A PUBLIC meeting will take place to discuss the formation of a new Friends group for St Alfege Park.
The council is holding the meeting, which will be independently chaired, at West Greenwich Library next Tuesday night and is encouraging local people who want to help with the park to get involved.
Greenwich Council refused to work with the previous group after the controversial smashing of headstones in the former churchyard.
In December the previous Friends group was still hopeful that it would be reprieved and voted to go into “hibernation” rather than formally disband. Those hopes now seem to have been dashed as the council looks to create a brand new group.
Doors open at 6.30 and the meeting will commence at 7pm on Tuesday March 13th.
Rob –
some confusion here – is the meeting on Tuesday or Wednesday please?
Thanks jack – just fixed. It’s Tuesday.
Shit, I’m working – I suppose the short notice is part of the damage limitation plan on the part of the Council. It takes them 3 months to organise a meeting and then give a bare week’s notice…..
Ne’er a truer word spoken, Jack, ne’er a true word spoken…
The council had the option of finding out and revealing who really broke up the gravestones, making sure in one way or another that the Friends did not repeat their folly and contribute to any more disasters, and letting some dedicated people get on with supporting the park to enhance the lives of local people and wildlife. The Friends committee voted in a new management structure to ensure that nothing like this could ever happen again, which the council asked to see but in the end ignored. Instead, they blamed everything on us and sacrificed us all to cover their own backs. I imagined that in joining the Friends I was acting as an autonomous citizen, but with hindsight I feel that I was merely a tool of the council.
“The council had the option of finding out and revealing who really broke up the gravestones”
Indeed Suzanne, and it is a public disgrace that we still don’t know exactly what happened and when. In the absence of the facts, no lessons can be learned, and there is nothing to stop something similar happening again. It is astonishing that public servants feel that they can get away with behaving like this.
I’m just thinking out loud here but it might be that the new Friends of the park may decide that establishing, and publishing, the facts surrounding the previous incident and working out how best to use the remains of the headstones is a useful first task.
Rob –
I think that you’re right, but how are the new Friends to publish the facts if the Council won’t give them the facts to publish? The very sparse information that we do have to date had to be prised out of them, by yourself, via the Freedom of Information Act.
At the meeting, anyone from the former Friends group who wishes to continue working with the new group should demand that the full facts, which I am confident that the Council has, be published, as a condition of joining up. Without the former rank and file Friends, who know no more of the facts than anyone else, and who have been scapegoated (not talking about Mr Delap here, who is culpable), the new group has little chance of success, or even being quorate to start with.
This is a key point. Are the members of the old Friends group going to be allowed to join the new Friends group? If not – then who the hell else else do the Council think is going to join?
The old Friends group was made up of the local people – like Suzanne – who care enough about the park to actually get out there, clean it up, and try to make it a better public space.
It is these same people who would be needed to have a meaningful and active new Friends group.
That of course begs the question of why on earth the Council won’t just let the old Friends group continue, albeit with better safeguards in place.
The more I consider this issue, the more convinced I have become that it was the London Probationary Trust who are responsible for the damage to the gravestones. I strongly suspect that the Council is stonewalling because they bear ultimate legal liability as owners of the park and could be prosecuted for criminal negligence. By leaving the issue in a fog of confusion and rumour, they think they can duck this legal liability.
Rob – how about sending some more FOI requests to LPT and RGB on this?
Franklin
May I return the compliment and say, “never a truer word spoken” to what you have written above – 100% agree with everything that you have written. Regarding your penultimate paragraph, and the cover-up, I have a feeling that there could well be a specific person, or small group of persons, who are fairly directly responsible, and that the Council has closed ranks to protect one of their own in a shameful breach of democratic responsibility.