhile the developers have signed a new lease with a TV and Film studio company for the space where the forthcoming Disney+ series ‘A Thousand Blows’ was filmed. How would that work in conjunction with the hotly contested proposals for 1000+ residential units and a 1200 pupil secondary school?
I am introducing a new section to this Blog. It is one area I intend to develop and invite contributions.
Every Trick in the Book
Those who like some local colour in their crime novels might want to read this book from the pen of Barnes author Bernard O’Keeffe.
Set around a murder at Barnes Pond the author misses no opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge of local places and characters.
One might have some quibbles but not without running the risk of creating spoilers.
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The book reviews published below are first works by contemporaries, one fact and one fiction.
They are an inspiration to publish when you pass three score years and ten.
Royal Marines in Russia 1919
At the height of the Russian Civil War in 1919 a 23-year-old Royal Marines officer, Captain Thomas Henry Jameson led an expedition of 38 men some 5000 miles down the Kama River from Vladivostok to near Moscow. They fought numerous successful battles. Later they were forced to retreat. Cut off behind enemy lines, they fought their way out. Had they been captured they would have suffered summary execution. Jameson and his Marines faced many hazards including disease, which he described as ‘the biggest challenge of all.” They all survived.
Using original material and his own experiences of retracing his grandfather’s steps Alastair vividly describes the expedition.
Alastair Grant is speaking about his book at the MESS meeting at 730pm on Monday 13 May 2024 at Tower House School in Sheen Lane. As this clashes with the All Saints Church AGM he is speaking again at the Church at 645pm on Thursday 16 May. I shall be interviewing Alastair after his talk to expand this piece. Publisher Pen and Sword Military £22.
The Luggage Lifter
Terence Connor has entered the world of fiction late in his career, having long held an ambition to write a novel. To achieve that objective he attended a creative writing course, lockdown providing a strong incentive and opportunity. His alliterative title comes from a warning poster observed some years ago on a station platform.
He writes from some first hand professional experience of the effects of adversity, especially in relation to children in care. His chief character, Harold, was orphaned early and has spent his life in a bleak tenement in the edgy Blitz-damaged East End. During adolescence he works with his family in the hop fields of Kent. Self-employed he works around London hotels and railway termini, demonstrating considerable skill and knowledge to embody the eponymous hero of the novel. Other characters and their activities were built largely round extended family experiences.
The escalation in Harold’s criminal activities leads him to romance, gang warfare and eventually prison. In another nod to the author’s knowledge of the realities of life, Harold emerges from prison with some more innocent and beneficial skills and a heightened moral code. But will these help him survive?
His ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but Terence is aware that without the ‘benefit’ of lockdown, the process may be more challenging. And he might move to poetry.
Published June 2023, Austin Macauley, £11.35
Expressionism at the Tate Modern
The art exhibition running at the Tate Modern until 20 October 2024 took me back to a trip to Vienna in April 2011 when I saw Der Blaue Reiter. Now it travels under the title Expressionists: Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider. Expressive and impressive it is. Expressionism was a form which experimented with colour, music, poetry and drama and their interaction, imbued with a sense of the spiritual. Goethe was an inspiration. It touches on one of my favourite concepts, synaesthesia, the joining of sensations, which are usually distinct, such as seeing a colour when you hear a sound.
Kandinsky was the leading exponent and in 1911 he published The Blue Rider Almanac, which set out the values of their multi-national community. The early 1900s was a turbulent age of ideological differences and social inequalities. Their work illustrated their belief in the power of creativity which influenced 20th century European art. Where now are similar artistic influences?
We have to decide how to vote in the GLA elections on Thursday 2nd May. I have made no secret of my Lib Dem leanings, especially in respect of principles which I regard as fundamental to functioning democracy: fairness, community consultation, open debate, respect for a local community and their interests, provision of affordable housing ….
The problem I have is that Gareth Roberts, the candidate I should be voting for in the South West London constituency, has defied all those principles. Teddington and Twickenham are preferred to East Sheen and Mortlake. The best he can do in terms of consultation and debate about the Stag Brewery is to storm disrespectfully out of a meeting shouting ‘Get real’. He oversees a residential planning application which has reduced affordable housing from 30% to 6%.
He oversees the import of a school from East London to the banks of Mortlake, pretending that it will benefit the area. How? It will primarily attract pupils from across London, thereby exacerbating local traffic and other infrastructure problems. Worse still it would impact detrimentally on the other schools in the area, schools which he has failed to consider or consult.
I have had several local councillors, including one canvassing at my door in the last few hours, tell me that the Council was required by law to make the recent planning decisions. None of them has been able to explain why that might be so. I do not believe it. It is simply what they have been told to say to what they regard as the gullible public.
So how to vote? For an autocrat who gives the appearance of regarding himself as en route to the House of Lords or for a party which locally is allowing its guiding principles to be subverted?
Richard White
So the autocrat won.
Richard White is a retired solicitor and former Tribunal Judge
I have been living in the area of East Sheen for over forty years. In the last few years since retirement I have become more interested in what is happening in the local community. Having worked in and with local authorities in a variety of ways it is perhaps a natural development.
