Please sign the petition to retain Stonebridge’s heritage Victorian villa

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

“Altamira”, 1 Morland Gardens, at the corner of Hillside and Brentfield Road.

 

Willesden Local History Society has been campaigning to save the locally-listed Victorian villa, known as “Altamira”, since Brent Council “consulted” on its original plans to demolish it as part of its Morland Gardens redevelopment plans in 2019. I joined the fight in February 2020, with a guest post on “Housing or heritage? Or both?”

 

The battle has been long and hard, but the planning consent which Brent’s Planning Committee gave in 2020 expired at the end of October 2023, without construction beginning on the project. The following month, the Council started a review of its future plans for the former Brent Start site (the college having been moved to a “temporary” home in the former Stonebridge School annexe in 2022, at a cost of around £1.5m).

 

That review was due to last a few months, with proposals then being put to Brent’s Cabinet by Spring or early Summer 2024. Instead, it eventually got tagged onto the redevelopment proposals for Bridge Park, as part of what Brent then started calling its Hillside Corridor project. At the exhibition in November 2024, which began another consultation, this was the conclusion after one year of the Council’s Morland Gardens review:

 

 

By March 2025, a new consultation was launched, asking whether residents agreed that the Morland Gardens site should comprise new Council homes and youth facilities. It did not give any indication of whether Brent intended to retain the heritage Victorian villa as part of that scheme, even though I’m aware that many people had asked for that in their comments as part of the earlier consultation (including me, with detailed proposals on how this could be done!).

 

Now we have found out that the long-awaited new proposals will be put to Brent’s Cabinet at its meeting on 16 June 2025, not as a separate item, but tucked away as part of a report about the future of Bridge Park. In response to this, Willesden Local History Society have launched a petition on the Council’s website:

 

We the undersigned petition the council and its Cabinet, when considering the regeneration of 1 Morland Gardens, as part of the Hillside Corridor proposals, to retain the beautiful and historic locally listed Victorian villa, Altamira, as part of the redevelopment of that site for affordable housing and youth facilities. The 150-year-old landmark building is part of the original estate which gave Stonebridge Park its name, and its sense of place can be an inspiration to local young people who would use it, while there is plenty of space behind the Victorian villa to build a good number of genuinely affordable homes.

SIGN THE PETITION HERE

As I write this, more than 150 people have already signed this online petition, more than enough to ensure that the Society can present its views in support of retaining this important local heritage building at the Cabinet meeting. We can hope that this view adds weight to a recommendation already made by Council Officers, but we won’t know that until the report is published about 10 days before the meeting!

 

From Brent’s Historic Environment Place-making Strategy (Part of the Council’s adopted Local Plan!)

 

At this stage, it is important that as many people as possible from the Brent community sign the petition, to show the strength of feeling that this beautiful and historic building is too valuable to be demolished. The Council’s own planning policies tell them that, but there are some people at the Civic Centre who don’t seem to care about that! If you agree with the petition’s aims, then please sign it, if you haven’t already done so. You can do that here. Thank you.

Philip Grant.

 

 

Bee kind! – grow some winter flowering plants if you can

 Guest post by Philip Grant

A buff-tailed bumblebee in a Kingsbury garden, 24 January 2025.

 

If you were watching the BBC Winterwatch programme on Thursday evening, you will have seen a film about a buff-tailed bumblebee, and its need to find flowers to feed from after emerging from its hibernation burrow. A sudden rise in temperature and some sunshine, like we had on Friday after several very cold weeks, can make them think that Spring has arrived.

 

Plants that are in flower can be hard to find at this time of year. It is several weeks too early to find snowdrops or crocuses in bloom. The bumblebee in Bristol was lucky enough to find some Mahonia bushes in flower, a winter flowering evergreen shrub that can have yellow flowers between November and March.

 

Mahonia flowers. (Courtesy of the RHS website)

 

But if you have a garden, or even a small patio or balcony, and can grow some suitable plants, you may be rewarded with sights like the buff-tailed bumblebee above, which I saw feeding on a patch of winter-flowering heather in the sunshine on Friday morning. Bee kind, if you can – nature needs our help, and can also give us so much pleasure.

 

Don't forget it is the RSPB Garden Watch this weekend! See my post from last January HERE.

 

Philip Grant.

1 Morland Gardens – hoping the Victorian villa has a Happy New Year! Here's how it could be so.

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

“Altamira”, the landmark villa at the entrance to Stonebridge Park, in 1907 and 2023.

