PAUL LUSHION, our environment correspondent, reports on how a 6,000-signature petition is about to be handed to a council leader demanding that they do their job to protect south London’s biggest nature reserve
Sparrows, which used to thrive at Beddington Farmlands, are now all but extinct on the wildlife reserve
The Beddington Farmlands nature reserve, just the other side of the borough boundary with Sutton, was once a jewel in London’s ecological crown.
Yet Sutton Council is now using the existence of the Viridor incinerator – which the LibDem-run council allowed to be built on Metropolitan Open Land (MOL) next to the nature reserve – as an excuse to allow even more industrial development and encroachment into the nature reserve.
Some 10 acres of the nature reserve along the Beddington Lane frontage have recently been de-designated as MOL – which is supposed to have the same protections as Green Belt. It has been handed over for industrial development as part of the New Sutton Plan. In the past year or so, another 10 acres have also been lost to industry, while there has also been losses to the incinerator development, the “Incinerator Academy” primary school at Hackbridge, and an extension of waste management facilities.
At the current rate of loss of approximately 20 acres a year, the entire nature reserve could be gone within 20 years, according to local conservationists.
There’s another round of cuts in services, closures and re-organisations coming to the NHS in Croydon and across south London, with one of the first casualties (no pun intended) feared to be the Sanderstead Clinic in Rectory Park, which treats 4,500 patients each year.
Croydon Scouts, in a ceremony attended by the Mayor of Croydon, Bernadette Khan, conducted a solemn memorial service at Croydon Minster on Saturday, exactly 100 years to the day after their predecessors staged a similar commemoration for the 75 Scouts from the area who had died in World War I.
