Friday, 9 August 2019

Dawn Butler launches campaign against the overnight closure of Central Middlesex Hospital Urgent Care Centre

Wembley Matters reported on July 2nd that Brent Clinical Commissioing Group was proposing to Close the Central Middlesex Urgent Care Centre overnight (Midnight to 8am) citing lack of use. LINK

Dawn Butler  MP (Brent Central) has now launched a Central Middlesex Hospital Campaign with a petition aimed at preventing the overnight closure LINK

Butler writes
News has broken in recent weeks that Brent Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) are now intending to cut the hours of operation for the Urgent Care Centre at Central Middlesex Hospital entirely from midnight to 8am, making potential savings in the region of £450,000 per annum.

I have used the Urgent Care Centre late at night and know first-hand that there is an absolute need for this 24 hour service in Brent. I am entirely opposed to cutting the hours of operation and call on the CCG to think again and to put any future proposals to a full public consultation.

If the Urgent Care Centre were to close at night local residents without access to a car will have to travel for anywhere between 45 minutes and 1 hour 20 minutes on public transport in the dead of night.

I therefore call on you to join me in condemning the proposed closure by signing my petition below. I will also continue to keep you updated on the petition and my campaign to put a stop to this proposed closure.

The above link takes you to the petition.

 

Thursday, 8 August 2019

Public meeting: making Brent a safer place to live - August 22nd 7-9pm

From Brent Council Neighbourhood Watch

We are writing to invite you to join Police and Council leaders for a community conversation about violent crime. It will be held at Roundwood Youth Centre in Harlesden on Thursday 22 August, 7-9pm.

Sadly, like many London boroughs, Brent has had its share of headlines for street violence in recent months.

In response to these events, we are hosting a Time to Talk event focused on making Brent safer. By attending, you will have the chance to talk about your concerns, put your questions to Police and Councillors, hear from young people in the borough, and work together to find solutions.

The event will also highlight the reality behind some of the headlines and tackle misconceptions. Despite a number of high profile incidents, police figures show knife crime incidents in Brent are far less frequent than they were 12 months ago. The number of crimes involving knives has dropped 31%.

Cllr Muhammed Butt, Leader of Brent Council, had this to say: 
We’re working hard, with the Police, to address violence on our streets and make Brent an even safer place to live. But just as it takes a village to raise a child, we need the whole community to work together to put a stop to this behaviour.

Headlines don’t always tell the full story, but they do focus minds. We want to harness the strong emotions people rightly feel about street violence and see if we can find solutions together.
So, we hope to see you at Roundwood Youth Centre in Harlesden on Thursday 22 August. The free event will run 7-9pm and light refreshments will be provided. To register your interest, please go to https://www.facebook.com/events/670868150045602/. Registration is not essential, but it will help us to make sure that everybody is catered for. 

If you need to reply regarding this message, click on this email address: owl@brent.gov.uk

Wednesday, 7 August 2019

Campaigners call for a 'NO' vote in South Kilburn regeneration ballot

There was a mixed reception at a consultation on South Kilburn regeneration for the leaflet below. Residents generally welcomed it but some leading councillors were not at all pleased with campaigners.

Residents of 17 blocks  will have a Yes/No vote on whether the regeneration should go ahead.


Fix these problems first!

·      Many of the new flats have had major problems, with flammable cladding, leaking roofs, mould and much more.

·      Rents will be higher in new flats and rise more quickly than Council rents.

·      Most people won’t remain Council tenants but be transferred to a Housing Association (HA), which already have higher rents. There have been many complaints about how unresponsive HAs are.

·       Service charges have gone up considerably for HA tenants.

·      Not all new flats are as large as current flats.

·      Temporary tenants (some of whom have been temporary for as long as 10 years) in South Kilburn, but they are being offered worse tenancy agreements than those who are already secure tenants.

The ballot asks if regeneration should continue, without addressing any of these problems. Balloting 17 blocks at the same time means residents whose blocks only need refurbishing are pitched against residents whose blocks should be demolished and replaced by better housing.