 

For 150 years the Italianate-style Victorian villa called “Altamira” has stood at the entrance to an estate which gave the name Stonebridge Park to the surrounding area. Five years ago, Brent’s Cabinet approved plans which should have seen it demolished by now, even though it is a locally listed heritage asset in good condition. But it is still standing, and has the chance for a secure future as a community facility, as part of new redevelopment plans for the site.

 

The Council’s future options for its Morland Gardens property have been under review since November 2023, but with little progress on display when the public were asked for their input at the Bridge Park / Hillside Corridor exhibition on 28 and 30 November 2024. The consultation exercise launched then is still ongoing, but ends on Monday 6 January, so you still have time to express your views.

 

The consultation questionnaire for Morland Gardens was mainly a tick-box list of possible community facilities you would like to see provided, along with new Council homes on the site. That was not enough for my comments and suggestions, and I have submitted the detailed document which I hope that Martin can include at the end of this article.

 

 

The plan above is at the heart of my proposals, showing what I believe is a sensible outline redevelopment suggestion for the site, including the retained Victorian villa as the community facility and a housing layout which would provide around 27 Council homes, 25 of them as two, three or four bedroom properties to rent for local families with children. (It wasn’t until after I had finished preparing this plan that the lyric, ‘Little boxes on a Hillside’, flashed into my mind!) You can find further details of this suggested layout in section 3 of the document.

 

As well as sending my document to the agency handling the consultation, and the Council Officer in charge of the Morland Gardens review, I sent a copy to the Stonebridge Ward councillors. I invited their support for my suggestions, if they believed they were a sensible way forward for the site. I also reminded them of what Cllr. Aden had said, on their behalf, at the August 2020 Planning Committee meeting (which was ignored by the five councillors who voted to approve the Council’s flawed, and now failed, original Morland Gardens plans).

 

Extract from the minutes of the August 2020 Planning Committee meeting for application 20/0345.

 

My December 2024 proposals are for a redevelopment that would be very much in line with the wishes of the then Stonebridge Ward councillors (two of whom are still the same). I was pleased to receive an early reply from one of the councillors, although a little surprised that he did not appear to be aware that Brent Council have been reviewing its future plans for Morland Gardens since November 2023, or that it was part of the “Bridge Park” consultation!

 

While not expressing a view either way on my suggestions, he has indicated that the Council do need to hear from local people about what they want to see provided at Morland Gardens as part of the consultation. Copying in a fellow Ward councillor, he finished with the words: ‘As representatives of the community, we are here to represent the wishes of the wider community, so I believe all options will be considered.’

 

If you want the Council to consider your wishes for the Morland Gardens site, please send them, by next Monday 6 January, by email to: bridgepark@four.agency , with a copy to: neil.martin@brent.gov.uk . If you have read the document below (or at least section 3 of it), please feel free to mention it, and say whether you agree with my suggestions.

 

Philip Grant. 

 

The 2024 Wembley History Society Christmas Picture Quiz - the answers!

 Introduction to Christmas Quiz answers by local historian Philip Grant

Thank you to everyone who had a go at last weekend’s 2024 Wembley Christmas Picture Quiz. (If you haven’t done it yet, click on that “link” and have a go before you look at the answers!) 

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed the quiz, as part of the excellent and varied “Wembley Matters” content, which I’m sure that, like me, you are very grateful to Martin for providing. The answers document is below, at the foot of this guest post.

 

I wrote in a comment under the quiz, in relation to the photograph for question 4, that I’d been asked whether Wembley had its own band when the park, with its bandstand, was opened in 1914. The answer is “yes”, and only last week this photograph of the Wembley Town Band from c.1912 was shared with me by Richard, who wrote the letter about his Wembley airman / WW2 Prisoner of War father which Martin published last month.

 

Richard’s grandfather, Henry Hawkins (second from the left in the back row) was one of the organisers of the Wembley Town Band, when it was formed in 1910. A number of the band’s members were policemen or railway workers, and Richard’s great-grandfather, James Blackmore (seated just in front of Richard’s grandfather), the first Metropolitan Police officer to be stationed in Victorian Wembley, had played bass drum in the Met. Police band in the 1890s. The short gentleman standing next to the then bass drummer, and wearing a straw boater, is Titus Barham. He was the President of Wembley Town Band, and paid for the band’s uniforms, which were green with silver trimmings (another of his generous gifts to the people of his adopted town).

 

Hopefully, most of you knew, or guessed, that the intercity railway line through Wembley, in question 7, which opened in 1838, ran from London to Birmingham. It is interesting to compare it with the current High Speed 2 line. Robert Stephenson’s early Victorian trains had a top speed of 30 m.p.h., and at first the journey from Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street took 5½ hours. HS2 is predicted to cut that journey time to just 50 minutes. 

