Following the closure of the east bound platform at West Ealing due to safety fears over nearby demolition, Ealing Council has stopped all work on the site of the tower block next to the station. It seems no construction management plans have been submitted to the Council by the developers, Southern Grove. These plans were one of the documents required by the Council before any work commenced.
No trains stopping at West Ealing station over safety concerns from nearby demolition
No trains are stopping at West Ealing for the time being due to safety concerns about the demolition work taking place in preparation for Southern Grove’s 20 plus storey tower block next to the station.
I don’t remember hearing any mention of this level of disruption in any documents about Southern Grove’s plans. There’s also been no information about this station closure given to residents and it’s not clear how long this disruption will last.
More detail now from campaigning group Stop The Towers:
| NO TRAINS TO PADDINGTON FROM WEST EALING STATION Just 8 days into work on the controversial Manor Road tower and poor site management has already stopped London-bound train services. Eastbound services for thousands of commuters from West Ealing’s new station were today suspended, with staff unable to foresee when the platform could operate safely. This is due to the risk of a retaining wall collapse. Falling debris from the small buildings currently being demolished on Manor Road has also fallen onto the pavement beyond the blue hoarding. Network Rail engineers on site could not believe that a towering 22 storey building of largely one bed apartments is set to be built next to the station platform. One commuter who was turned away stated “It’s ok for me, I can walk to Ealing Broadway. But for many less able, that’s just not possible. It shows complete disregard for residents.” In an official statement Balfour Beatty stated the suspension of services was due to “An unsafe structure”. An unnamed engineer attending the site stated he was amazed the 22 storey tower got planning permission, adding “it’s a potentially horrendous situation we have to deal with”. Unbelievably, there is no evidence that the statutory requirement for a Demolition Plan and/or a Construction Management Plan has yet been complied with by developer Southern Grove or their partners, Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing. Ealing Council has either not asked for it, or not yet validated it, again displaying a lack of care when dealing with developers. When the developer was contacted by Stop the Towers they tweeted “it is called regeneration and progress”. The full tweet (below) has since been deleted. |
| ‘Thanks for the mention it is called regeneration and progress’ |
| Justine,
Co-Chair of Stop The Towers said “From day one we said building a 22
storey tower so close to the railway and station was dangerous. The
arrogance of the developers is breathtaking. But blame must lie firmly
with Ealing Council who has spent the last 10 years flogging off every
spare inch of land for greedy developers to build unneeded tower blocks
of luxury flats and encouraging them to build higher. This is precisely
why STT exists. The sheer arrogance and the greed of developers, the
recklessness of the planning application and the lack of care from those
on the planning committee who supported it – it is appalling. We’ve
always known the site was unsuitable and now we’re in one of those ‘told
you so’ moments.” James Murray MP wrote on Facebook: As many people living near West Ealing will know, the eastbound platform at the station was closed this morning. This was the result of an “unsafe structure” at the station – caused, almost certainly, by the building works for the Manor Road tower. After seeing the closure this morning, I spoke to TfL who confirmed this was the result of a potentially dangerous situation with the retaining wall. TfL said that after they were alerted last night, an inspector visited the site and decided that no trains would stop at West Ealing on the Paddington-bound line. I urged TfL to make sure the station can reopen safely as soon as possible. Once it is safe, I said they must then find out how this happened. If, as seems all but certain, this is the result of building works for the Manor Road tower, I said to TfL I want to see them take action against the developer. We must make sure the developer does not get away with causing this disruption and potential danger without penalty – and most importantly we need TfL to push them to make sure this does not happen again. No trains from West Ealing to Paddington until the weekend according to James Murray / Network Rail Stop The Towers want to know why there is no demolition nor construction plan logged on the Council Planning Portal and why was there not an adequate risk assessment done that took account of this potential hazard. Fighting for the rights of residents, your Stop The Towers team. Stop The Towers www.stopthetowers.org |
Changes to ‘stop and shop’ parking charges
The Council is introducing a new system for extending stays at its ‘stop and shop’ parking bays. The cost of extending your stay beyond the 30 minutes or 1 hour will depend upon the emissions band of your car. The new charges will be operated through the PayByPhone system/app. The full notice of this change gives more detail.
