Here is my first YouTube video, inspired by Connington Road and the overdevelopment of Lewisham town centre:
It was Max Calo's idea. He happened to have a camera with video.
Not bad for an impromptu first attempt, even though I say so myself.
Must send it to Sir Simon.
Brockley Nick
/ Website
(12.5.08 22:20)
What a ridiculous load of hyperbole. Yuppies? Do you mean young people with jobs who want their first home? Stalinist? Do you mean big (ie: dense, to provide lots of homes)? Residents in the tower blocks are up in arms about shadows and views being blocked - do you not see the irony in that complaint?
Pressure on public services is a legitimate concern, but why not address that question, rather than complaining about the creation of some new housing on previously poorly used land?
The housing is getting built, so why not tell us what you want to see in terms of public service provision.
Max
/ Website
(13.5.08 00:26)
Oh come on Nick, that stuff is ugly, go there and see by yourself. A word to the wise, bring a bucket.
Those blocks are there only for speculative reason, the vicinity of the station and DLR is not a reason strong enough to make the world awful by imposing ugliness on industrial scale.
Get one of those in Brockley if you like them, you'll have the tube soon, good transport links for people to go to work.
And by the way, one segment of housing market that's oversupplied is that, one and two bedrooms flats.
Max
/ Website
(13.5.08 00:58)
By the way, speaking of services that will suffer there's the very good example of the leisure centre that has been planned for Lewisham Centre, at planning stage all the usage derived from all of those large developments and the transport interchange was not accounted for, this means that those that will go and live in those flats 'by the pool' will use it heavily and it will be too crowded to accommodate all the community needs.
As the plan stands it is a lifestyle pool to help sell the flats of the developments but that will bar access to many.
You wrote about it, don't you remember, you thought that it was ok, but then you said that you had not read the papers really, but that still it was ok, although you didn't read the papers.
You also once wrote that you would have published an interview that you made with the head of planning about it, I never saw it though. What's happened to it? It's many months since you announced it.
And the transport, same stuff, thousands of additional flats and a road system that's not really up to it.
I think that this is another thing that you supported.
And the DLR, even those few additional carriages planned won't take all that people that is supposed to go to work in Canary Wharf although the DLR is always mentioned as the reason why those developments are built in the first place. There's no comparison of scale between the scale of those developments and the infrastructure.
It will have a detrimental effect on many aspects of life for many and this is much like stalinist planning.
And Andrew Milton worked hard on all of these issues and other important issues like health for example, and he writes about it here all the time.
Take the time to read before writing your controversial comments next time Nick.
My point was I want to hear from Councillors about the problems and solutions - not grandstanding. So what specifically are the problems it will cause? How many new school places are needed? How will the transport system cope (by the way, when you say "a few extra carriages" you mean the capacity of the DLR will increase by 50%)? What are Andrew's proposed solutions to these problems.
I support the changes to the road system because I believe people should come first, cars second in our cities. You'd support the changes too, if you weren't ideologically opposed to the large scale redevelopment of Lewisham.
Perhaps you could provide the link to the post where I said I hadn't read the documents.
It is my view that Lewisham centre is the right place for a swimming pool and that Ladywell is a poor facility. It is my view that too much of the criticism of the plans is based on xenophobic attitudes towards "newcomers" to borough - precsisely the sort of inverted snobbery that Andrew displays in his video, when he dismisses people moving in to those homes as yuppies. If he was dismissing newcomers as chavs, he would be condemned for using crude and offensive stereotyping.
On the matter of the interview re: the pool. I didn't say I had interviewed John Miller specifically about the pool. As part of the wider interview I asked him directly about your concerns that the pool will not have windows to the swimming area, because I agree with you that it would be rubbish if it didn't. He told me that the pool most certainly will have windows that allow natural light. We shall see!
I haven't yet written up that part of the interview, but hope to get rount to it. But just for you, there's your answer.
(13.5.08 17:52)
Brockley nick, as is ever evident on his 'blog' never stops to enquire into the developers information any further than looking at the pictures and saying 'great!' He can be safely ignored . . .
I simply asked for constructive political debate, not offensive, xenophobic stereotyping. If that's a controversial position on this blog then it's a pretty tragic state of affairs.
(14.5.08 14:34)
and as ever there's a troll called brockley nick who misses the point as well...
Andrew Milton
(14.5.08 18:44)
Nothing wrong with a bit of hyperbole, but this is all getting a bit out of hand. I'm coming from this from the point of view of a ward councillor looking after the interests of his constituents, the ordinary residents of the town centre. There are plenty of others powerful, rich and influential enough to look after the interests of the other stakeholders. From the point of view of residents, thethese developments will bring some benefits. But they will also bring significant problems. The construction of these grand projets will inevitably cause congestion and added pollution. And as they come on stream, the new residents will place demands on the local infrastructure, which is already creaking. Trains, buses and DLR are already full to capacity at peak hours. This is my personal experience and the anecdotal evidence of my constituency. And we have similar issues to those raised at the Brockley Local Assembly which I attended yesterday evening about under-provision of secondary education. Of course I have done a scientific study of the likely additional impact of the cumulative effect of every development in the town centre, or a projection of what the effect the transport policies of the new Mayor for London will have. I don't have the time, trying as I am to hold down a full-time job and acting as the only fully functioning councillor in the ward. But nobody else has made such a study either. The only way to find out what's going to happen in the future is to live as long as possible and see what happens. It's all a matter of unquantifiable risks. But from the point of view of residents, excessive over-development is a risk they don't need to take. It's all pain and no gain.
And if there are any yuppies out there who are genuinely offended by my characterisation then I sincerely apologise. Or at least with as much sincerity as Boris would manage in similar circumstances.
And it's not often I get accused of inverted snobbery and xenophobia. Usually, as a liberal, it's the opposite.