 

But construction of the original line took less than five years (November 1833 to September 1838), whereas HS2 began construction in 2017, and the phase from Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street is expected to be finished by 2033. So the first railway was quicker in one way!

There were probably a few of the questions that you didn’t know the answers to. If that’s the case, you have the chance over the Christmas / New Year break to discover more about some aspects of Wembley’s past. I’ve included “links” with some of the answers, which will take you to illustrated articles giving more information, if you want to take advantage of them.

 

If you were feeling competitive, and wrote down your answers, you can now see how many you got right. There are no prizes, but if you want to share your score out of twenty (just to let others know how well, or badly, you did), you are welcome to add a comment below!

 

With best wishes for the Christmas season, and a happy and healthy New Year,

 

Philip Grant,
for Wembley History Society.

UPDATE: Internet Success! Photgraph of R.D. Douglas Found: Lest We Forget – looking for relatives of a WW2 Wembley airman

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Extract from a document produced by the Dutch Airwar Study Group 1939-1945.

 

The Second World War seems a long time ago, and we probably don’t think about it very often, unless we were personally affected by the loss of a family member. But there are some people who still give their time and effort to ensure that those who lost their lives in that awful conflict are remembered with respect. I was contacted recently by one of those, asking for help to try and find relatives, and hopefully a photograph of, an RAF airman from Wembley who died in 1943, and I’m writing this guest post to ask for any help that you can give, please.

 

Ronald Douglas Francis (no relation to the editor) was born in May 1921. By the age of 21, he was a Sargeant in the R.A.F., and the wireless operator / air gunner on a Lancaster bomber flying missions to bomb industrial sites in Germany. On the night of 3 April 1943, his aircraft was shot down by a German night fighter, and at around midnight it crashed in flames in a forest near Stevensbeek, in the south of The Netherlands. All seven members of the Lancaster’s crew were killed, and their graves are now in a war cemetery at Eindhoven.

 

Some of the war graves at Eindhoven, and the gravestone of Sgt. R.D. Francis.
(Source: Commonwealth War Graves Commission website)

 

The Dutch Airwar Study Group 1939-1945 have been collecting information about this aircraft and its crew, and have sent me an excellent information sheet, prepared by one of their members, Rene, which I will ask Martin to attach at the end of this article. As you will see, they have yet to find a photograph of Ronald Francis, or of the plane’s pilot, 20-year old Pilot Officer W.H. Swire, and rear gunner Sgt. R.R. Feeley. They would very much like to have photographs of all the crew members, to include on a memorial it is hoped to erect near the crash site. A similar memorial was recently installed to remember the crew of a Wellington bomber, who also died in April 1943 when it crashed, just inside the Dutch border, after being damaged by “flak” (anti-aircraft gunfire) on a mission over Duisburg.

 

Memorial board to a Wellington bomber crew. (Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

As well as photographs, the Study Group would also like to contact any living relatives of Ronald Douglas Francis, and his fellow crew members, so that they can be invited to, or at least aware of, the steps being taken and events to commemorate the lost Lancaster bomber. Ronald’s parents, John Charles Francis and Winifred Edith Francis, lived at 19 Douglas Avenue, Wembley (a turning off of Ealing Road). Does anyone in the area still remember the family, including the names of any of Ronald’s brothers or sisters who might still be alive, and where they might be found now? If you have any information which might help, please send it to Leo Janssen at: leojanssen1954@ziggo.nl  (with a copy to Wembley Matters, if possible).

 

Wars are horrible things. They bring about terrible loss of life and injury, destruction and disruption of people’s lives. Bombing, especially the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, is one of its worst aspects. But it is not the men and women who volunteer, or are called-up, to serve in the armed forces of their countries, who cause the wars, or decide what acts of war are inflicted on “the enemy”. If they lose their lives (or suffer life changing injuries or trauma) in the course of their service, they deserve to be remembered with respect.

 

It is moving, and humbling, that there are groups of people in The Netherlands who are working to ensure that British and Commonwealth war dead are not forgotten. Another organisation, in the same North Brabant province as Stevensbeek, is the Overloon War Chronicles Foundation. They are collecting the photographs and stories of the Allied soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Overloon, a crucial victory in the advance towards Germany in October 1944, and are among the 281 who are buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the village.

 

A remembrance service at Overloon war graves cemetery. (Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

For the past few years, people the municipality of Land van Cuijk, which includes Overloon, have been holding a special remembrance event at their local war graves cemeteries each Christmas time. Any relatives of the dead, or others interested, are invited to join the local community for this. On Tuesday 24 December 2024 the tour of four cemeteries will end at Overloon, with a programme of music, speeches, poems and readings, starting at 4pm. And on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, candles will be lit on each of the graves, as part of the annual Lights on War Graves commemoration.

