Commercialisation of our parks in Brent Council's budget proposals

 The Council's proposals for Barham Park included plans to commercialise the buildings to include a  boutique hotel and supermarket along with charging market rents for some of the voluntary groups and charities that presently occupy them. The proposals resulted in a massive campaign, a petition and council debate.

Undaunted Brent Council is now consulting on its 2024-25/25-26 budget that includes (page references are the budget document that can be found HERE) :

1. Increase in events in parks to generate income - review (increase) for those organising their own events in parks.  (p130)

2. Commercialise existing ‘under-used’ property space within parks to generate income (p132)

3. Market commercial advertising within parks to generate income  (p134)

Letting of parks for events - Income generated 2024-25 (my highlighting)

The new grounds maintenance contract with Continental includes a requirement to support the council in creating, advertising, and facilitating a programme of commercial events in parks and open spaces. This can be supported by a revision of fees and charges for those applying to organise their own events in parks.

How would this affect users of this service?

There would be no impact on service users, other than there being a more comprehensive programme of events and activities in our parks. Those seeking to organise their own events in parks would be required to meet a higher cost for that access.

Key milestones

Revised fees would be submitted for consultation and decision as part of the corporate budget setting process for 2024/25 and would be implemented from April 2024. 

 I would challenge the zero impact on service users as parts of the park would be inaccessible to residents (remember Fryent Country Park when used for car parking and Barham Park for funfairs). The Council thinks that there is a trade-off as the events would be attended by paying customers from the borough.

Commercialisation of parks is already a problem for community groups/voluntary organisations that  being charged rates they find difficult to meet including Daniels Den, Roundwood Forest and Families, Bush Farm collective)

 Commercialise existing ‘under-used’ property space within parks to generate income (£30,000 2024-2025)

This proposal would seek to raise income from commercialising existing unused property space within parks.

How would this affect users of this service?

There would be minimal impact on users of the service other than some benefit from the upgrade of unused facilities and the opportunity to make use of property space for a variety of purposes.

Key milestones

Oct 2023: Survey of existing unused space.
Oct 2023: Schedule of usable space drawn up.
Oct 2023 - March 2024: Any adaptations agreed and undertaken. April 2024: Vacant space advertised and offered for use.

There are empty buildings in a number of Brent parks including Roundwood (Bowls Pavilion) and King Edwards VII. Bowls Club pavilion and the football pavilion. Utilisation for charities and non-profit organisations would be socially useful but commercialisation (market rents) is the intention.

Market commercial advertising within parks to generate income - £40,000 2024-25

 This saving is based on a new offer of space for commercial advertising in parks

How would this affect users of this service?

There would be no impact on service users other than advertising being more visible at locations within parks.

Key milestones

Oct 2023: Survey of suitable space.
Oct 2023: Schedule of usable space drawn up.
April 2024: Vacant space advertised and offered for use.

Key consultations

Awareness of this intention should be raised to any Friends of Groups that are relevant to any park in Brent to which this saving might apply.

This raises many questions not least the aesthetics of advertising banners etc within parks and the nature of the advertising.  Advertising along Olympic Way in Wembley may give us a clue.

Brent Renters Picnic in Roundwood Park on Saturday August 12th 12 noon

 

Poetry Book Celebration in Roundwood Park, Thursday 12.15pm - Cafe Area

 

The Roundwood Gardening Group's Poet in Residence, Susan Carberry, will be reading from her recently published collection, 'Eternal Ephemera', in the Roundwood Park Cafe area tomorrow lunchtime.

The event marks a one hundred sales of the book which is on sale at the cafe for £5.  Funds raised will be donated to the gardening club.

Susan says:

By purchasing this booklet, you will have help to support the work of the Roundwood Gardening Group,  a collection of local - and not so local - volunteers who give up their time every week to support the full-time gardeners. The members not only help with the maintenance of Roundwood Park's beautiful flora, but also give valuable support to each other. Everyone gains much from the exercise, social interaction, banter and belonging.

