£10 Million Greenwich Park restoration

£10 Million Greenwich Park restoration

by | Mar 16, 2021 | Greenwich Park

£10 Million Greenwich Park restoration. 

Greenwich Park is to be transformed with a £10 million overhaul partially help with £4.5 million national lottery funding.

The plans include the restoration of the landscape to its 17t century glory and the building of a new state of the art learning centre.

The four year planned project which was announced last year by the royal parks charity has had to be changed slightly due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the use of existing buildings repurposed for learning and building a smaller classroom than planned, using sustainable materials.

According to the charity, Greenwich council has 69 tall building projects in the pipeline around Greenwich so the park will be “an even crucial asset in the heart of the city” and the park will be future-proofed for generations to come.

One part of the plan is to give greater disability access to the park, although one part of the plan that I can see going against this plan is the reintroduction of its 17th century landscape with giant steps leading up to the observatory. Now tell me if I am wrong but giant steps and disability access usually are opposing ideas. I dare say on the 17th-century planning committee, disability access was not high on anyone’s agenda. I am sure there will be an alternative route for the less abled among us.

At the top end of the park on the Blackheath side, the underused contractor’s yard will be transformed into the new ‘Vanbrugh Yard’ with a cafe, community kitchen garden, wild orchard and volunteer mess room and also public toilets and changing facilities for disabled visitors.

Woolwich farmers market, or is it?

Woolwich farmers market, or is it?

by | Mar 16, 2021 | Community, Street Food

Woolwich farmers market, or is it?

Seeing a tweet from the local online beer merchants Plumsteadshire of what they were having on sale at the Woolwich farmers market I was intrigued. I have used them many times in the last three lockdowns and I was interested to see what they had on their stall at the RARE Woolwich farmers market and to also check out the actual market.

The Beer stall was great and had a small but varied selection of craft ales, stouts and lagers. I was served by a friendly and beer knowledgeable young lady and I will be back to the stall again when it next opens.

What I was a bit disappointed with though, was the actual farmers market. When you think of farmers market, or at least the ones I have been to, you think of organic fruit and vegetables, half-eaten by pests and insects and way overpriced produce, that your local supermarket would throw away as not being good enough to sell to the public. Yes, you’ve guessed it, I have not fully bought into the organic is better ideology yet. The only thing I want chemical-free is my beer.

The only fruit and vegetables being sold at the market was one seller trading from the back of a van rather than off of a stall. All the other stalls seemed to be food stalls selling various cooked cuisines from around the world as well as the obligatory cheese and chilli oil and artisan bakery stalls.

This is now a bi-monthly food festival rather than a farmers’ market. I’m not complaining by any means. I would rather taste homemade produce or foods from around the world produced from within the local minority communities than overpriced and bug-infested cabbages anytime.

A lot of the regular stallholders were not there, possibly due to the Covid restrictions, perhaps they did not think it worth opening their stalls.
I dare say that the market will get bigger and more varied as it used to be, once we get back to normal and hopefully the market will go back inside again.

(See the events calendar in the what’s on section for opening dates and times).

To cull, or not to cull.

To cull, or not to cull.

by | Mar 1, 2021 | Community

To cull, or not to cull.

The sight of parakeets flying around certain areas of London is becoming almost as common as seeing squirrels or foxes. In Greenwich, they are very common especially in the parks and along the railway track treetops.
The government has announced that they are looking to cull the wild parakeets as they are not native to the British isle and as such are decimating the natural ecosystem by dominating the smaller native birds.

I personally love seeing the brightly coloured parakeets flying about outside my window especially in the summer. They brighten up the place. I would like to see maybe a partial culling that would not destroy the whole parakeet population but maybe keep them to a level where they do not impact so much on the native smaller birds. I’m no expert, so this may not be feasible.

In a way, I can understand the governments position as these birds are native to mainly Australia, South America, and parts of South Asia and not the UK. During the last century, grey squirrels were introduced to the British isles from North America and this has had disastrous consequences for the native red squirrels, which were driven to almost extinction by the more aggressive grey squirrels.
Similarly, when the non-native rabbits were introduced to Australia they found that the rabbits bred like….well rabbits. This spelled disaster for the farmers crops which the rabbits feasted on like there was no tomorrow.
The Australian rabbit problem got so bad that the Australian army and prospecting bounty hunters were called in to try and eliminate the devastation they were causing. Although the problem is now contained the rabbits are still in abundance on the subcontinent of Australia, a testimony to the endurance of mother nature over man.

