Category: Ealing and Northfield

Tonight Ealing Times is reporting that the new Westfield shopping centre is not having the impact on Ealing that some feared. Apparently although footfall in Ealing is down 7.4% this is actually better than the national average which is down 11.8%.

I have to say that this comes as no surprise to me. The idea that Ealing’s town centre competes with Westfield is ridiculous. Westfield competes with Brent Cross, Bluewater and the West End. Westfield competes with other “destination” shopping centres, places you go for a serious day out acquiring stuff. Ealing simply asks you to go out and do a few chores. Ealing has been a “recreation” shopping centre for years. That is why Beales couldn’t be made to work.

Back on 7th September I wrote this comment:

You are quite right that Ealing does not look like it can be a successful destination shopping area. You mention Kingston. The last time we tried to shop there we had to queue for a long time to park and then we found that there are very few places where you can get a decent lunch. The Italian we ended up in was mediocre to say the least. Bentalls didn’t have the lights we wanted in stock so we might as well have ordered them online anyway.

What Ealing Broadway and West Ealing can do is service their hinterland. One of the recurring themes in both development proposals and the Tibbalds work is the permeability of the new developments, allowing them to link with the rest of the town centre and parks. The White City development won’t allow you to push the kids on the swings in the park and get a coffee and do a few chores on Saturday morning. In Ealing you can go to the library, get new heels on your shoes, get some dry cleaning done and get some new pants at M&S. You can also get a good range of interesting food – something that White City, Brent Cross and Kingston really don’t provide. Been to Farm W5 lately?

The main customers for the town centre will be its own hinterland – a hinterland bolstered with some housing density in the town centre.

Most retail space is fairly flexible and there is a range of facilities that we need in the town centre that can exploit this space. We should have some density in the town centre and putting shared services on the ground floor of these is pretty sensible. You can can talk about these developments leading to excess retail capacity but if you look at what is proposed for the Daniel site in West Ealing where there is a scheme to put a polyclinic in a newly built, large retail premises you might accept that retail can be pretty much anything.

Coincidentally, tonight your councillors benefited from a repeat of Sir Peter Hall’s lecture on Ealing town centre. In the Q & As afterwards he agreed that the densification of the current sites was sensible. He said he “wouldn’t have any quarrel with the principle of densification in central Ealing”. He agreed that Crossrail was going to change Ealing and that it was “turning into something different – a middle London type of a place”. Hall was clear that there was enough transport land east of the station that could meet transport needs in respect of buses, trains, Tubes, etc. He accepted that there was no particular need for a bus station in the town centre, there were other ways of organising bus services.

I note that fully a week after the planning committee approved the Dicken’s Yard plans SEC have managed to update their home page.

I had day away from my PC yesterday so I missed a lot of London and Ealing stories. The most trivial was the one that surprised me the most. Apparently our MP has been promoted onto the lowest rung of government. He will be Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State at the Treasury and the Home Office, Phil Woolas MP, who has responsibility for Borders and Immigration. See Ealing Times report here.

For a guy who was a councillor for 25 years or so without any achievements to his name Gordon Brown has clearly spotted some latent talent that the Ealing Labour group was never able to identify. I can only imagine that the PM thinks that Sharma will act as a dead weight that will slow the accident prone Woolas down.

Maybe now that Sharma has three jobs he will give up his council seat. As far as I know he has not roused himself to attend a council meeting since he made a one off appearance at a scrutiny panel in July.

The London Assembly have produced an interesting report into the availability of public pools in London today. The picture above is reproduced from their document. It shows, in red, areas that are more than a mile from a public swimming pool.

It looks like Ealing is not providing as many public pools as it might but it seems that the Assembly have got their facts wrong. The Assembly reckon that today 64% of people in Ealing live more than a mile from a public pool although this number will drop to 56% when Northolt Swimarama re-opens. It seems they do not count the Dormers Wells pool because it is on a school site. It is fully accessible to the public though and is run by contractor GLL on behalf of Ealing as is Gurnell. I visited both of these sites last month and they are both very well run and, most importantly, clean.

As a sportsman myself the report seems a little strange as it does not mention provision of 50 metre pools – there are only two in London which really is a scandal. Gurnell is one, the other being at Crystal Palace.

As well as having one of London’s two 50 metre pools Ealing is also home to the awesome Ealing Swimming Club. They are probably the best London swimming club and certainly one of the best in the country. With 900 members they are one of the biggest sports clubs in Ealing. Politicians can go on about sport as much as they like but it is the volunteers who run bodies like Ealing Swimming Club that really drive sport.

The Standard covers the story here and the BBC here.

A revised scheme has been submitted by the developer St George and a consultation period starts today, ending on 13th October 21 days hence.

I got a notice from the council through my door today and saw notices on the street in Ealing Broadway too.

The application is due to be heard at a planning committee meeting to be held on 5th November.

If you want to make any comments you can do so here online.

This application has been pretty controversial with much of the running on behalf of the anti case having been made by Save Ealing’s Centre which purports to represent a wide range of groups. In reality SEC is a small group of activists with large homes in central Ealing.

Coincidentally I wrote to SEC three weeks ago today to ask for copies of its constitution and minutes. As a fully paid up member of one of the residents associations it purports to represent I figured I was entitled to see this material. I haven’t heard from SEC so I guess they don’t think public life should be transparent and open.

We don’t know who is behind SEC or what their objectives are. It seems they want to stop anything happening in Ealing. They may feel that this enhances the values of their properties but they are not speaking on behalf of the whole community.

Coverage in Ealing Times here.