The event runs from 12.15pm until 1pm.

ROUNDWOOD PARK...

...is a silent world with

steaming mists rising

from rain-swollen ponds

Is this Paradise? I ask,

but question and 

answer are lost in

dragonflies' wings droning

loud as a passing storm

 

My canine companion,

thunder-growl spooked,

holds his head high,

his eyes ee all,

his nose quivers

at exciting new scents.

the park is recovering

its sensual persona.

 

The sun comes out

warming this oasis

in the heart of London.

Roundwood Park,

storm-battering over,

rises from the deluge:

once more a haven,

sanctuary for all.

 

Susan Carberry

 [Roundwood Park published with permission. It is the author's intellectual property]

If you go down to Roundwood today, you're sure of a big surprise...

 Aerial view of the southern edge of Roundwood Park (Bowling Green in centre)

I certainly got a big surprise when I visited the Gardening Club and other activity areas on the edge of Roundwood Park on Thursday at the invitation of Katie Mills of social enterprise Forest and Family. Full of passion and energy Katie has a vision for this space that already includes an independent gardening club, a Nature Connection Centre where events, talks and half-term activities are held and a Forest School area in a woodland glade. Working with children and their families from diverse backgrounds they reconnect with nature in an era of keyboards and screens.

 

The Gardening Club, made up of volunteers, even have their own resident poet in the person of Susan Carberry and I arrived just in time for a tea break and Susan's reading of one of her poems from her booklet Eternal Ephemera. (On sale in the Roundwood Cafe to raise funds for the Gardening Club)

 Susan told me of the benefits of the Gardening Club. It combines physical hard work, poetry, and socialising and in the process opens up new horizons for participants. People with little previous exposure to poetry become interested in Susan's poetry and that of other poets that she shares with the group, leading to a developing interest in literature.  Susan said that being: 'It fires me up to write!'

The hard work was visible in the garden area with its recently planted orchard, herb and strawberry raised bed and other beds being prepared for planting.

A toddler investigates the orchard

Raised beds

Weeding the herb and strawberry bed

Getting out the compost for use in the potting shed

Seedlings were being hardened off outside

Also in the Cafe compound is the Nature Connection Centre that can be used for events, work with children and all sorts of other possibilities.

A woodland garden is being developed behind the cafe. 

Beyond the Cafe area, walking towards Longstone Avenue, a tall fence and shrubbery conceals a bowling green and pavilion. Like that at Edward VII Park in Wembley it has fallen into disuse. The green has recently been mown and I understand that the pavilion, although currently full of rubbish, has a kitchen, centre space, toilets and changing rooms attached. It clearly has great potential, and it is a pity to see, in a borough lacking in green space, that it is unused.

But there is hope. Brent Council intend to lease it out and a consortium consisting of Forest and Family, the Scouts and others are interested in making an application.

The Bowling Green

The Pavilion

Walking on from the bowling green you come upon an asphalt path which used to be a vehicle entrance to the bowling green and next to it the children's playground currently being refurbished with the rather garish equipment common to most Brent Parks.

However,there is another surprise at the end of the asphalt path. The rustic entrance to semi-woodland that is used as the Forest School with visits from local primary pupils, enabling them to get in touch with nature and immerse themselves in activities. Katie Mills has brought the previously abused area back into positive use and given the right arrangements with Brent Council it could have a fully sustainable future and contribute to the Council's Climate Emergency Strategy and engagement with young people.

What child would not be thrilled to enter through this gate?

Another of Katie's projects, which has become a national outdoor campaign but runs locally with the cooperation of Brent Libraries, is Stories by Moonlight. Participants get an outdoor story book sack of activities to do at home with parents and carers on summer evenings, but even better, a network of participants has been formed. Children can come in their pyjamas to a park or green space and take part in storytelling and read books surrounded by fairly lights or lanterns in a magical space as day becomes dusk and night.

