Streatham Hub Public Meeting #1 - so what did we learn?

Lambeth spent a lot of time and money developing its masterplan for Streatham. A 6-figure amount was paid to a consultancy group to launch “Future Streatham” to “consult” with the public about development in Streatham into the future. The gist of this was that Streatham would be divided into 4 regions (North, Central, Village and Hub). There would be specifically targeted development schemes for these regions (or so we were told): entertainment in the North, dense residential development in central and village, retail (Tescos + Hub) in the Hub and so forth. In addition to the monetary figure quoted above, many, many hours/days of personnel effort, civic input (Town Centre Mgt committee and Streatham Action both dedicated much time to this) were spent on it and our erstwhile Town Centre Manager burned a lot of runtime on it as it was considered a priority in TCM efforts.

All of this was interestingly put into context when Jo Negrini was questioned on it. Her statement was that the Masterplan was an ideal if the situation lent itself to the plan (i.e. if that’s what developers were going to do anyway) but was nothing more. It had no force or compulsion. Reading into local gov’t speak it was something that would offer an indication of the development the council wouldn’t oppose and might be willing to help and assist with in its implementation.

But even that’s subject to the irony of reality doing its own thing, usually in the opposite fashion to well-laid plans: the only high-density residential development, and the only major entertainment complex, opened in Streatham in the past two years are both in the “Hub” area, whereas the flagship Megabowl retail/residential development in the  Streatham Hill region was shot down in flames by well-orchestrated local opposition and was retail/resi development, not night-time economy as per the masterplan.

So much for a Masterplan. Seems the point to it in this case is to give underemployed council officvers something to do. To indicate to developers the possiblities that exist is fair enough, except the council commissioned GVA Grimley to do just that a while back and developers are working to that and ignoring the current council masterplan.