The other day we decided, for no good reason, to take a walk around what used to be the West Park Asylum, now the property of Crest Nicholson, Linden Homes and possibly others. Generally speaking, the developers look to have made good use of the usable asylum buildings which look pretty well in their new clothes.
Started off by Hollywood Lodge, once Horton Lodge, built around 1750 and now derelict (see http://derelictmisc.org.uk/ for more details. An unusual and interesting site both for its content and in that it appears to be an entirely private effort, not for commerce or gain at all. The work of one D. A. Gregory). The story is that the lodge and its land were sold off by the council or by the NHS to an East End restauranteur for a nominal £1, but there must be more to it than that. In any event, the place caught fire, is now derelict and what used to be its paddock or some such is now the rather tatty home to some horses, presumably the property of some travelers. See the lime green area marked A on the illustration, which you may need to click on to enlarge. The slightly less tatty blue area marked B is also home to some horses but a sign suggests that it is the property of Crest Nicholson, presumably anxious to do something about it as it can't being doing much for the prices of few houses left to sell. I stand by my comments on the subject of camp sites for travelers on 23rd February, but may be part of any deal ought to be their sorting these two fields out: the travelers can have their horses there but they have to do it in a regular and decent way, doing something, for example, about the derelict featherboard fencing someone saw fit to erect, goodness knows why.
I note in passing that there must be the right sort of number of horses in area B as it is neither churned up nor grazed bare, something a lot of much posher horsey people do not always manage. There are also huge numbers of buttercups in attractive flower, which made me wonder whether horses don't like their taste.
We moved onto to a half completed batch of rather pretentious and no doubt expensive semi-detached houses, complete with mock stone surrounds to doors and windows. At least I think it is mock stone: some sort of fine grained, dull yellow material, with shapes which look moulded rather than carved to me.
The next thing to strike one was the half-hearted way that the extensive and potentially handsome public green areas had been tidied up.The developers no doubt sold the development to the council and is selling the houses to the punters on the basis of the beautiful park land setting - but having now sold most of the houses are not too keen on stumping up the necessary to make the park beautiful. Straight off the bottom line you know. So while the houses might look pretentious, the public green areas do not. A particularly irritating example was the short avenue planted in front of a handsome bit of restored & pilastered portico: the young trees were probably planted early last year and then nobody - the developers, the council or the occupiers of the new houses round about - thought to water them properly during the hot summer, with the result that some of them now look rather sad, despite the wet spring. About on a par with the tree planting effort at our shiny new & redeveloped railway station. Things had looked much more hopeful when I visited on 7th December last year and when one would not have expected to see any leaves.
BH tells me of a story from a borough councillor about their depressing wars of attrition with the developers of these brownfield sites, who promise all kinds of stuff, then fail to deliver. The council pegs away at it and the developer stalls, hoping that the council will just get tired and give up.
And then we came to the water tower, about where the red circle marked C is. A tall and imposing edifice. What are they going to with it? Will they shove a lift up it and make it into luxury flats? Will they not shove a lift up it and make it into affordable flats? What about a multi-storey bunk house for care workers from foreign parts? There were a couple of chaps with a van busily taking pictures with fancy looking cameras, so I asked them to find out that some peregrine falcons have taken up residence on the edge of the roof. I even got to see one - the first time I have knowingly seen such a thing; a tweet or what. Which presumably means that all bets are off: even the mighty developers will stand no chance against the RSPB. They can really put some tanks on the lawn. I wondered whether I ought to put my oar in by suggesting to the Residents' Association that there be a proper exclusion zone around the water tower, for the greater comfort and safety of the peregrines. Any houses that might have to be bought up for the purpose could be left derelict to the bats, which could then provide supper-time snacks for the falcons.
I close by remarking that what used to be my allotment is the purple circle marked D, lower far right.
PS: if you want to do Gmaps for yourself, use the reference visible in the search bar at the top of the illustration, the bit that follows the '@'.
No comments:
Post a Comment