Looking again at the aerial view,  you can see that taken together the area around the cafe with its edible woodland gardens and meeting space, could be linked with environmental projects on the disused bowling green, and linked on again to the Forest School woodland area. This would be a tremendous facility that could serve as a model for other Brent spaces as well as further afield.

It just needs people to match Katie's passion and vitality and get behind the vision to the benefit of all.

I'll leave the last word to Katie: 

This is a big vision project about how Nature connects us to better health, wellbeing, and each other. I wanted to show how parks can become dynamic and innovative centres for Nature connection, outdoor wellbeing, green prescribing, and community cohesion in Brent. 

 

With support from NCIL funding we're achieved that; we're impacted so many people through the project and create an ambitious template with huge potential to be scaled. We're shown a huge appetite alongst local residents, schools and families for what we're doing. 

 

This work is urgent and vital, especially in Brent, and it needs a joined up, strategic and multi-partner approach. The council's buy-in to this vision is critical and if we can get the right level of support and momentum the benefits for all are huge.

 

LINKS

 

https://www.katiemills.co.uk/business/stories-by-moonlight/

 

 

https://www.katiemills.co.uk/business/forestandfamily/

 

 

 

Clement Close – how Council housing began here

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant.

 

Clement Close was the subject of a recent blog, about residents’ opposition to Brent’s proposed in-fill scheme for this Council housing estate. But how did this estate come to be here, surrounded by suburban homes in Brondesbury Park? The answer lies in another time of acute housing shortage.

 

 

Some prefab homes in Clement Way, 1950s. (Photo courtesy of Brent Archives)

 

Even though they were in the middle of a major conflict in 1942, some members of the Churchill’s National Government were thinking ahead to how they would rebuild the country after the war. Housing people whose homes had been destroyed would be a major problem. One solution they came up with was the idea of temporary factory-made houses, and by 1944 local Councils were instructed to consider how many they would need, and where to put them.

 

One of the sites identified in the Borough Engineer’s report to Willesden Council on 15 January 1945 was the playing fields at Okehampton Road, where he thought there would be space for 135 “prefabs”, as they came to be known. The Council ‘noted’ the objections received by residents adjoining the playing fields, to the erection of emergency housing there, at its meeting on 19 February 1945. Despite this, at the end of May 1945 the Council applied for a loan of £31k from the Ministry of Health, for a period of ten years, and accepted tenders from two local companies to prepare a number of sites, including the Okehampton Road playing fields.

 

News of German P-o-Ws clearing a site for prefabs near Roundwood Park.
(From “Willesden Chronicle”, 22 June 1945 – Brent Archives local newspaper microfilms)

 

Because of the shortage of workers, German prisoners of war were used as additional labourers for preparing the sites, and work was underway at Okehampton Road by mid-June 1945. They would have been brought to work by lorry, probably from a large P-o-W camp near Watford. The concrete bases for prefab homes were laid out along a new street, called Clement Road (possibly after the new Labour Prime Minister!), linking Okehampton Road and Milverton Road, and a shorter road called Clement Way which came off of it.

 

The Clement Road prefab estate, from a 1959 O.S. map. (Source: Brent Archives maps collection)

 

There were several varieties of prefabs, and Willesden Council had expressed a preference for the Arcon design. But they had to take what was available, and what the Ministry of Works supplied for Clement Road was a “flat-pack” bungalow, made of timber and chipboard, supplied by America under the wartime Lend Lease agreement. While they had “all mod cons”, they’d been designed as married quarters accommodation for large U.S. Forces bases in the south of that country, so were not ideal for the British climate.

 

An American wooden prefab at 70 Clement Road in the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Irene Ottaway)

 

 Despite this, the prefabs on the Clement Road estate provided popular homes for around 130 local families, for far more than the ten years they were originally expected to last. As they were made of timber, it’s surprising that only two (as far as I know) were destroyed in house fires – but when a fire took, hold the effects could be devastating. These photos from Clement Road in the 1960s were taken by a schoolboy who lived there. What he did not know at the time was that a baby had died inside this burning prefab.