Both the local (Kilburn) Labour Party and the borough-wide Brent Labour Party have called on the Council to suspend regeneration while these issues are sorted out.

Vote NO and call on Brent Council to come back with proposals which really address our housing problems.

This leaflet is produced by local residents and activists. For information, contact theotherwiseclub@gmail.com
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Tuesday, 6 August 2019

Join the Conservation Day at the Welsh Harp Centre on Saturday August 17th

From Thames 21

Each month a great group of individuals come together to do extremely useful conservation and maintenance work around the Centre using basic gardening tools, to gain skills and meet new people. This work supports the activities of the Welsh Harp Environmental Education Centre including over 3000 school children that attend the Centre each year and improves the biodiversity of the woodland habitat.

What will be the tasks at the next event? (August 17th 10am-12.30pm)
  • Clear algae from the pond
  • Cut back vegetation around pond area
  • Other tasks as they come up
What else do you need to know?
  • All welcome! Young people aged 17 years and under need to be accompanied by a responsible adult, each individual child under 11 years old will need an adult with them at all times as we are using sharp tools. 
  • Tasks can be adapted or alternative tasks available for all levels of involvement.
  • Tea, coffee and snacks, steel toe cap wellington boots, tools and gloves are all provided. 
  • Wear comfortable outdoor clothing suitable for gardening.
  • Please meet inside the Education Centre.
We have achieved a lot since these events have started and we will continue to address many other aspects of the WHEEC Habitat Management Plan that need attending to. If you would like a copy of the management plan or information about the group, please email me - Deb Frankiewicz: welshharpcentre@thames21.org.uk.

Hope to see as many of you as possible at the next event!

UPDATED WITH COMMENTS The Welsh Harp Reservoir – a warning from Whaley Bridge



Guest post by Philip Grant

The Welsh Harp Reservoir – a warning from Whaley Bridge
We know that Global Warming is causing more frequent extreme weather conditions, such as record heat waves in summer, and more intense storms. In the past few days, we have been watching (from a safe distance) the news about a threatened dam collapse at Whaley Bridge, caused by the volume of water flowing into the reservoir above the town after prolonged torrential rain. I don’t want to cause alarm, but this should be a wake-up call about a reservoir much closer to us.
The Toddbrook Reservoir in Derbyshire was built in the 1830’s, to supply water along a “feeder” to the High Peak Canal. The embankment dam was constructed of earth, around a central core of puddled clay. 
The Kingsbury, or Brent, Reservoir (now better known as the Welsh Harp) was built in 1834/35, to supply water along The Feeder (which still runs through Neasden and Stonebridge) to the Paddington Branch of the Grand Junction Canal. Its dam, using the same method of construction, was the work of a Hammersmith contractor, William Hoof. The price for the work, which he agreed with the Regent’s Canal Company, was £2,747 and six shillings!



William Hoof’s letter of 18th October 1834, agreeing to build the reservoir and embankment dam at Kingsbury.
            
Heavy rain, and a rapid thaw of snow, caused a partial collapse of the dam in January 1841. 


A newspaper illustration of the flooding in Brentford, 1841.


The water swept down the Brent valley, which was then just open farmland, and caused major flood damage at the canal port of Brentford, where the river met the Thames. Several people were drowned, and more than 100 boats were wrecked.
The dam had been repaired by 1843, and was enlarged ten years later as the Regent’s Canal Company needed more water for its operations. A spillway was added to the dam, allowing excess water to escape into the river below when the reservoir was full. By late Victorian times, this had become a tourist attraction for people visiting the local countryside from the crowded city.


