Celebrating Brent's Conservation Areas

I am please to publish this guest post by local historian Philip Grant
 

Conservation Areas were introduced in England by the Civic Amenities Act 1967, as a way of preserving the character of areas in towns or villages which had special architectural or historic interest. They are meant to provide a level of protection for those areas when planning decisions are made.

The Victorian commercial character of the Willesden Green Conservation Area helped campaigners in 2012 to save the remaining Victorian section of the Willesden Green Library building, despite the plans of Brent Council and their development partner, Galliford Try, to demolish it. The façade of the 1893 library now forms the High Road frontage of the modern Willesden Green Library.

The distinctive late-Victorian and Edwardian suburban villas which characterise the residential Mapesbury Conservation Area have, so far, managed to save “The Queensbury” in that area from demolition, and from an inappropriate development of flats on its site.

The inter-war planned garden suburb of the Sudbury Court Conservation Area, has relatively narrow tree-lined streets with grass verges, which form an essential part of its character. However, this did not prevent Brent Council pushing through its plans in 2016 to expand Byron Court Primary School, built in the early 1930’s as a two-form entry school for the children of this Comben & Wakeling estate, to five-form entry, generating traffic that the areas roads will not be able to cope with.

Anyone interested in Conservation Areas and their history will be very welcome at a Wembley History Society talk on this subject, on the evening of Friday 8^th June:-

Brent’s first Conservation Area, designated in 1968, was the Roe Green Village Conservation Area in Kingsbury (whose proud sign is shown on the poster above). As well as marking 50 years as a Conservation Area, the village is also celebrating its centenary this year. It was specially planned by the Government’s Office of Works during the First World War, as housing for workers at an aircraft factory (“AIRCO”) on the opposite side of Stag Lane.

The Roe Green Village Residents’ Association is holding a number of events during June 2018 as part of the village’s centenary celebrations:-

If you don’t know Roe Green Village, why not treat yourself, and come along to the Village Day on Saturday 30^th June! As well as lots of other attractions on offer that afternoon, on the Village Green in Roe Lane (yes, the WW1 plans included a village green, although the village pub that was meant to stand beside it was not built!) Wembley History Society will be putting on a display of pictures, telling the story of AIRCO and how the village came about. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Save our Gardens

Destruction in Salmon Street

Something that really upsets me is when I see yet another front garden being ripped out and paved over. There's something really brutal about it and it is  regular occurrence in Brent.  Even worse is when there is no attempt to retain even a border or a little container planting:

Car park with house attached, Queen's Drive

 The London Wildlife Trust published a report last week  'London - Garden City?'which recorded the loss of gardens in London. You can download the report HERE .

'As established by this report, London’s gardens cover a vast area. But the speed and scale of their loss is alarming,’ says Mathew Frith, Deputy Chief Executive of London Wildlife Trust. ‘Collectively these losses detrimentally affect London’s wildlife and impact on our ability to cope with climate change. It’s never been more important that Londoners understand the value of our capital’s gardens. A well managed network of the city’s 3.8 million gardens support essential wildlife habitat and offer important environmental benefits in response to climate change including sustainable urban drainage.'


The loss is a combination of hard surfacing to provide car parking space - what the estate agents love to call 'off-road parking'; erection of sheds, garages, glasshouses and bottom of the garden studies etc; and the development of back gardens for new housing. Brent suffers from all these and the transformation would bewilder anyone transported to the present from the 1950's: 'What have we done with our cherished front gardens?'


It isn't just front gardens either. A parent I visited recently proudly told me she had converted the back garden into a playground for her children and took me into her back room to show me the garden,  paved completely from house to back fence,  with nothing growing in it at all. As I stared I remembered our back garden in Kingsbury when I was a kid.  We played hide and seek amongst the shrubs, picked the figs and threw them at each other,  built little camp fires to cook sausages and baked beans, searched in the irises to find snails and have snail races - and even planted seeds and nurtured the young plants. What a loss.


All is not completely lost though.  I have already reported on the Chalkhill allotments which are proving very popular but many of the very small gardens on the estate are something to wonder at. When I have leafleted on the estate I have stopped to admire the ingenious ways people have managed to grow flowers, tomatoes, corn, aubergines, runner beans and courgettes in a tiny space, often in their front gardens. Some conservation areas, such as St Andrew's in Kingsbury have managed to retain grass verges and the ban on drop kerbs. The difference is striking:

Well's Drive in the St Andrew's Conservation area

Even on the busy Church Lane it is possible to have a lovely front garden:

Front garden in Church Lane, Kingsbury

The Report says that on average the equivalent of two and a half Hyde Parks has been lost each year between 1998-99 and 2006-8. In the same period the amount of hard surfacing increased by 26% and the amount of lawn decreased by 16%. Overall vegetation in gardens decreased by 12%. On average 500 gardens, or part gardens, were lost to development each year.

Action needs to be taken at a London-wide as well as a borough level. This not only requires stricter planning controls but also weaning people away from cars by providing better public transport.  It could be that the price of oil will do the trick in the longer term. There is also an issue with people's lack of time in this era of long working hours and multiple jobs and also with lack of knowledge about gardening. The former is obviously a wider social issue but it has been encouraging to see the latter addressed. Metropolitan Housing is running gardening workshops on Chalkhill, the Transition movement has been doing some educative work, and Brent Elders' Voice has introduced a scheme for cross-generational support to keep gardens under cultivation.


I do my bit to encourage wildlife in my very small back garden but is is often hard to persuade visitors that I have planted the jungle deliberately! However they are soon entranced by the many visiting birds, including woodpeckers and the busy pond life.