Greenwich councillors have been warned that they will be challenged at next year’s elections if they back plans to close Maryon Wilson Animal Park in Charlton.
A packed public meeting at St Thomas’ Church – just a few hundred metres from the park – heard locals vent their anger at the council’s proposal to shut the much-loved animal park as part of budget cuts.
The park, with deer, goats and sheep, has been a fixture of life in Charlton for nearly a century. A petition against the closure had reached 10,600 signatures by Monday night.
Charlton Village councillor Jo van den Broek, who attended the meeting along with Sandra Bauer, the new cabinet member for equality, culture and communities, felt the brunt of the audience’s anger after responding to residents’ complaints with emails defending the park’s closure.
The proposal aims to save £60,000 a year by 2028, although the high cost of rehousing 93 animals means that saving would be knocked down to £5,000 over four years – although the meeting heard that the closure could even end up costing the council money over that time. Next year’s council budget is £333 million.
One campaigner, Gary Dark, said the council’s business case had “more holes in it than the derelict toilet in the animal park”.
“In the recent general election, the MP for Eltham said that Labour had to restore faith in politics,” he said.
“If Labour don’t change their position, we will see you at the ballot box as a community in May 2026,” Dark said to cheers from the audience.
Turning to Van den Broek, sat at the front of the hall, he said: “Thirteen hundred votes sees you sitting at the back, and not at the front.”
Dark accused the local Labour party of putting one councillor “on the naughty step” for engaging with campaigners, accusing it of “using threats from Big Brother”. He also questioned why council staff would be asked seeking sponsorship for the Sparkle in the Park winter festival, but residents left to shoulder the burden of the animal park.
Greenwich Council has said that local people will be offered the chance to run the park themselves, but a similar plan in 2011 failed and the council took the park back five years later.
Carol Kendall of Charlton Park Riding for the Disabled, who was involved in the 2011 attempt to take on the park, said some individuals wanted the company to fail from the start, adding: “We were never allowed to make it work.”
“We weren’t offered a lease until we had money in the bank,” she said. “Big companies would not give us money in the bank until we had a lease, because they didn’t want to effectively write a cheque to the council.
“We set up a load of events and they were very, very popular. Matthew Pennycook [the Greenwich & Woolwich] MP came and asked, ‘How are you coping?’ We said, ‘We don’t know,’ and carried on.
“Another reason that we couldn’t run the company was that we were quoted anywhere between £30,000 and £460,000 a year to run the animal park.
“For four years, we were asking, ‘What is the breakdown of costs?’ And they couldn’t give us a breakdown.”
Kendall said she had seen an earlier council document that had claimed a saving of £95,000 for saving the animal park. “I contacted our councillors at the beginning of December and was told, first and foremost, that I shouldn’t have seen it,” she said.
Another speaker mocked Van den Broek as being “more Catholic than the Pope” in seeking to defend the closure in emails to residents.
The meeting was also addressed by Matt Hartley, the Conservative opposition leader, who said that he had written to Anthony Okereke, the council leader, to ask him to think again, or that he would put the matter to a separate vote at the council meeting next month that will decide on the cuts.
Van den Broek said she had suggested the possibility of the community running the park to try to avert closure, and that different figures for the closure had been circulating.
“I wasn’t so involved in Charlton at that time, so I don’t know how things went,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t good, but whatever it was, it would need to be learned from. Basically, I heard ‘the whole thing closes now’, and I stood up and said that wasn’t right.”
“This was me, personally, thinking you can’t have things being cut off, let’s see if there’s another way. But now things seem to be unclear.”
Van den Broek added: I want to go back to the cabinet and the leader and just say, does this one really make sense? I want to forward everything that I’ve heard from everybody.”
The council said last week: “Years of underfunding and budget cuts by the previous government have left us no choice but to take tough decisions to stay well managed and financially secure. We have a duty to people who rely on our services to review how and where we use our limited budget.”
Councillors on the overview and scrutiny panel will discuss the proposals on Thursday, while a final decision will be made by councillors next month.
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