 

Firemen tackling a blaze at a Clement Road prefab in the 1960s. (Courtesy of, and © Brian Aris)

 

Families on the estate were gradually being rehoused into permanent Council homes, but as late as 1962, some were being relet to other families in housing need. Eventually, the prefabs at the northern end of the site were cleared, and the permanent Council homes of what was to be called Clement Close were built in the 1960s.

 

 

Mrs Maisey, in the back garden of her Clement Road prefab in the late 1960s,
with Clement Close homes in the background. (Courtesy of Irene Ottaway)

 

The Clement Road and Clement Way prefabs were finally removed by the early 1970s. Most of the Okehampton Road playing fields, which Willesden Council had requisitioned for post-war emergency housing in 1945, returned to their original use, but this time as additional grounds for the adjacent secondary school (now Queens Park Community College). The northern end, accessed from Milverton Road, was kept for Council housing, as Clement Close.

 

Philip Grant.

 

(With thanks to the former residents of the Clement Road prefab estate, who shared their stories and photographs with the Brent Archives “Prefabs Project” in 2011.)

 

Editor's Note:

If you are interested in the extent of the bombing locally during the London Blitz (7th October 1940 to 6th June 1941) that led to the destruction of many homes go to this interactive site. The information goes to street level.

Child-friendly bike ride Sunday 26th June - Roundwood Park to Paddington Rec

 

Roundwood Gardening Club starts tomorrow at 10am

 

What do you and your children think of the options for Roundwood Park children's play area? Have your say.

OPTION 1

OPTION 2

OPTION 3

Brent Parks service are currently looking at a number of options to improve the playground within the park. Three companies have been approached to develop plans for what they would do with the space, all working to a similar budget. 

Please take a look at the three options and let us know your preferred option and any comments you may have.  

The deadline for comments is Sunday 12 December 2021.

 You can express your preference and make a comment HERE

Need to safeguard our allotments as development proposal made for Roundwood site

The triangle ear-marked for development - allotments top right

Several people have drawn my attention to the development plans for the Roundwood triangle formed by Longstone Avenue and Harlesden Road.

The plans involve building on the allotments that can be seen on the ariel view above (top right) and, because the site is under-utilised replacing them with a site of fewer plots elsewhere in Roundwood Park.

I have covered concern from several allotment sites about the Council's failure to re-let plots quickly leading them to be overgrown and hard to bring back into cultivation when they are eventually let.

In a posting in June 2018  LINK I wrote about the issue and said:

Meanwhile, following other examples of neglect of council resources such as garages on estates, there is a fear that pictures of neglect and low use rates such as those above, could lead to justification for a policy of selling off  allotments to be used for housing developments.

The proposal for Roundwood has been put into the project mainstream with £0.5m to be spent and  in 2019-20, £20m in 2020-21and £24.5m in 2021-24:
 

The allotments and 1-47 Longstone Avenue will be two relatively rough sites sitting between two brand new developments in Knowles House and an existing new development that has been completed and sold off.

The proposal is to buy out the lease holders in 1-47 Longstone Avenue and develop a new corner block. The massing Visual does not include the allotments that are located at the rear which have no overlooking and could be developed up to four storeys, with the allotments (half dozen in use) being relocated on to a small portion of Roundwood Park directly to the back, this allows us to not lose the allotment use as part of the scheme as allotments are considered to be a leisure activity.

The worry is that if this is conceded other lucrative allotment sites could be threatened by a land-hungry council with a potential reduction in the size of sites because of the number of unlet plots.

Precedent was set in the famous case of Farm Terrace in Watford which I covered HERE.

All may not be lost as Brent Council have tasked an officer from the Parks Department with looking after the borough's allotments and I hope that he will be proactive in letting plots. Clearly there has been a problem when we are told that there are hundreds on the allotment waiting list and so many are at present unlet.

