Welcome to Streatham Action
Welcome to the Streatham Action website. It's a place for residents and local groups - like neighbourhood watches, residents associations, action groups, forums and individual campaigners - to share ideas, news and get their voices heard. And it's a focus to urge local service providers to do what we want, not what they think we want.
You can join the site and share your views on the forums. Join the mailing list to receive news about what's happening locally and, if you get a campaign going, tell us and we'll help spread the word. Attend our events and help lobby for improvements.
Apologies for the lack of postings on the website recently, caused by our volunteers being overstretched in their day jobs.
Streatham Festival 2010
As part of the week long festival progamme, Streatham Action are pleased to announce that with support from Lambeth Council we will be running the second “Streatham Expo” in partnership with Streatham Festival Association at the “Big Day Out ” on Saturday 3rd July on Streatham Common.
More details are already on the Festival website: http://www.streathamfestival.com/listing/big-day-out/
The “Hands Off Our Common” Campaign
As most local people will be aware, just before the local elections Lambeth Council announced that they had come to revised development agreement with Tesco for the Streatham Hub site, involving construction of a temporary ice rink.
However, there was uproar when it was discovered that the only site that Lambeth were seriously considering was Streatham Common. Hands Off Our Common has been set up as a joint campaign of The Streatham Society, Sustainable Streatham and the Friends of Streatham Common. There is now a dedicated website for the Hands Off Our Common campaign at:
http://www.handsoffourcommon.com/
Previously on Streatham Action:
***UPDATED 17th March***:
Tesco "commit" to Streatham Hub
Streatham Action are pleased that Tesco's board meeting today has finally confirmed their commitment to deliver the Streatham Hub project with a target date for completion of 2012.
This represents major progress in our campaign objective to ensure that the long-delayed Streatham Hub project provides the new sport and leisure facilities that Streatham desperately needs.
However, we are concerned at the lack of detail about the proposals for a temporary ice rink. This would need to be built to allow redevelopment of the site in one go under Tesco's revised proposals, unlike the previous scheme which kept the old ice rink operating until the new leisure centre was open.
If a temporary rink is to be built on Streatham Common, there are a lot of legitimate concerns - will it be large enough to support the full range of skating activities, how will services be provided to the site without harming the Common and its wildlife, and how will the Common be restored afterwards. These all need to be answered by Tesco and Lambeth.
We also think it is critical that Tesco are legally bound to deliver a permanent ice rink and leisure centre before demolition of the existing ice rink is allowed to take place. Streatham Action believes that this needs to be secured with a financial bond for the value of the new leisure centre (approaching £50million) to ensure that Tesco cannot demolish the ice rink and then walk away from the project - as happened with the developers of the Richmond ice rink site.
We look forward to seeing the papers for the rescheduled meeting of Lambeth's cabinet that will consider the Borough's response on Monday 29th March. The devil will be in the detail…
We ran successful protests outside Tesco on 27 February and the following two Saturdays to make sure Tesco knew Streatham people's views.
“Head for the Shed” - Streatham Festival Video Vox Pops 2009
Last year the Streatham Festival commissioned an absurdly talented group of local lads, to make a video featuring people from Streatham who agreed to be interviewed about the area and were forthcoming about what they liked and what definitely needed changing. Click on the picture to see what they said.
