Smilers scrap metal merchants, Atwood Road (2011)

Garages are an endangered species, locally and across London. Where once council flats would have had rows of garages below – often beloved of British spy and detective dramas where exclusively bad stuff happens – new developments are mandated not only to have bicycle storage, but also to be car-free, meaning garage-free too.

Free-standing garages and similar small industrial buildings are being demolished for housing, and as we’ve experienced locally, offices too.

The car is next on the endangered species of course, and current bogeyman of every level of government and social media alike.  One can only wonder when the car is completely green, producing no emissions – tailpipe or otherwise – running on tyres made of waste plastic designed to shed no particulate matter, what will the Twitterati and government have to berate us old dinosaurs with?  Don’t laugh – it’s only a decade or so away.

Lest we disappear down that rabbit hole, let’s focus on garages, and why they might be important for a range of socio-economic reasons, not as just car storage, which few ever used them for anyway. The site pictured above is from our 2012 collection of 50 favourite places, and true to form, was redeveloped soon after and became the location of a Nancye Goulden Award of 2015 – with not a garage in sight.

We are reminded by last week’s Last Word that Sidney Alford, the maverick explosives expert who created methods of defusing the terrorist’s preferred weapon – the Improvised Explosive Device – started in a garage. Locally, Shepherds Bush, to quote our follower @sbcalling …nowhere else on the planet has a richer history of rock & roll, TV, film and pop culture than Shepherd’s Bush, White City & Hammersmith, and where the NME has claimed one rock star to every 1,222 of the population, may have significantly benefited from garages.  Many an act has started in one, often for practice, away from others, making as much noise as they like, there’s a plethora of terminology relating to garage bands, a garage rock genre and so-on.  It certainly worked out for locals The Who, punk icons The Clash (Garageland) and the maverick Sex Pistols, with Danny Boyle’s new drama Pistol filmed last week in The Cross Keys, 45 years on.  Not much more than a glorified garage at the time, the laundry behind the 2009 award-winning 22 St Peter’s Square, AKA Island Studios, became rather significant to a huge swathe of the music industry in the 1960’s and 1970’s as Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.

Maybe no longer to your taste, but while pondering a misspent youth fixing cars in parent’s garages, including a less-fondly remembered side-line of garage rock, think of the economic benefits of garages:

Steve Jobs Garage

• Apple Inc., was started by Steves – Jobs and Wozniak – in a garage. Now worth $2,100,000,000,000 – the most valuable company in the World.
• Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage, Now worth $1,700,000,000,000 – the second most valuable company in the World.
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in a garage, close behind at $1,600,000,000,000.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in a garage, now worth $1,000,000,000,000.
• Bill Hewlett and David Packard started their enterprise in a modest garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto – now worth $9,000,000,000.  It’s clearly worth only $9 Billion, because it was only a single garage, though Walt Disney did OK from his single garage too.
• 

  Sipsmith Distillery: 27 Nasmyth St [Photo: Horton & Garton]

  Proving that being in the USA and the world of technology isn’t a pre-requisite, Brewdog is a recent Scottish garage success, now valued at nearly £2,000,000,000. They even have a bar in the aforementioned ‘Bush.

• Finally, and a lot closer to home, the now well-known Sipsmith gin distillery only started in 2009 in a modest 500 sq.ft. garage in Nasmyth Street W6, and was sold for £50M just 7 years later. There are differing views around early sales, but the relative numbers above tell their story.

As membership secretary, I regularly hear the clarion call  “I’m not on Social Media so I can’t see your posts…”  It’s a popular myth that you must sign up, notwithstanding the fact that our latest Twitter and Facebook postings automatically appear on our home page (have you checked recently..?),  all three “platforms” that we use are publicly accessible to anyone, as are most social media sites.  They will encourage you to sign up, perhaps even boost the myth that you must for obvious reasons, but you can ignore that without missing that much.  However paradoxically it will help our cause if you do sign up and follow us – read on…

Facebook Twitter Instagram

I’ve read concerns about  tracking, cookies, and a good range of urban myths too, but many are outdated.  A number of issues are addressed in our website and accessibility guide and related privacy policy, but in short if you don’t have an account with the platform in question, there’s limited tracking they can do, while at the same time still giving you access to useful local material. Increasingly newer browser versions are closing these avenues of tracking joy, and the effects are often rather more prosaic than perhaps popular hyperbolae might suggest.  You can, of course, always delete browsing data, including cookies, or use the Incognito/inPrivate modes available on all modern browsers to properly eliminate tracking if it still concerns you.