A new arts centre coming to West Ealing in March
Almost 10 years since WEN helped set up OPEN Ealing arts centre in the then empty A2Dominion offices on the Uxbridge Road, we are delighted to hear that a new arts centre with low cost studios to rent is about to open in West Ealing.
SET Ealing will be taking over the old Catalyst Housing building on the Uxbridge Road and on the west side of St James Avenue. Here is their press release:
‘A new Arts Centre spanning 25,000 sq ft of former office and retail space is set to open in Ealing on the 17th of March 2022.
SET Centre CIO (registered charity no. 1170903) is dedicated to supporting and nurturing London’s artist communities. Access to genuinely affordable workspace for artists is crucial, particularly in the post-pandemic climate when the creative economy has been badly affected and those in precarious work have experienced limited support and job losses. This project aims to support the next generation of artists to continue their practice and to
flourish, with the additional benefit of helping to bolster the creative economy and maintain London’s reputation as a cultural capital.
SET Ealing artists’ workspaces will be some of the most affordable in London, priced at £1.10 per sq ft (psf) all-inclusive (utilities, rates, internet etc.). The centre will host around 150 artists working in variety of disciplines and mediums. Studios will range from 200 sq ft spaces
for £220 per month to 800 sq ft spaces for £880 pcm. We will also provide smaller units of 100 sq ft for £150 pcm.
SET Ealing will house a public arts and educational programme – including our Members’ Programme which features works by SET studio artists from the Ealing centre and our other SET centres.
SET Ealing will also be home to a SET Collective-Residency – a free studio prize for a collective or group with a publicly-engaged practice. The residency winners will be granted the use of 4 rooms totalling 1700 sq ft, located in the glass-fronted former Western Union on West Ealing Broadway high street. The deadline to apply is Monday the 24th of March with the winners announced on Monday the 7th of April.
We are also looking to hire a new part time (3 days a week) Assistant Studios Manager who will oversee SET Ealing.
Studio viewings will take place every second Thursday from the 17th of March from 4pm – 7.30pm. You can book a viewing via the link below.
For more information, to register interest or submit to the SET Collective-Residency prize, go to www.setspace.uk/ealing. Please contact us with any further questions via email at: ealing@setspace.uk
About SET
Founded in 2016, SET is a multifaceted arts and community organisation and registered charity based in numerous centres across London. SET curates an eclectic and experimental arts and educational programme and provides genuinely affordable workspaces for artists.
SET currently has six centres across London and is home to over 700 artists, with an artist membership of over 1000. SET hosts artists working across a variety of practices from text, performance and installation to music, sound, print, textiles and more.
SET Projects & our Members Programme include performances, exhibitions, live music, talks, workshops and screenings, and seek to provide a platform for new and collaborative projects. With an inclusive ethos always, SET is a community which aims to bridge gaps between disciplines and demographics, creating a platform for collaboration and
multidisciplinary experimentation.
SET provides both long-term and temporary centres. They are predominantly hosted in otherwise vacant property, functioning as a charitable meanwhile-use scheme. At these sites, SET brings disused space back into positive use in the interim period.’
SET is supported through the Mayor of London’s Culture at Risk Business Support Fund.
London Mayor green lights ‘monstrosity’ office block on Uxbridge Road
Plans for an 11 and 13 storey office block dubbed the ‘monstrosity’ by some local residents has been approved by the Mayor of London. The new buildings will replace CP House on the Uxbridge Road. CP House has been a Covid-19 vaccination centre for the much of the pandemic.
Photo copyright Ealing Council
More about this story here
Would like Northfields to become a new Conservation Area? Give your views to the council
Some local residents have put forward a proposal for Northfields to become a new Conservation Area.
