Working together to make West Ealing a better place for residents, businesses and visitors.
The residents of St James Avenue spent the past few days working on a plan to light up their street and the result lifts the spirits. My photo doesn’t do it jusitice.
Turn the corner from St James Ave to St Kilda Ave and you get an added bonus of a blaze of Christmas lights decorating the whole front of a house.
Well done to everyone involved in showing what working together can achieve for your neighbourhood.
Eric Leach’s Covid-19 newsletter lists some of our local pubs which will re-open and serve meals as from 2nd December:
Included in this list are:
‘Drayton Court’, West Ealing
‘Duke of Kent’, West Ealing
‘The Grange’, W5
‘The Grosvenor’, W7
‘The New Inn’, W5
‘The Plough’, W5
The Council has approved plans for a 10-storey block of flats at 72-76 Broadway on the site of Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse and Shoe Zone.
This stretch of shops was part of the site of the FH Rowse department store that was demolished in the 1980s. Not quite 40 years later and it’s to be demolished again. Not dissimilar to the Green Man Lane Estate that was built in the 1970s and now mostly demolished as the new estate edges toward completion.
The Low Traffic Neighbourhoods have mostly been in place for a couple of months. Are we starting to get used to them and maybe just changing our minds? WEN would like to find out your views as we near the halfway point in this six month trial.
Our second of three polls is here and we would be very grateful if you could spare a couple of minutes to complete it. The poll will stay open until Wednesday 9th December. We will use the results from the three polls as part of our submission to the Council.
Eric Leach’s most recent Covid-19 newsletter has this story:
‘Agreement is needed this week for TfL to secure £80 million from the Government to ‘keep the Crossrail project on track’. If this money is not forthcoming from the Government, TfL says the whole Crossrail project could be mothballed. The Government says it’s keen to see the Crossrail project completed – but TfL must fund its completion. The uncompleted Ealing Crossrail stations are Acton Mainline, Ealing Broadway, Southall and West Ealing.’
Originally due to open in December 2018, the date now for its opening looks more like 2022 if the additional funding can be found. But, as this project has been plagued by delays and funding problems don’t bank on it. Even so, assuming it does finally open it will be quite some feat of engineering and certainly benefit West Ealing residents who travel in to central and east London regularly.
PS. there’s a useful article on Crossrail and its delays in New Civil Engineer.
This is an extract from Eric Leach’s regular Covid-19 newsletter:
‘In the period 17 October to 23 October 2020 the Covid-19 infection rate per 100,000 people in Ealing was 220.3. Although the highest in London this figure must be put into a national perspective. The highest rates of infection are: Blackburn with Darwen, 785.6, Rossendale, 675.7 and Oldham, 625.4. At the lowest infection rates are the Isle of Wight, Cornwall and Somerset all with under 50 cases/100,000 people.
However the rates in specific neighbourhoods in Ealing show a wide variation. Here is just a sample of what I dug out of the Government’s data mine:
Southall West: 340
Northolt East: 313
Norwood Green: 286.3
Southall Park: 244.1
Ealing Broadway: 225.1
Acton Central: 181.9
Elthorne Park: 155.4
Cuckoo Park, Hanwell: 151.2
West Ealing: 132.3′
More at the government’s website
A few weeks ago we reported that a group of residents were asking the High Court for a judicial review of Ealing Council’s decision to introduce Low Traffic Neighbourhoods across the borough. One of the prime arguments being a lack of consultation with residents. Yesterday (28th October), the judge listened to the arguments from both sides and said there is a case to be heard.
Tonight’s Council meeting narrowly voted against the plans for a tall tower in Manor Road next to West Ealing station. Whether or not this is the end of this story is another matter.
Here’s a link to our original story about this application. The 25-storey tower was reduced in height when the plans were actually submitted.
We will add more to this story tomorrow:
To add a bit more information. There were over 2,400 objections to this application received by the Council including one from West Ealing Neighbours. As mentioned above, the original application was amended to reduce the height of the main tower from 25 storeys to 20 although the other tower was raised so the total number of homes remained at 144.
The Council meeting last two and a half hours and at the end the voting was four in favour, six against and two abstentions. The chair Cllr Monro said he would have voted in favour had he needed to vote. So, it was a pretty close vote given two councillors abstained.
WEN very much hopes that if the developers, Southern Grove and its partner Thames Valley Metropolitan Housing, want to continue with plans for this site that they will now actually talk to local residents’ groups about what is in keeping with the area. There is widespread recognition that this area could benefit from sympathetic development and that this can be achieved by taking the time and effort to work with local groups and not against them.
It’s lain empty for a while but the scaffolding is now up on the old NatWest bank at the Lido Junction. The site will have 9 new flats and keep a retail unit on the ground floor.
Change of date:
If you’ve walked through Dean Gardens in the past few months you’ll have seen that it needs some brightening up. There’s a community bulb planting event on Saturday 14th November from 10am – 12 noon. Anyone can volunteer to go along and help plant bulbs to bring some much needed colour and cheer back to Dean Gardens come next spring.
You can find out more on the special Facebook page.