Six council homes will be built on a “village green” in a Blackheath conservation area, despite objections from the local MP and residents who said it was a place where children could play safely.
Richmount Gardens was built as part of the Brooklands Park Estate in the 1950s. It features housing surrounding green space and a community hall which Greenwich Council spent at least £6,000 refurbishing in 2018 only for it to close the following year. The whole neighbourhood is part of the Blackheath Park conservation area.
The council plans to knock down the hall, which had housed a nursery before its closure, and an adjacent playground and build housing there. Open space would be cut by more than half, with the remaining green accommodating a replacement playground. The scheme is part of its Greenwich Builds programme to build 1,500 new homes.
The hall contains a mural by the artist and sculptor William Mitchell, which residents unsuccessfully tried to get listed and is to be relocated.
Residents were told they could use community facilities in Berkeley Homes’ Kidbrooke Village development a short distance away, but 95 of them submitted objections, along with Clive Efford, the Eltham MP.
The council claimed that the community hall was not viable because a community group which had looked after it had become defunct, forcing the town hall to take over, and since closure the hall had fallen into disrepair.
With Greenwich battling a 27,000-strong housing waiting list, it is resorting to building on green spaces and other vacant land in estates – known as “infill development” – to get the numbers of new homes up. Plans to build on garages in the street have already been approved with little opposition.
Efford did not attend the meeting on Tuesday, but Adam Scott, a former assistant minister at the nearby St Michael’s & All Angels church, told the committee he could remember horses that drew milk carts grazing on the green in the 1950s.
He said that the Brooklands Park Estate, together with the neighbouring private Blackheath Cator Estate, “were remarkable for the common green spaces and the trees and the council’s task is to preserve or to enhance conservation areas”.
“It’s a community around a village green. It’s all carefully oriented to give good sight lines for each home of the green,” he said, adding that architectural tours visited the street.
“It’s not going to be so easy for parents to be able just to see what’s going on in the green, because the bit of open green will be at the north end.”
Scott said that while he accepted the need for new homes, the loss of much of the green would be an “irredeemable sacrifice”.
Stephanie Cooke, who lives opposite the green, said: “The new community facilities in Kidbrooke [Village] are clearly aimed at the rapidly growing population there, and there’s been no attempt to include Brooklands residents.
“The council’s neglect left [the hall] open to vandalism and there’s a mess inside, but no danger or irreparable damage.”
Cooke said that a former council leader, Denise Hyland, had called the hall “a potentially valuable resource”, and a wheelchair ramp and replacement windows were installed, while the playground had also been upgraded in recent years.
Documents about the refurbishment have disappeared from the council website, but The Greenwich Wire has confirmed that Hyland approved a £6,000 grant for a wheelchair ramp in July 2017, less than 18 months before the centre closed.
Roxanne Mussa, who used to help run the community hall but gave up her role to concentrate on being a foster carer, said it had closed with “no consultation whatsoever” and recent attempts to reopen it had fallen on deaf ears.
Richard Parkin, the council’s senior assistant director of repairs and investment, denied the council had allowed the building to fall into disrepair. He said that only 16 per cent of residents responded to a questionnaire about the future of the hall, with nobody coming forward with a business plan and other organisations reluctant to take it on because of its secluded location.
“Sixteen per cent is quite high in my experience,” David Gardner, a Greenwich Peninsula councillor, said.
“Just to get it back to a usable state, you’d be looking at around £300,000,” Parkin added. “If you were to upgrade it to modern standards to use as a nursery or for children with special educational needs, you could be looking at anywhere up to £500,000.”
Andrew Fisher, representing Greenwich Builds, said: “Currently, we have 27,000 households on the housing waiting list. 5,500 of these households are in priority need. Of these households, 1,970 are in temporary accommodation and 260 households live in bed-and-breakfast hotels.
“The waiting time for three-bedroom houses is currently 52 months. This proposal delivers six of these much-needed homes. We would like to ensure that six families have the opportunity to live in these safe, warm and sustainable homes in the not-too-distant future.”
When it came to the vote, Conservative Pat Greenwell (Eltham Town & Avery Hill) and Labour’s Majella Anning (Creekside) voted against.
Anning said: “I had not realised the architectural heritage and significance of this site. It recalls the squares of Paris and Madrid where housing is designed to surround a square – in the UK that’s like a village green – which do build cohesive communities.
“It is a very marginal choice, but in this specific case, I will be voting against because as I said, this is clearly one of the jewels in the crown that Greenwich owns. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
But her Labour colleagues Clare Burke-McDonald (Charlton Hornfair), Gary Dillon (Charlton Village) and Gardner voted for the development. Gardner secured a condition that the development would be car-free and that residents must be consulted on the new home for the mural.
Dillon, the chair of planning, said that building on green space in estates meant the council did not have to consider taking over parks for new homes, and that the loss of the green was “a small sacrifice in the balance of things”.
“Because of the success of our existing council estates and our homes-for-life policy, we haven’t been able to increase the council’s housing stock as fast as we’d like to give other people the opportunity to get into social housing,” he said.
“It is a difficult choice, but it is a choice that we have to make because next year I’ll be looking at 28,000 people on the [waiting] list and maybe 400 people in hotel rooms. People are suffering because we are not able to provide them with a home.”
After the meeting, Howard Shields of the Blackheath Society, which also objected, said that it had supported “tackling this serious issue by building on brownfield land”.
But he added: “In this case we believe the benefit of six homes is far outweighed by the spoiling of a community and its green space in a conservation area, ignoring Greenwich’s own guidelines. It sets an extremely worrying precedent.”
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