The Kingsbury “waterfall”, in a postcard from c.1900.  [Brent Archives online image 1341]
The land downstream of the reservoir remained as farmland until 1880, when the Metropolitan Railway built a large engineering works at Neasden, on the line they were building out from Baker Street. They also had to build homes for the many people needed to run the works, and the first 100 houses in “A” and “B” (now Quainton and Verney) Streets were occupied by 1882. If you want to learn more about Neasden’s Railway Village, there is an illustrated article on the Brent Archives website LINK .
Across Neasden Lane (North), suburban development in the 1930’s saw new roads such as Braemar Avenue built right up to the foot of the dam, and a new junior school, Wykeham Primary in Aboyne Road, to serve the area’s growing population. Two more schools, Neasden High and St. Margaret Clitherow R.C. Primary, were built in the early 1970’s, on the site of the former Neasden Power Station, between the River Brent and The Feeder. When the High School closed, as part of Brent’s cull of secondary schools in 1989, its site was redeveloped as the Quainton Village housing scheme.
More housing developments were built near the reservoir in the late 20th century. Runbury Circle nestles under the north-west edge of the dam, while Harp Island Close lies between the river and The Feeder, near to where the Brent emerges below the dam. This estate of 128 flats was built by Laings in the 1980’s, and the view here is from its gardens (in 2009).


What had been the dam’s Victorian spillway was replaced in 1936 by five siphons, designed to take water out of the reservoir if its level becomes too high. These were installed as a safety measure, under changes introduced by the Reservoir (Safety Provisions) Act in 1930. That law was introduced after 16 people were drowned in Dolgarrog, North Wales, in 1925, when floods coming down a valley in the hills caused an embankment dam above the village to collapse.
Toddbrook Reservoir had been inspected, both by its owners and an independent engineer, under the provisions of the current (1975!) Reservoirs Act, as recently as November 2018, and found to be “safe”. In the light of the near collapse of its dam, less than nine months later, and what we know about more extreme weather events, as a result of Global Warming, we need to think again about the safety of all of the country’s Canal Age dams, including the one at the Welsh Harp.
Brent Council needs to work with the Canal and River Trust, and the Environment Agency, to review all aspects of our local dam’s safety, both to minimise the risk of a similar event to Whaley Bridge happening here, and to ensure that plans are in place on how any such emergency would be dealt with. 
If a similar spell of very wet weather hit North West London, as it did North West England last week, the wide catchment areas of the Dollis Brook / River Brent and the Silk Stream would bring huge volumes of water into the Welsh Harp. Not only the safety of the dam structure in such conditions needs to be properly assessed, but also the ability of the siphons to cope with such volumes.
If the reservoir had to shed large volumes of water, could the river below the dam take that water away safely, without flooding low lying residential areas and roads for several miles downstream. There have been times, in living memory, when debris restricting the culvert which channels the river under the Harrow Road has caused flooding in the Monks Park and St Raphael’s Estate areas.
Are Brent’s own maps of areas at risk from flooding, if there were to be a partial (or worse) failure of the dam up to date? Does the Council know how many people currently live, work or go to school in these areas, and how it would manage their evacuation if there were to be an emergency of the type experienced at Whaley Bridge. The recent events there have been a warning which must not be ignored.


Despite this warning, the Welsh Harp Reservoir is still a place to be treasured and enjoyed, rather than to be feared, as long as its potential dangers are properly considered, and the necessary action taken. If you want to discover more about its history there is an article online LINK t, or for more of its fascinating story, beautifully illustrated, borrow a copy of Geoffrey Hewlett’s “Welsh Harp Reservoir Through Time” from one of Brent’s libraries. Better still, take a stroll beside it yourself!
Philip Grant.

Note from Editor:  I am awaiting a response from the Canals and River Trust to a request made for a comment on the above piece.

Carolyn Downs, Brent Council CEO, has sent thos response to Philip Grant:

Dear Mr Grant,

Thank you for your email and attachment, on behalf of Carolyn Downs I acknowledge receipt.

Please be assured that the matter is being discussed by the relevant teams internally and we will seek to engage with the relevant external partners on this to provide you with a further response.

In the meantime, the council’s Flood Risk Management Strategy is publically available on the website*.