 

The annual commemoration and Lights on War Graves at Overloon cemetery.
(Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

Lest we forget!

UPDATE February 23rd 2025 from Philip Grant

Douglas Avenue cropped up again in a February 2025 WW2 guest post:
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-curious-incident-of-dornier-in-night.html

I sent a "link" to that article to the Dutch team and their English family history researcher. I'm pleased to say that I have heard back from them that they have managed to contact a relative of Ronald Francis, and obtained a photograph of him in his RAF uniform. Here it is:

 

 
 

Philip Grant.

 

Have a go at 2024’s Wembley Christmas Picture Quiz!

Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

 

The Wembley History Society’s Christmas Picture Quiz has become a bit of tradition, since it began during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Once again, Martin has kindly agreed to share it with “Wembley Matters” readers. You are invited to have a go at this year’s quiz, and the “question paper” is attached below.

 

There are ten pictures again this year, each with two questions. The images come from the area covered by the former Borough of Wembley (from 1934 this included the previous Urban District of Kingsbury), which the Society was set up in 1952 to promote the history of. That is the part of the present day London Borough north and west of the River Brent.

 

Stained glass window showing the Borough of Wembley coat of arms.

 

How many questions can you answer? The quiz is just for fun (no prizes!), and you’ll get the answers on this blog site next week. Don’t worry if there are some you don’t know, because the more questions you can’t answer, the more you’ll discover about Wembley in a week’s time.

 

Please feel free to share the quiz (and later the answers!) with friends and family living locally, or former Wembley residents, if you think they’ll enjoy it too. Good luck!

 

Philip Grant

 

 

When is complaint not a complaint? – Part 2 Is there a 'cover up culture' at Brent Council

Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Opening paragraphs of Kim Wright’s email to me of 27 September 2024.

 

On 2 October, Martin published my guest post “Bobby Moore Bridge advertising lease – When is a complaint not a complaint?” The email of 27 September above from Brent’s Chief Executive had been sent in response to my request for her to conduct a Final Review of the formal complaint I had made on 30 August. I requested that as I was not satisfied with the initial reply of 9 September from a Corporate Director, which did not even mention the word “complaint”.

 

The grounds for my complaint were detailed in a guest post a month earlier, “Bobby Moore Bridge – formal complaint submitted over advertising lease award”. Briefly, they were that the Officer Report to the Cabinet meeting on 28 May, and the recommendation to make the award under Option B, were biased, and that the main author of that report had an undisclosed conflict of interests, which had only come to light months later.

 

 I wanted to understand the reasoning behind the Council’s decision not to treat my “concerns” as a formal complaint, which had apparently made before the first response to that complaint on 9 September, and what evidence it had been based on. I requested some details in an email to Kim Wright on 11 October (the text is in the comments section under the 2 October guest post). The Council decided to treat this as an FoI request, and I received the response to that on 11 November.

 

If the information provided is correct (and you would expect it to be, as the response came from a Senior Brent Council Lawyer), the decision (that my formal complaint was not a complaint) was made between 30 September and 3 October, after the Chief Executive had told me of the decision.

 

In reply to my questions about what information the decision had been based on, that the matter I’d formally complained about ‘had not affected me personally’, and ‘had not caused me an injustice’, the response in both cases was: ‘Please refer to council officer’s emails sent to you dated 27/9 and 3/10.’ In other words, if Brent’s Chief Executive said that I had not suffered any personal injustice as a result of actions by the Council, or one of its Officers, that was sufficient evidence on which to base a decision justifying her claim!

 

Extract from Brent’s FoI response of 11 November 2024.

 

The response had already told me that the (apparently retrospective!) decision had been made by ‘The Complaints and Casework Manager in conjunction with the Corporate Director, Law & Governance.’ My final request had been for ‘any documentary evidence relating to’ the decision, and ‘any communications, and any advice sought or given, in respect of it.’ I was informed that the only documents were Kim Wright’s email to me of 27 September and the Council’s Complaints Policy (a copy of which was attached). ‘No further communication is held.’

 

I have set this out in detail so that any reader who is interested can see how Brent Council operates. If it does not want to deal with a complaint, it says that it is not a complaint, without having to provide any evidence. It hopes that you will give up and go away, rather than admitting that something has been done wrongly, and trying to put it right! 