The reasoning behind the proposal is that:
- Northfields is historically important. It embodies the evolution of Ealing – from its early rural past to its rapid transition in the later 19th/early 20th centuries into a thriving London suburb.
- Northfields has retained much of its character, with tree-lined streets, largely intact front gardens, and houses and shops with a wide variety of interesting architectural features.
- However, Northfields is under threat from excessive and unsympathetic development as shown the by the success of recent planning applications, e.g. for Orion Park.
- Conservation Area status would help to preserve Northfields’ human scale and make it more difficult for developers to destroy its special character.
The Council is now consulting on the proposal. Their consultation document includes a number of questions. The most important ones are whether people favour the creation of a Northfields CA, and, if so, where the boundary should be drawn.
The proposers are trying to get as many people as possible to take part, so please do take a few minutes to give your views.
The Council has asked that responses to the consultation should be via email to localplan@ealing.gov.uk. As an alternative, they ha ve provided a postal address as follows:
Strategic Planning Economic Growth Division Place Directorate 4th Floor Perceval House14-16 Uxbridge RoadEaling W5 2HL
The consultation closes on Friday, March 18.
Free half-term fruit tree planting event in Dean Gardens Tuesday 15th Feb 11am
Petition launched to save Gurnell Leisure Centre
West Ealing Neighbours received this email from the Save Gurnell group with details of a petition it has launched to save Gurnell Leisure Centre. This follows the Council’s failed attempt to redevelop this site. See here for the background story.
The
Gurnell Leisure Centre has now been closed since March 2020 – that’s
nearly two years without our much loved and much needed facility. To
raise awareness of this issue, the Save Gurnell campaign team have
started a petition to the Mayor of London seeking his assistance. Click here to sign the petition.
Gyms
and leisure centres play a key role in helping people to be active and
they will be crucial in our nation’s recovery from coronavirus, in
addition to providing wider health, wellbeing, and community benefits.
The current position is totally unacceptable.
Since
the planning application was refused in March 2021, there has been a
distinct lack of communication from the new leadership team at Ealing
Council. That’s why we have started a petition to the Mayor of London,
asking him to step in and assist as he has with the National Sports
Centre at Crystal Palace.We
would appreciate it if you could forward this update and petition
to your members. Please don’t let Gurnell go the same way as Ealing
Cinema.
Too little too late? Council puts forward its views on tall buildings
The increasing number of tall buildings across the borough is proving highly controversial. Do tall buildings maximise the use of a very limited resource – land? Or are they repeating the planning failures of the 1960s and letting future generations pick up the bill to put right today’s mistakes?
As part of draawing up its new local plan, Ealing Council has published a position statement on tall buildings. It has also released a video about its tall building policy.
The Ealing Today website has a detailed article about this with comments from Stop The Towers and others.
There is also a new Council survey asking for your views about how you feel about your local area.
Manor Road tall tower – did the Council withhold crucial information?
West Ealing Neighbours fully supported the efforts of the Stop The Towers campaign to halt the proposed Manor Road tall tower next to West Ealing station. In October 2020 the Council’s planning committee rejected the proposal but the developer took it to appeal and in October 2021 it won. Most of the area of the site is now fenced off though the computer repair shop seems to be holding out.
One of the key factors in the developer winning its appeal was the Council’s failure to provide proof it was meeting its annual housing target and had an adequate pipeline of housing supply for future. The developer’s legal team made much of this lack of information. Yet, just a few months later the Council was able to supply these figures having been made to by the Local Authority Ombudsman. Why did it take a referral to the Ombudsman to force the Council to fulfil its statutory duty? Have a read of the response from Stop The Towers below and make up your own mind:
‘Was information withheld from the inquiry?
With
work about to begin on the controversial Manor Road tower, Stop The
Towers (STT) has discovered that key evidence supporting our case, which
Ealing Council said didn’t exist, is in fact available, but
inexplicably wasn’t presented at the inquiry.
