AGM Update – a year later
Given it is AGM time (see our earlier post entitled ‘A date for your diary’) we thought we’d bring you an update from the project that we heard about at last year’s AGM.
In 2024 Abi Woodman, of East London Waterworks Park – www.elwp.org.uk, told us about the initiative:
East London Waterworks Park is a charity campaigning to buy the 14-acre Thames Water depot on Lea Bridge Road and turn it into a community-owned, biodiverse park with wild swimming ponds and community spaces. We are bringing the East London community together to learn how to live in harmony with nature.
A year later, Abi has provided us with the following update on where matters stand currently:
“The site of the future East London Waterworks Park is currently owned by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and managed by LocatED, the Department for Education’s arms-length property company. Following the announcement in January 2024 that the Department for Education had identified an educational use for the site and that the London Innovation and Improvement Alliance (LIIA) planned to build a secure children’s home on the site, East London Waterworks Park continued to focus on working to buy the land, open it up to public access and return it to nature. We did this by developing a campaign to oppose the planned development of the site, which is Metropolitan Open Land and should be protected from development except in very special circumstances.
We were working under the impression that the planning application for the secure children’s home would be submitted to Waltham Forest Council in summer 2024. However, we were notified in late August 2024 that it was being delayed and we have yet to hear that the planning process has restarted.
We continue to lobby local, regional and national government to support the project, and ensure we are ready to respond to the planning application if and when it is submitted. We also continue to co-design the park through extensive listening and collaborative design workshops, exploring how we will return the site to nature and promote biodiversity and prudent use of natural resources, and how we will ensure the park is fully accessible and welcoming to the whole community. We are also in the early stages of developing a public programme to share our learnings more widely, and we hope to work with local government to realise this programme.”
