destruction!!

200511

November Destruction !!

The area has always been in a difficult place. In the course of the years, fires, some quite large, were often set off by burned cars (quite common for a while) and flytips set ablaze. many people, even close residents, had expressed fears that the area could be used by antisocial elements.

As a matter of record, for the over 20 years I have been living on the estate and closed to the area, I never noticed it to be a place more proclive to crime than any other part of this God forgotten estate or for that matter of any other nearby.

Certainly I never found much evidence of drug taking or prostitution being prevalent there and with the exception of periodic joy-riding in Albridge Street, nothing exceptional has ever happen there.

The police may differs because they have always and so far unsuccessfully dragnetted the site every so many bust-cycles (for the reader unaccustomed to our place of abode, here the police used to raid household -bust in the local cant- very often indeed).

But the fear of the wild nature is maybe something intrinsic in people living in a concrete jungle. Rumours of every kind about the place persisted for long time (my favourite was that of murdered people being buried in it ;-).

It should than not have been a surprise that the local the police was to give it some credence. So that thanks to them he closest the Wildlife Area has come to serious harm was after some many years of fire this very year, when things are at last toning down.

Not from destruction bent criminals but from Law and Order representatives.

The East Walworth Safer Neighbourhood, a consultative group made up of police, local authority and residents representatives under the direction of the Sergeant in charge of the local police team (actually a decent copper by any other means and well liked in the community) thought that something should have been done to curb what they must have thought of was a (open sky) den of iniquity.

As it happened I was one of the locals representatives at some of the meetings and I naturally spoke against any plan to disturb the area but they managed non the less to use the service of young convicts sentenced to do "community work" to organise a “pruning” of the overgrown vegetation, preposterously to prevent villains from hiding “amongst the bushes in the waste ground”.

Everything was organised in a hurry and I underestimated the scope and determination of the people pushing for the initiative.

At the end after it was clear that they intended to flatten the area it was only the courage of local residents, in particular Elizabeth from the bordering Barham House, that literally stood firm in front of the saws.

When I arrived we manage to defuse the situation and the cutting was stopped.

Due to her, some of the area was saved and quickly the rest regrew to be the verdant thing that is today.

Below are some pictures of those perilous days...

(Old) Wildlife Area Introduction page Return to the 2008 timeline on "My Surrey Square" site