 

Anyone who knows me will realise that I am not put off by such tactics. This is the full text of an open email which I sent to Brent’s Chief Executive on 12 November:-

 

This is an Open Email

Dear Ms Wright,

 

Further to my email of 25 September, requesting a Stage 2 Final Review of my formal complaint to you of 30 August 2024 (see copy attached), you will have seen my Internal Review request (sent yesterday evening) to the FoI response of 11 November, to the questions I raised in my email to you of 11 October.

 

This is getting complicated, and is taking up quite a lot of Senior Council Officer time. The reason for that is that you and other Council Officers appear to be trying to "give me the run-around", hoping that I will give up, so that you do not have to deal with a perfectly reasonable and genuine complaint that I raised.

 

This latest letter, from Brent's Senior Constitutional & Governance Lawyer, exposes that there is no valid basis in evidence to show why Brent Council should not treat my complaint of 30 August as a complaint within the Council's Complaints Policy.

 

It appears from her FoI response that the "decision", 'that this issue does not fall within the scope of the Council's normal complaints procedure', set out in your email to me of 27 September, was not made until several days after you had sent that email, rather than before Minesh Patel's original email reply, in your absence on leave, of 9 September, which is what you had suggested.

 

And that "decision", for which there is no documentary evidence, appears to have been founded solely on a claim in your email of 27 September that: 'In this particular case you have not suffered a greater degree of personal injustice than anyone else affected by the matter raised.'

 

There was no supporting evidence for that claim. In fact, you already knew that the open tender process for the new advertising lease from 31 August 2024, seeking best value for the Council, with separate bids that would give the opportunity for Cabinet to properly consider the tile murals in the Bobby Moore Bridge subway, had been my suggestion in 2021, which had been accepted by your predecessor, Carolyn Downs.

 

The process was meant to be fair and transparent, and I had put in a great deal of effort to try to ensure that it was. My complaint (there can be no other valid description for it) was that the Report and recommendation, which Cabinet accepted, had been biased, and that its main author had an undisclosed conflict of interests. How could that not affect me personally, or give rise to an injustice, not just to the people who signed the petition which I presented on 28 May, but to me personally?

 

I would ask you again to carry out a Stage 2 Final Review of my formal complaint of 30 August, in the hope that this matter can be satisfactorily resolved without my having to refer it to the Local Government Ombudsman.

 

In answer to another FoI request, which I received on 14 October, I was told that the new advertising lease agreement between the Council and Quintain from 31 August 2024 had not yet been signed. If that is still the case, then my suggested remedy No.1 still applies (as does the second suggested remedy in my open letter of 30 August attached).

 

I look forward to receiving your reply. Best wishes,

 

Philip Grant.

 

The Leader Foreword from the Cabinet Bobby Moore Bridge advertising lease report, 28 May 2024.
(The “supplier” referred to is Quintain Ltd, through its Wembley Park subsidiary)

 

You will notice a reference to some other FoI requests I made, to which I have received some partial responses. Among the information gleaned on the Report to the 28 May Cabinet meeting is that the “Leader Forward” in it was not actually written by Cllr. Muhammed Butt himself (but by the Officer with the alleged undisclosed conflict of interests):

 

‘The foreword for the report was discussed by the Leader and Head of Communications, Conference and Events at a face-to-face meeting and the steer the Leader provided was included in the report and cleared by the Leader.’

 

My request for ‘copies of all email or other documentary contacts between the Contact Officers and the Leader … in the preparation of the Report’, was denied. The reason given was that:

 

‘complying with this request would exceed the cost limit set by the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Under Section 12 of the Act, public authorities are not required to comply with requests if the estimated time to locate, retrieve, and extract the requested information would take more than 18 hours.’

 

I doubt whether it would cost that much to provide the relevant emails etc between two people from 1 April and 14 May 2024, so I have asked for an Internal Review of that response!

 

There was an Appendix to the Report, headed "Advertising Lease Bid Evaluation", and I had also asked for ‘all the information in that Appendix 1 which was not exempt information.’ That request has also been refused:

 

‘The appendix includes commercially sensitive details related to an ongoing procurement process, as well as market-sensitive information. The public interest in keeping this information confidential outweighs the interest in disclosing it, as premature disclosure could harm the commercial interests of the bidders and the council.’

 

But the procurement process is not ongoing (it ended at the Cabinet meeting on 28 May!), and I had only requested the non-exempt information, not any commercially sensitive details. Again, I’ve asked for an Internal Review of this response. What is Brent Council trying to hide?

 

I feel that the treatment I have received in trying to pursue my complaint demonstrates a “cover-up culture” at Brent Council, which appears to go right to the top of the organisation. That is not a healthy state of affairs, especially for a public body paid for at our expense!

 

Philip Grant.