Mystery surrounds the sudden emergence of opposition to a scheme to build a primary school on Aberdeen Road in South Croydon, just behind Bar Txt on South End.
Will a primary school built behind this bar at an already busy South Croydon junction really be a “disaster”?
Headlined “Disaster on your doorstep”, the leaflet illustrates the doom which awaits us all with large arrows pointing at a primary school, as if it is some sort of Godzilla monster, about to devour high street businesses.
The leaflets’ overstatement is almost as gaudy as the design: “a huge 3 storey primary school” is to be built. “Save this area from disaster that will cause hardship for years to come, affecting both businesses and homes”, the A3 sheet claims, adding that the noise from the proposed rooftop playground will be “worse than the M25”. The “disaster” will include 176 additional car journeys in the area twice a day, and people using the nearby Spices Yard car park to… park cars.
The Aberdeen Road primary school has been proposed for more than two years, having been first suggested when Tim Pollard, now the leader of the Croydon Tories, was in charge of school provision on the council, attempting to increase the number of available school places to match the rapidly rising demand.It has been agreed that the new school will be run by the STEP academy organisation.
Efforts to get the local businesses to object to the proposal, led by some within the South Croydon Business Association, failed to coalesce. Indeed, more than 20 local businesses have come out in support of having a new school on the site.
There is no name attached to the leaflet, but it calls on people to lodge objections with the council, and with local councillor Vidhi Mohan and Croydon Central’s Tory MP Gavin Barwell, before the end of the statutory consultation period in a fortnight. The anonymous leaflet carries a gmail account for someone called “disasteronyourdoorstep”.
Beware the monstrous primary school: the gaudy leaflet, apparently put together by a grown up
Emails sent to “Mr Doorstep” (“… or may I call you ‘Disaster’?”) have failed to nudge Croydon’s newest pamphleteer out from the shadows to reveal their true identity.
Charlotte Davies, the chair of the South Croydon Community Association, describes the leaflet as “alarmist”. She says that, contrary to the claims in the leaflet that there has been a “lack of neighbour consultation”, “This proposal has been out to consultation in this area, we have accepted that we are going to get a primary school and that … this is a spacious development.”
Davies dismisses the leaflet’s claims that the school will be open from 7am to 9pm – it is, after all, a primary school with children aged from four to 11. She also makes light of the suggestion that parents bringing children to the school and dropping off in Spices Yard will impact parking for businesses in the Restaurant Quarter, since local bars’ trade will tend to arrive long after the school bell sounds for the end of classes (no one has yet made the point that the school could even be persuaded to have a healthy policy of encouraging parents and children to walk to and from school each day. Maybe that’s too beedin’ obvious?).
“A school development may well be really good to reinvigorate the area and make it more attractive… That is why we wanted the high street improved, to calm the area down. Many of the local businesses are looking forward to a school opening,” Davies said.
In an email sent from the leaflet’s gmail account, the anonymous pamphleteer claims, “We are just a group of local residents who do not want to have our lives blighted by this monstrous development.
“We are completely non-political but feel that it is necessary to let local residents know what is being planned, something that it appears Croydon planning are failing to do.” What they don’t want local residents to know, it would seem, is who it is who has paid for and distributed the leaflets.
How odd.
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Why not use Ruskin House to build a school. Oh dear I am asking for it from the Red army. It is bonkers to build a school in that area. Just more traffic and chaos. It is bit like the one being built in West Croydon.
Ruskin House isn’t owned by the council, Patrick.
As for Aberdeen Road, you should take up your reservations with Tim Pollard: it was first proposed on his watch.
I think you’ll need to build the schools where the demand is and where the opportunity arises, rather than picking locations just because they work well for drivers.
Surely Ruskin House, regardless of current ownership, would be an even worse site from a traffic management perspective and there really isn’t much space.
However a little further south down Brighton Rd on the right is a very large space that has plenty of available area for the construction of a primary school. It is currently owned and used by a charity set up for the education of the poor of the town. Superficially it would offer lots of opportunity and in many respects would be ideal.
However Whitgift School and the Whitgift Foundation are very unlikely to be willing to surrender any space for the much needed primary school that is open to all children in the neighbourhood regardless of their parents socio-economic circumstances.
The demand in Fairfield in precisely this area.
The birth rate for this ward is one of the highest in Croydon (4th highest birth rate for a ward 2012 and 2013, no more recent data available) and rising as more apartments are built and office blocks converted to residential use; but no family homes are being built for anyone to move out to… So we have a pressing need for a lot more primary school places and the situation will only get worse in the coming years. There is simply no where else to put this development.
What really worries me is that an anonymous person has thrown a lot of money running a campaign against this school, but they have no feasible alternative suggestions.
I suggest that you all go online and look up the ward birth rates, also look up details of recent developments of residential properties in this area and do some real thinking about the choices and compromises we need to make to ensure that this very densely populated part of London functions smoothly.