In the case of the British parakeet problem, the birds were not introduced on purpose but were caused by numerous escaped parakeets escaping from the confinement of cages to which parakeets are not meant to endure, so they will attempt to escape at any opportunity. These free wild birds then managed to congregate and breed.
I’m still amazed they manage to breed so fast and managed to adapt to our climate so easily but that is just what they have done.
Whether it is accidentally escaped birds or the intended introduction of a non-native species to a country to solve another problem, the final problem of non-native species destroying the ecosystem or the native species is always the fault of humans who do not think enough of the long term consequences of their actions.

All hail the British entrepreneur.

All hail the British entrepreneur.

by | Mar 1, 2021 | Business, Community

All hail the British entrepreneur.

At the corner of Greenwich High Road and Stockwell Street, just outside the Mitre pub sit three old red telephone boxes. To anyone idly passing by that is just what they are but upon closer inspection, you will realise that they are not telephone boxes at all.

These three red telephone boxes are part of a growing phenomenon that is spreading across the land whereby the telecoms equipment is removed, and the units are turned into small businesses. In the case of these three boxes, one is a locksmith key cutting service, one is a mobile phone repair business, and one is a coffee selling kiosk.
At the moment we are still under lockdown trading restrictions so the only business working there at the moment is the coffee selling kiosk.

I can only assume the rental on such a small plot of land must be minuscule and with just basic utilities such as electricity as overheads, this is what you call a win, win business scenario if you want to stay small and is the ideal start-up for the budding entrepreneur.

The advent of the ubiquitous mobile phone meant the demise of the old telephone boxes since almost everyone has a phone with them all the time so the need for the old telephone boxes is not needed anymore. A working telephone box actually being used as a telephone box is a rare sight to behold these days.

Will we ever learn?

Will we ever learn?

by | Feb 18, 2021 | Corona Virus, Lockdown

Do we ever learn from our mistakes?

Just over a hundred years ago, the world went through another pandemic, the ‘Spanish flu’ when between February 1918 and April 1920 about 500 million people were infected and between a conservative estimate 20 million up to 100 million people died and was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.
Just as in 1918 in the United States where the pandemic originated as patient zero was trace to a poultry farm worker in the US. The President at the time just like Trump did over 100 years later, played down the seriousness of the disease, and The Prime minister at the time just like Boris Johnson followed with the same rhetoric.

At the start of the Spanish flu, counties like Australia and New Zealand closed their borders and enforced a strict level of quarantining and so they got the infection under control and so got back to normality far quicker and with far fewer deaths than the rest of the world.
100 years later the same counties who in 1918 buried their heads in the sand and told their populations that the pandemic is a hoax or is nothing serious are the same counties who are still in denial about the present Covid-19 pandemic and are suffering a horrific level of death and suffering. Australia and New Zealand who once again took precaution immediately have relatively minor levels of death.
Nothing has been learned by Europe, and the US, or most of the South American countries. A thing to note is that most of the countries that are suffering due to denial of the seriousness of the pandemic are lead by right-wing populist leaders, like Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lopez Obrador in Mexico.
Like all populist leaders they come to power promising the earth, knowing full well they can’t deliver on their promises and just tell the crowds what they want to hear regardless of the facts. They are in reality only in it for power, prestige, and money. The trait of a genuine and true leader is what they do in a crisis, and boy is the pandemic a crisis.

Not one of these so-called populist leaders has acted like a true leader, and given priority to their nation’s health over the wealth of their nations. If they had all acted swiftly and with decisive authority right at the beginning and closed the borders and introduced strict quarantining and lockdown, instead of half-hearted token gestures and making dubious on the fly laws that they do not strictly enforce, we would not be in the complete mess we are still in at the moment.

Many people in Australia and New Zealand are perplexed at the British government is only now strictly enforcing quarantine restrictions and still not even partially closed the countries borders a whole year after this mess started. Did we not go through the fiasco that was Brexit to get back control of our borders (something we had all along in the first place) just so we can leave ours open for everyone to just wander in without any sort of testing and the French, an EU country, closed their borders just as they were always entitled to.

Thankfully, although the borders are still open for all, some countries have now been placed on a restrictive red entry list and anyone coming in from these countries must be proven to Covid-19 free and go into forced hotel quarantine for 14 days in an approved hotel at their own expense.
This new enforcement has I’m afraid, come far, far too late in the day. Kind of bolting the stable door after the horse has already bolted. None of this would be needed if we had done this in the beginning.