Caring about Wandsworth's buildings, open spaces, rivers and transport.
This year’s party in St Anne’s Church Hall was as usual well attended, with musical entertainment from Chris Beaumont on the xylophone and Derek Carden on piano. Chris Beaumont keeps alive the music of Patrick Moore and recounted anecdotes about this fascinating man between numbers. As ever, excellent food and a glass of wine was included in the £15 ticket.
The council’s is calling for firm reassurances from the Mayor and TfL that they are serious about carrying out the long-awaited and much-needed redesign of the Wandsworth one-way system.
The current scheme – which would remove all through traffic from Wandsworth High Street, significantly improving the town centre’s main shopping areas for pedestrians and cyclists – was first unveiled about a decade ago.
Removing through traffic from the one-way system has been a long term strategic aim of the council, but the works can only be approved and carried out by TfL. The council has set aside more than £27milllion to help fund the scheme.
Work was originally scheduled to commence in 2017 but TfL recently confirmed that this would not now happen until 2021 at the earliest.
On Thursday 8 November Carol Rahn gave a fascinating presentation at the November meeting on an oral history project assembling the memories of local people who were living in Battersea during World War II. Their recollections of their childhood, their experiences of air raid shelters, brushes with death and evacuation made fascinating listening. The talk was accompanied by footage of the interviews which brought home the realities of a life far distant from that of children today.
40 members enjoyed a visit to The Ram Quarter on 21 October for a talk by Chantel Palmer and John Hatch. John is the master Brewer in residence on the site, ensuring that brewing continues in the old stable building while the new brewing suite is completed.
On Thursday 11 October a joint meeting was held with the Putney Society, and organised by the Wandsworth Historical Society, when Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch spoke to a packed audience of 250 people about local boy Thomas Cromwell.