Meanwhile allotment holders should keep an eye out for people in hard hats, high vis jackets and measuring tapes!

Thumbs up for Shakshuka at the Roundwood Park cafe

I popped into the Roundwood Park Lodge cafe for lunch today with a friend. There was a warm welcome and time taken to describe the dishes on offer. The cafe serves a mixture of traditional meals, with a special children's menu, and Middle Eastern dishes prepared by the Egyptian chef.

We chose the shakshuka which was freshly prepared and very tasty:

There is plenty to tempt you if you are just popping in for tea or coffee:

The cafe has had a makeover but still attracts families. Children are able to use the attached play area or the toy corner in the cafe while their parents relax and chat.

Highly recommended!

Forget the KFC crisis - new healthy cafe to open in Roundwood Park

Roundwood Park

 There was dismay in Harlesden and Willesden when the well-loved community cafe in Roundwood Park closed its doors last year.

Now with Spring on its way it has been announced that a new cafe will open in mid-March.

JSS Catering made a successful bid to run an environmentally friendly cafe in the park. The Roundwood Lodge Cafe will offer a wide range of dishes exemplifying its 'farm to table' ethos. A family-friendly atmosphere will make it an ideal meeting place for local people and their children.

The cafe will also offer cooking classes showing visitors how to prepare their favourite dishes from the menu.

The cafe will add to the facilties in the park which include an aviary, bowling green, outdoor gym and children's playground.

A cafe with a lovely park attached - what's not to like? I wish them well.

Sparks fly over transfer of Roundwood Park firework display to Wembley

The ending of the annual Fireworks Display at Roundwood Park in Willesden/Harlesden has been met with anger by some residents in the south of the borough who see it as yet another example of 'Wembleyfication' - the dominance of Wembley as the regeneration and adminstrative heart of the borough, sucking resources from elsewhere in the borough. 

Certainly a move from a spacious park to the limited paved area of Arena Square (see diagram) has its drawback but in a statement Brent Council claim that sponsorship by Quintain, the US  owned developer of the area around the stadium and Wembley Park Ltd, is the only thing that has saved a borough firework display:

Due to ongoing cuts to local budgets by the government, we're working hard to keep delivering for our residents. This has been particularly felt in the budget for holding local events like our annual fireworks display in Roundwood Park.

We know that the fireworks display is an extremely popular event with residents as well as visitors from across North West London.

That’s why – working closely with Quintain and Wembley Park – we have been able to ensure that the fireworks display will go ahead at a new venue in Wembley.

The sponsorship of the event means that we can continue to host this fantastic annual event in Brent completely FREE to residents. Excellent transport links mean that residents from across Brent will be able to take part this year – we hope you can join us!

There will be performances around the square and at the Civic Centre from early afternoon and the fireworks themselves will be lit at  approximately 6.30pm on November 6th.

UPDATE: The Lodge, Roe Green Park, to be converted into a cafe

The Lodge on December 20th

Brent Council has granted planning permission for the conversion of The Lodge, on Kingsbory Road, fronting Roe Green Park, to be converted into a cafe.  It would include at outside seating area and toilets that would be accessible to park users as well as customers. This would operate on the same basis as the facility in Roundwood Park.

The cafe seatingwould be in an extension that will be built to blend in with the existing building.

The current state of the building (above) xhows what a challenge refurbishment present. 

Full planning details can be found HERE and the historical background to the The Lodge, which served Kingsbury Manor, can be found HERE

Will the next Brent Cabinet be a walk in the park?

The next Brent Cabinet meeting will be held at a new venue - the Roundwood Youth Centre, next to Roundwood Park in Longstone Avenue, Willesden.

The meeting is on Monday September 15th at 2pm and has a crowded, and potentially controversial agenda, as can be seen below.

The full Reports Pack is available on the Council's website HERE

The Press and Public can attend this meeting. Requests for deputations should go to anne.reid@brent.gov.uk Tel 020 8937 1359.