Working on the aftermath of the closure of the Bank of England Sports Centre, much used by Richmond residents in the east end of the borough, was an eye-opener on the lack of consideration for the community.
Being a member of the Barnes Home Guard Club (based in Sheen) for thirty years and watching its modernisation in the last couple of years, provided links in the local community.
Joining the committee of the Mortlake with East Sheen Society (MESS) provided another perspective. The increase in its membership over the last year is illustrative of a need and the monthly newsletter from an independent Civic Society is important.
Attendance at the East Sheen Police Liaison Group and taking minutes of their meetings has shown how little interest there appears to be on matters of importance to local community welfare. Unless of course you are a victim. Efforts are ongoing to try to improve methods of communication.
All these activities have demonstrated the difficulty of developing reliable sources of news and the exchange of well-informed opinion.
One of the most useful publications is Sarah Olney’s Weekly Newsletter, but, while informative, it is inevitably politically biased. The refusal to address the Stag Brewery planning applications in spite of the huge local opposition demonstrates this all too clearly. The Richmond Council Community News available by email is a useful factual source of information but it too naturally comes from a source where you would not expect to find anything remotely critical of services.
By comparison the Barnes Bugle appears, on recent examination, to be a useful independent medium for Barnes residents. One might have hoped that Next Door East Sheen would have provided a useful and reliable source of information and thinking. Sometimes it does but all too often it has descended into a bearpit of vituperation.
The Richmond and Twickenham Times ought to be for the whole borough but its primary local focus is on the other side of the river, and its knowledge of East Sheen and Mortlake can perhaps best be summed up by its report of the major incident at the junction of the Upper Richmond Road and Sheen Lane on 24 April as having happened in Putney. [Nowhere reported the closure of the junction between Waitrose and Milton Road which continued from 930am to 6pm to facilitate the necessary forensic investigations. News of the resulting traffic chaos appears to have been left to local Whats App groups.]
The Stag Brewery
The context for this analysis of what might benefit East Sheen and Mortlake is that Richmond Council is becoming worryingly autocratic and authoritarian. Their conduct of the Stag Brewery planning applications is of course the prime example. Ignoring the local expertise aimed at improving the proposals for the benefit of the local community in East Sheen and Mortlake is unforgivable and will cause dissension for years to come. That is especially so if the developers succeed in their appeals at the Planning Inquiry which is now to start on 29 May 2024.
Somewhat belatedly at the Planning Committee meeting on 31 January 2024 the Chair apologised for the failures in consultation. Hollow you might think, when in the next breath the Committee approves the applications on the basis that it has all taken too long and must now be pushed through.
The 1200 pupil secondary school to be imposed on the site will be a white elephant dominating the area. It will cause all kinds of problems for access to the area for pupils and staff, use of Mortlake Station at rush hours, residents and business people getting in and out east and west, medical facilities. These are all questions which the Council has refused to address.
Why you might wonder have such a large school on that site in the face of opposition from other local secondary schools who openly state that they could provide more spaces. Not that the need is likely given the falling primary school rolls. Could the answer to this conundrum be anything to do with the fact that the Council would acquire a nice status symbol in the shape of a shiny new school, paid for by the Department for Education, on the banks of the River Thames.
Where does one find out accurately what is going on with the Stag Brewery development other than the Mortlake Brewery Community Group website? That was originally set up only for ensuring adequate discussion of plans but has now also had to become a fundraising site, to enable the local community to be represented at the Planning Inquiry. Our interests are certainly not being represented by Richmond Council, which has a single-minded and determined approach to the scheme. It is galling to realise that one’s council tax is being used to pay for representation of a scheme which lacks viability, while having to pay again to ensure that arguments are fairly put before the Planning Inspector.
Just as awful we have discovered recently that the developers, so well supported by the Council, uploaded to the Council Planning website, detailed letters of support for the planning applications about which some of the alleged authors knew nothing. What was the motivation for that? Was it perhaps that they could see the growing opposition and wanted to paint an alternative picture of support for their plans, which they assumed no-one would cross-check? The numbers involved and the wrongful assertions that consents were given suggest it was no accident.
Electric Car Charging Points
In the same vein we now find that electric car charging points have been constructed by private contractors acting on behalf of TFL outside shops from 199-207 Upper Richmond Road, severely reducing the available parking for short stays to use those shops. Planning permission is required but seems to have been regarded as a formality. The Council website states that notices were sent to 40 properties in the area on 11 December 2023. Only two people can be found who received them. It is possible that they all got lost in the Christmas post. But it seems improbable.
And now the responsible Council officer says that the notices were only sent as a courtesy in any event. If that is so why does the Council website refer to the notices as if they were part of a consultation process? And the local councillor responds ‘well it is a done deal’. Does it all sound familiar?
Enough for now but it seems to me we do need an independent, apolitical East Sheen and Mortlake outlet, which ensures that information circulates freely among residents and retailers.
 | Richard AH White on Stag Brewery School |
 | Charles Miller on Stag Brewery School |
 | David Pugh on Stag Brewery School |
 | inspiring641c639631 on Get your red flags out |
 | SB on Hammersmith Bridge |