Why follow us on Social Media?

#BernieSanders patiently waits to cross the Bridge

It’s a lot simpler and quicker for us to post short updates, reactions to news, and links to events of interest on these platforms – particularly Twitter – than it is to create longform articles such as this, or physical/pdf newsletters.  One or two of our survey responses have suggested more regular updates, and this is one way to respond.  These postings form a useful complement to our other publishing, as text messages complement email and letters.  We post something almost daily on one platform or another,  so there’s always something new on the website as a result too.

The website continues to be updated with improvements to layout (such as use of tabs on some new pages), usability, and of course, plenty of new material.  We mentioned the new guide recently, it’s been renamed more accurately the Website & Accessibility Guide, and updated.  Accessibility improvements include the elimination of the last few recalcitrant contrast errors and one or two missing screen-reader tags. 

There have been a couple of significant content additions recently, plus this year’s unfortunate necessity, the previously announced daily-updating H&F Covid-19 graph at the top of the Home Page.

Capability Brown Statue

Awards Map snapshot – click to visit the interactive version

Firstly, we’ve subsumed the content of the  original Capability Brown Statue website, created as part of the project led by former committee member Richard Jackson. It now has a permanent home in the history section.  There are photos of some of his landscapes, a section describing the project, the history and development of the statue itself, with a video of the unveiling, links to our news stories during the project, and for the record, a list of benefactors, of which this Society was one. 

Also noteworthy is the news that there’s a fundraising effort for a riverside sculpture of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, by the same sculptor, Laury Dizengremel.

Each history page now has a set of pictorial/excerpt links to the other history pages at its foot, or in the sidebar, and each page has seen a little TLC too. The history sidebar also now appears on our home page.

Secondly, ‘Lockdown 2’ has provided the time to complete of a longstanding project to map all Awards and Nominations since the start of the scheme in 1990. In reconfirming the postcodes and/or exact locations of all 133 records, some information was updated, and a photo or two refreshed. Click on the map image to explore the area interactively – each colour-coded map pin identifies the type of award and what we know about it, provides a link to a picture if available, and to the relevant year’s Awards page.  Perhaps we’ll create some local walks based on it – watch this space!

In Lockdown 2, we continue to post updates on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and add diary entries of interest to members. Please follow us on these platforms if you have an account, and keep an eye on the diary which is updated with new events at least weekly.

Save our Skyline – River and King St views

Local residents will remember John Jones, who was for many years Chairman of our affiliate, the Ravenscourt Society, and who died in April.  For several decades he was a formidable defender of his patch of Hammersmith from ill-judged development and Council efforts to sell off land on the fringes of Ravenscourt Park.

He threw himself into the battle against the first Town Hall development plans in 2010-12, chairing a number of packed public meetings on behalf of the Save our Skyline coalition.  The campaign notably led to a Council Planning Committee meeting so crowded with objectors it had to be moved to the Great Hall of Latymer School. At that time, the Hammersmith Society worked with him to successfully see off the 15-storey glass towers around the Town Hall and a footbridge over the A4 which would have very considerably reduced the Furnivall Gardens’ open space.

A barrister by profession, he used his professional and forensic skills in the service of local causes.  His manner was a mixture of the magisterial and the mischievous, backed up by serious local knowledge and commitment. He also chaired public meetings for the Ravenscourt Action Group calling for Council action on anti-social behaviour.

An engaging obituary can be found in The Guardian following this link

The Ravenscourt Society was founded in 1971 and is no longer active, but perhaps there are residents in the area who would like to revive it; a local residents’ association is a good way to stay in touch with what is going on at the Town Hall, channel local concerns, and to build a neighbourhood network.

More: Video describing the SOS campaign

Arboricultural Association suggested tag

Twenty-Twenty was named the “Year of the Tree” by the Tree Council, and moments before lockdown, in Davos the World Economic Forum announced the creation of the One Trillion Tree Initiative, following on from the UN Billion Tree Campaign of 2006.  We’re hoping that H&F Council and residents will take the opportunity to participate.

In contrast, while Sheffield is normally noted for heavy industry, recently it became notorious for a rather different kind: the Sheffield Chainsaw Massacre seemingly more for the convenience of the PFI road maintenance contractor than for the public good, under a plan euphemistically called “Streets Ahead”.  The before and after shots are alarming. Furthermore, Sheffield Council has been found to have misled residents over the state of some trees.