At the inquiry an
important issue was Ealing’s housing supply figures; not just evidence
of what had been built in the past five years but also anticipated five
year land supply figures. If Ealing Council had met its annual housing
targets and could prove that there was adequate supply in the pipeline,
then there was little justification for the Manor Road tower. But if
Ealing Council couldn’t show it had met its target, there’d be a
presumption in favour of development(known as the ’tilted balance’) so
planning permission would be granted – a point seized on by the
developers and their lawyers.
Prior to the Manor Road planning
inquiry, STT repeatedly requested these figures from Ealing Council’s
leadership / head of ‘Good Growth’. The Council should have already
published them in an Annual or, recently renamed, Authority Monitoring
Report (AMR) which all authorities have to produce. But unbelievably
Ealing Council have failed to publish any AMRs since 2014 and despite
STTs attempts to obtain information, Ealing Council repeatedly claimed
the figures didn’t exist. In fact conversations were had with senior
Cabinet personnel who implied that were STT to force the issue, then any
figures may show that the Council couldn’t meet their targets
(currently 2,157 units per annum).
Local residents group, Ealing
Matters reported Ealing Council to the Local Authority Ombudsman who
ruled that Ealing Council had failed to fulfil their statutory duties
and that these figures MUST be produced IN FULL by December 2021. In
response, the council published an ‘Interim Authority Monitoring Report’
covering the five year period 2014/15 – 2018/19.
Shockingly this interim report proves that Ealing Council met its housing delivery test results for 2018-2020 with up to 135% over delivery
*. Not only have they consistently exceeded targets (which isn’t
surprising given how many cranes that are visible in the skyline over
the last few years), but over 11,000 new units have been given Planning
permission that are yet to be built. So even without the 2021 planning
approvals or any new pre-application discussions, this should meet the
five year land supply figures.
Why were the figures withheld, and what does this mean?
Ealing
council had a statutory obligation to correctly record these figures,
which it failed to do. It also had a moral obligation to disclose them
to the inquiry, again which it didn’t do. Was this incompetence, or a
deliberate ploy?
Whilst not a silver bullet, had our barristers
had these figures it would have greatly improved our chances of
succeeding at the inquiry. But as a result we lost, and Ealing council
has to pay the developers huge legal bill, possibiy circa £250,000**.
So not only has this incompetence caused the Manor tower to be
approved/built, it’s also cost taxpayers wasted legal fees.
Whilst
the failure to record the AMRs was during Julian Bell’s time as leader,
the person at the helm of housing from 2018-2020 was none other than
Peter Mason, now council leader. He has been in overall charge of the
Council since May 2021. He and Cllr Shital Manro (Cabinet lead for ‘Good
Growth’) refuse to explain the reasons behind these failures. The
Interim AMR still lacks figures relating to a five year land supply and
the full report has not been published in time to meet the Ombudsman’s
ruling.
Such incompetence needs to be called out.
WHY DID EALING COUNCIL LEADERSHIP NOT DEMONSTRATE A FIVE YEAR SUPPLY?
WHAT IS THE COUNCIL LEADERSHIP’s EXCUSE FOR FAILING TO DEFEND THEIR OWN PLANNING COMMITTEE DECISION IN AN ADEQUATE FASHION?
WHY HAVE THESE DECISIONS NOT TO PUBLISH BEEN ALLOWED TO COST EALING COUNCIL TAX PAYERS AN UNNECESSARY HUGE LEGAL BILL?
Questions we will ask the council leadership. If we get answers, we’ll let you know.
Thanks again for your help and support.
Best regards
Stop The Towers’
www.stopthetowers.org
To donate click here
For posters click here
* Figures taken from Housing Delivery Tests published within LBE Interim Authority Monitoring Report Click here
** A Freedom of Information request has been made to Ealing Council asking them to reveal the amount awarded to cover the developers costs in full.