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| Willesden Green Library |
From Brent Council
The problem with the water at the Library at Willesden Green is going to take some time to fix. We will not be able to reopen until Monday 23 July at the earliest. We will keep you updated and let you know when we have a definite reopening day.I hope ward councillors will follow this up. Brent Council made great play that the new 'Cultural Centre' (title seems to have been dropped) had been provided at no cost to council tax payers in exchange for council land handed over to developers to build luxury flats. These were later sold in Singapore with the unique selling point that there was no affordable housing or key worker housing on site.
This is the second closure due to a water problem and the length of closure indicates a degree of seriousness or complexity that one would think unlkely in a fair straightforward new build.
Were corners cut in the building of the library to save the developer money?
I hope that Galliford Try will be footing the bill to clear up this mess. They were Brent's "development partner", who received over 70% of the original library site FOR FREE, in return for building the new Library, aka 'Cultural Centre'.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if any Labour Councillors will accept responsibility for this latest fiasco. The former Willesden Library was only 27 years old. It had a £2 million Museum built inside relatively recently. The former Library building was sound and could have been fully refurbished at a cost of around £2 million. The Labour Leadership rejected this option as they wanted another flag ship building in Willesden. As a result unfortunate residents of Willesden have been deprived of their Library for many weeks. Worse still the Labour Councillors gave the large car park back so that a private developer could make a lot of money selling them off to Asian Investors. Had the Council pursued the cheaper refurbishment option the car park could have been used for housing. Of the 70 to 90 units built around 25 could have been sold off to pay off the £2 million refurbishment cost and the cost of building the other flats that could have been affordable and used to house homeless people or those on the Council waiting list. As a result of poor decisions by Labour Councillors we get the worst of both words - a Library building which is closed and no affordable homes. It is amazing how the Labour Leadership disappears from view when it is time to take full responsibility was their poor decision making.
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