King St. tree felling 2019

Here in Hammersmith, we recently praised the council’s street tree planting programme, particularly in the North of the borough, and the associated guerrilla gardening was nominated for an award in 2018.  In 2019 however, tree fortunes reversed somewhat, and we had our own mini chainsaw massacre, where a number of street trees were removed by council contractors without notice.

Four were removed in a day at the West end of King Street. A mature tree outside the Sainsburys local was clearly dead, two were young but had died, apparently of neglect, and the 4th (pictured in the background) was partly diseased.  The removal on safety grounds is obviously an overriding consideration, however the job was half-done, and nearly a year on, ugly and potentially hazardous metre-high stumps remain littering our pavements, not just in King St. but elsewhere in the borough.  We have contacted the council’s arboricultural officer for comment on more than one occasion – so far without response. 

Old Oak development area

The Hammersmith Society decided to make a £300 donation to the costs of a legal opinion from Landmark Chambers on a new planning manoeuvre, because it looks to set a precedent and become frequent in Old Oak and elsewhere.

Henry Peterson of the Old Oak Neighbourhood Forum and Grand Union Alliance – whose planning knowledge has been invaluable to local groups such as our affiliate St. Helens R.A. in the past – spotted that developers were seeking increases in height to approved planning permissions by means, not of a new planning application, but through a technical route using Sections 96A and 73 of the Town & Country Planning Act 1990 to seek minor material amendment approval, to “optimise” a planning consent. The amendments in question are often by no means minor and should warrant a new planning application.

This route has been used in a permission for North Kensington Gate (South) on Scrubs Lane where the developers have sought to increase the approved height of the development from 19 to 22 storeys, and the housing units by 20%. The Society and others have opposed the application as the planning context has dramatically changed from the original permission, where  intensive development was envisaged on that side of the area – now no longer part of the development plan following the exclusion of the Car Giant site – and with significant public transport additions planned via a new Overground station at Hythe Road – also no longer on the agenda, partly because of the many pressures on TfL finances.

Along with others, the Society’s activities have been severely curtailed during the government’s enforced lockdown. We’ve found a little solace in the popular Zoom video-conferencing application (used with appropriate security precautions), and on Monday this week, keeping to schedule, managed our first online committee meeting – with 75% attendance.

Online committee meeting

The committee decided that the Society should use some of its limited funds to make a donation of £1000 to Hammersmith residents in need of support at this difficult time, via our local charity and affiliate Hammersmith United Charities which represents an excellent model of giving relatively small grants to local groups which know what practical help is needed and target it accordingly. The donation will be distributed through their Community Coronavirus Appeal, which is run in conjunction with the Council. 

We have inevitably decided to postpone this summer’s AGM until government rules allow us to convene again. We’ll announce a new date when rules change.   The Spring Newsletter, which would normally be posted out in April, will be published on this website, as a series of articles released over the coming weeks, with summaries and links emailed to members as usual.

We hope to be in a position to at least make nominations for the 2020 Environment Awards by reviewing what material is available to us via photos, and we encourage you to submit nominations by email if you have a suitable development in mind.  We may not be able to visit them, or make a formal award until later in the year, but expect to be able to publish and consider the suitable nominations.

Julian Hillman

As a trustee of United in Hammersmith & Fulham (charity no. 1187649) and a long standing committee member of The Hammersmith Society, I wanted to say something about the Appeal, which has so far raised £65k including gift aid. Firstly thanks to The Hammersmith Society for making a donation.

United is working in conjunction with the Council. We hope to raise more money as different phases of need emerge. We provide grants directly to groups supporting borough residents. This includes those particularly focusing on the extra needs of at-risk groups, including people who are:

• At risk of complications severe enough to require hospital care
• At risk of being unable to cope with isolation
• At risk because they’re living in poverty

So far we’ve been one of the fastest in London getting grants out to grass roots groups. Currently we have supported 21 organisations, awarded £20,450 and estimate we have reached 17,200 people in some way. Demand is increasing and we hold regular grant giving panels.

If you know groups doing good work who might benefit from the Appeal ask them to contact the Programme Manager Savraj Kaur – . If you would like to donate or know others who would want to help please go to: https://unitedhf.org/appeal/