Kind regards,

Tom Welsh
Head of the Chief Executive’s Office'

* THIS IS A LINK TO BRENT'S FLOOD RISK MANAGEMENT STRATEGY document:
https://www.brent.gov.uk/media/16406897/flood-risk-strategy-sept-2015.pdf

Roger Wilson has sent in this comment:
Phil, I support your proposal to Brent Council that it take heed of the 'warning from Whaley Bridge' and review its emergency flood planning and the maintenance schedules of the Welsh Harp/ Brent reservoir Dam Wall and spillways have not slipped.

But as a regular user of this leisure facility, both as a sailor and for the enjoyment its wildlife, I'd be more than upset to see an overly cautious kneejerk response to your blog, such as dropping water levels in the reservoir. Your Blog would be a more worthy if it reported some of the some of the measures that HAVE been carried out in the more recent past along side the sensationalist historic events of the past.

So to redress the balance ...

A quick online search 'Brent Reservoir repairs/ upgrades' reveals that:

i) that the spillway was redesigned in the 1930's (at the same time as the expansion of Housing below the reservoir) and is of a more sophisticated design than that of Toddbrook Reservoir impacting Whaley Bridge.

ii) That Brent's residents are fortunate that the Brent reservoir Dam and Brent River rainfall catchment basin have been the subject of a number of academic specific case studies (published between 1990 and 2000. These case studies included reviews of mathematical modelling methods used to predict floods, and of the capacity and design of the of the Brent Reservoir spillways to safely disperse flood water.

iii) Possibly as a result of these studies, between 2005 and 2007, e.g. only 12 years ago, the height of the Brent reservoir Dam Wall was raised with a new Concrete Cap and earth bunds and concrete walls added to the north and south side of the Dam wall. This I believe was to meet revised estimates of flood water levels in the event of a 1 in 10,000 year extreme rainfall.

Yes Brent Council , the Canal and Riverboat Trust who manage the reservoir , and the Environment Agency should review, publicly report and act on any short comings in their Flood prevention and Emergency planning provisions but in the meantime I hope this response lets anyone concerned sleep a little more easily in their bed!

Roger Wilson


UPDATE: McDelivery at Wembley Asda: residents need more information to respond to planning application


McDelivery is common in some other countries and now spreading here. A planning application has been submitted for alterations to the Wembley Asda store which suggests such a service will be opening there. Unfortunately there is very little information on the application to enable residents to make a comment.

This is what I have written to Brent Council's Head of Planning, Amar Dave.

Dear Mr Dave,

I have been approached by residents regarding the above application. The information on the Planning Portal is very sparse referring only to ‘installation of a new sliding window with overhead glass canopy and associated works’ LINK .


The application is from McDonalds and the drawing features McDeliveries - a motorcycle courier delivery service  that is often 24/7.

There is no information on changes in the current Asda restaurant but it appears the delivery service will be run from these premises. The collection window is labelled ’Non-public’ so this is presumably where couriers will collect food to be delivered.

Residents are concerned that if this is indeed a 24/7 service that they will be subject to a noise nuisance from the motorbikes/scooters. You will recall that the Council had to issue a noise-abatement order on Asda previously LINK   and there were regular complaints about noise from the delivery service.

In addition concerns were raised over road safety when a child was knocked down and killed on the crossing at the store entrance LINK.
Could you please point me to any additional information about this application including proposed hours of operation and noise and traffic impact assessments.

The dearth of information means that residents cannot make any meaningful comment on the proposals.
UPDATE This afternoon I received this prompt response from the North Area Development Management Team:
This application is currently under consideration by the Council, and the case officer is currently on annual leave, and will be back in the office on Monday. I am copying her into this email so she is aware of your correspondence, and logs it accordingly on the application file so that it is properly considered as part of her appraisal of the proposals.
The information on the public access system is all that has been submitted by the applicants for consideration – which constitutes a site location plan, elevations and an application form. However, I am aware that we have already sought additional information from the applicants with regard how the proposed alterations would be operated and what impact this would have on the overall operation of the superstore, and how this would impact the road and pedestrian access network (including pedestrian flow and disabled parking provision).
I can see the case officer  has made a note on the application file that an email was sent to the applicants on the 1st of August. I will put a note in my diary to speak with her upon her return from leave, and will ask her to update you directly at the start of next week
Earlier today Blog on the Block reponded via Twitter:



Saturday, 3 August 2019

Update on the Bobby Moore mural as fans pour into Wembley for the FA Community Shield


 Guest update post by Philip Grant
Because of the crowds coming to the F.A. Community Shield match at Wembley Stadium this week-end (Sunday 4th August), the barriers around the work being carried out in the Bobby Moore Bridge subway have been removed. It was possible to get a closer look at the work in progress, to cover up most of the tile murals with illuminated advertising panels.
First, the good news! For the first time since October 2013, residents and visitors can see the mural scene showing England footballers and the old “twin towers” Wembley Stadium, including the plaque unveiled by Bobby Moore’s widow, when the subway and murals were opened in September 1993.


This mural scene will continue to be on view in future. That was the only concession which Quintain were willing to make, in response to the call made jointly to them and Brent Council, by Wembley History Society in April 2018 LINK, to put ALL of the tile murals back on permanent public display.


The work on the west wall of the subway has already put a permanent covering over two thirds of the mural scenes, but two were visible on Saturday. The scene of a pianist accompanying a concert singer, had already been partly covered, so that it is difficult to identify who the female vocalist is (possibly Shirley Bassey or Whitney Houston?). If anyone knows the answer, or has another idea, please share it in a comment below!


At the south end of the subway’s west wall, the mural shows another scene from the Olympic torch relay, this time with the flame which burned at the Stadium throughout the 1948 Games. Together with the torchbearer and Olympic flag scene at the entrance to the subway, they were designed to welcome visitors to Olympic Way, the great “processional route” to the “Venue of Legends” that is Wembley. Both scenes will soon be covered over with illuminated advertising panels, perhaps never to be seen again.


As shown in the previous post (Wembley Park’s tile murals – now you see them – soon you won’t! LINK), the work to fix the illuminated panels was not meant to cause any damage to the tile murals. However, some of the electrical equipment already fixed over the 1948 Olympic show jumping mural scene appears to have damaged the tiles beneath. How much more of this heritage asset are we going to lose, before Quintain have finished their work on OUR Bobby Moore Bridge tile murals?
Philip Grant.

St Raphael's Edible Garden - the transformative power of community gardening revealed

The site May 2015
August 2015
Pride after planting seeds September 2015
Constructing the pond September 2015
It was lovely to visit the St Raphael's Edible Garden, one of Sufra NW London's amazing projects today. The garden not only provides vegetables and fruits for the food bank and Sufra's cooking activities, but is itself a therapeutic oasis for the local community.

I have included the images above  that I took on a visit early in the projectso you can judge what has been achieved in just four years by the workers, hundreds of volunteers and local community.  This is how the Edible Garden looked today - from a piece of derelict land to this!

The teaching tipi
Inside the polytunnel
Social Space The garden is open to the public Wednesday to Friday 10am to 4pm where you can go and relax and have a free cup of tea.

There is a Growing Club  taster-session every Wednesday from 10am-4pm where you can try your hand at a range of gardening activities.

Regular Gardening Volunteering takes place Monday to Friday with morning and afternoon sessions. Free but registration required,

Artisanal Workshops are held on the first Thursday of every month during term time and run from 4.30pm to 6.30pm - creative projects for all the family. Registration required,

Growing Academy - various dates. Accredited horticultural course that teaches young people about plants, soil, flowers, vegetables and growing. Free but registration required.

Corporate Volunteering and Team Building  Companies/organisations can come and volunteer for the day helping to maintain  the garden through DIY projects. Enquiry for details and fees.

More information on these activities:

admin@sufra-nwlondon.org.uk
020 3441 1335
160 Pitfield Way NW10 0PW


EDITOR'S NOTE: The St Raphael's Estate is due to be either refurbished or demolished and re-developed with some private housing. I hope Brent Council will recognise the need to preserve the Edible Garden whatever the eventual decision on the future of the estate.