Month: Jun 2008

Alongside the vision thing the detractors of Arcadia and Dickens Yard lament the lack of a masterplan or strategy for Ealing town centre. I have already outlined how the council is moving to fill this gap but let’s look at what they have to say anyway.

Save Ealing’s Centre says:

Until Ealing Council puts together an integrated development plan, that combines residential, retail, transport, infrastructure and community facilities, Ealing Town Centre will continue to decline and remain under seige[sic] from property developers that propose massive residential ghettos that are labelled ‘regeneration’ and ‘retail’.

The same night as last week’s council meeting Ealing residents enjoyed a lecture from Peter Hall, a eminent academic rather than a practitioner. According to the admirable WEN’s write up of the lecture:

Sir Peter felt strongly that what Ealing centre desperately needed was an over-arching strategic plan. It also needed an enlightened planning department.

Apparently the last line evoked laughter from the audience. Ridiculously SEC says:

The Council’s responsibility is to create an environment that meets all stakeholders needs.

That would be tough one even for God. We might settle for pleasing most of the people most of the time.

Strategy formation is poorly understood by most people and it is not about airily waving your hand around and opining about the way things should be in the best of all possible worlds. Strategy must always take into account the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground in Ealing are:

• we don’t use our own town centre enough, either there are not enough of us or we go elsewhere to shop
• Crossrail is coming
• Glenkerrin owns a large site
• the council owns a large site – and nakedly seeks to get the largest possible gain for the community as a whole
• there are two other large sites owned by property investors south of the Broadway.

Any strategy for Ealing must accommodate these facts on the ground. It must also be implementable. There are essentially four large development sites in central Ealing, two north of the Broadway and two south of the Broadway. Clearly these sites and their owners/developers need to be mindful of the relationships between them and the Tibbalds report does highlight how these should interrelate. Both the Arcadia and DY plans have been mindful of the permeability of their sites. But, the four large sites are separated by trunk roads which are unlikely to move and an implementable strategy for Ealing would be unlikely to make these developments directly contingent on each other.

A strategy for Ealing would allow Ealing Broadway station to be redeveloped along with Crossrail and would allow easy interchange with Crossrail for all other modes of transport. There is no reason to put rows of buses in a bus station in the centre of Ealing. By all means let the buses go through Ealing but I would be really glad if they weren’t all sitting idle in our town centre, that would quite literally be a waste of space.

It seems to me that the anti-development camp sees strategy as a convenient excuse for kicking any development of Ealing’s town centre into the long grass. It is also clear to me that their strategic analysis is unsound.

One of the big issues raised over the Leaf and Dickens Yard planning applications is vision. Where is the vision for Ealing?

In planning terms this has to be in the current Unitary Development Plan which the current Tory administration inherited from the previous administration. It was adopted in October 2004 and you can see it here.

This is currently being re-worked and will be called the Local Development Framework (LDF). The consultation meeting on Thursday was a part of the process of creating and getting consensus for the LDF. Sure this is a long-winded process that has been underway since the 2006 elections but it would be surprising if it wasn’t. Those asking for vision need to accept that the current process is all about informing that vision.

I have been looking hard at Crossrail, see here, and it is clear to me that Crossrail will have a big impact on the LDF. It is inconceivable that the State would spend £16 billion on building a high speed railway connection between the World’s busiest international airport at Heathrow and the World’s foremost financial centre in the City and allow Ealing’s centre half way between the two to remain a relatively low density area. We might argue over the level of density but dense it will be. Why wouldn’t you want to surround Crossrail nodes with high density developments?

Those with a knowledge of Ealing’s history know that the centre of Ealing was half way down South Ealing Road around St Mary’s church before the railway came. The current Broadway and its hinterland of residential streets is a product of 19th century railway development. Now the railway is coming again and Ealing’s centre needs to respond to it. We might lament the loss of the country houses and market gardens that comprised this area before the railway came but the railway is coming again and we need to work out whether we want to make it work for us or whether we want to stick our heads in the sand.

Many of the objectors to these schemes seem to have a clear vision. That of an exclusive, upmarket suburb like Chiswick, Hampstead or Richmond. That might suit a few of the borough’s residents but I suspect it will not resonate with the majority.

I attended part of the consultation session the council ran on the Ealing Development Framework on Thursday.

In many ways this was a very positive session. For starters there were about 150 people crammed into the Victoria Hall. Tory PPC for Ealing Central & Acton, Angie Bray, was there along with numerous councillors. Many of the faces were very familiar, dominated by residents’ association diehards. The session got off to a slightly shaky start as Cllr Millican, the portfolio holder for Regeneration and Transport, explained that it was not going to be a standard public meeting, where a few people dominate the room, but that we would get everyone to work on tables of ten. Some people didn’t like the idea but in the end it worked. There were five different aspects of the plan to discuss. My table discussed West Ealing and we had a useful hour on this. I will be interested to read the output from the people who were note taking.

I was struck by the age profile of those attending. The average age was about 60 and there were only three brown faces in the room.

The dominant opinion the room could probably be encapsulated in the line “we want to be like Chiswick”. The other line that kept coming back was that there was no overweening strategy or vision for the town centre.

The Save Ealing Centre group have been making much of the running in setting the terms of the public debate on the town centre redevelopment. Over the next few days I intend to look hard at some of Save Ealing Centre’s arguments because I believe that there is another side to the story and it needs to be told.

For instance, this posting appeared on Ealing Times’ website on Friday from a chap called Alex:

These Save Ealing Centre people are the same names as those in the Save Ealing’s Streets bunch aka GORDON RD GANG. First the tram, then the Leaf and now Dickens Yard. They resist EVERYTHING that threatens change and modernisation in Ealing Broadway from public transport improvements to much needed new homes. Its always a case of they are alright Jack and the rest of us can go eat cake. They’ve got their cars and their homes and they don’t care about anyone else. They don’t care if the next generation can’t get homes here or access to Ealing Broadway station in a reasonable amount of time. They only care about residents in their own very small central Ealing area, rather than the borough as a whole. They are a backward looking bunch who block developments that would bring benefits to a great many people, especially younger people who need small affordable units near tube stations to get to work into London in an environmentally friendly way. Their intransigence blocks much needed regeneration to Ealing Centre. Time for these conservative old timers to retire to Sandbanks and let the younger generation revitalise Ealing for all its residents.

I had a great afternoon at Little Ealing Primary School’s Summer Fete today.

The Dr Who theme was slightly incongruous alongside the beer, burgers and hot dogs, but hey! The Dalek made by one of the parents was truly impressive.

I paid £4 for ten goes at the “Adult Tombola” and came away empty handed. Maybe that was for the best. After that I just settled for buying actual stuff and bought home eight fairy cakes for tea – a much better investment.

As I walked down Weymouth Avenue I noticed this illegal fly-posting from a cowboy business in Hounslow called Rowans. I have written about these creeps before – here and here.

I called Monique Nicolaides on the number on the poster. She calls herself PR & Marketing Manager and claimed, as she has claimed before, that her marketing company, A.K. Marketing, has made a mistake and they would be taken down. The woman is a brazen liar who has systematically covered large parts of West London in her illegal posters for years.

If you want to call her and abuse her on 020 8742 1649 please do. Whatever you do don’t use her miserable function venue. On Friday I noticed three sets of these posters doubled up down Ranelagh Road. Let me know of anymore and I will try to get our envirocrime people to do something.

After a couple of setbacks the Central library is due to open 29th July. See council’s press release issued yesterday. The library was originally expected to open in January, but structural problems and a fire meant it had to be put back. I’ll be knocking on the door with my library card in my hand on 29th.