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| From Blogger Pictures |
The Metropolitan Police have asked the City of London Corporation (trustees for Wanstead Flats and the rest of Epping Forest) for permission to build a temporary Olympics operational base on the Flats (with an 11 foot high solid barrier, housing 80 horses and 12,000 police in a day) for 90 days in 2012. For the plan to go ahead, a law that has protected the Forest since 1878 (itself the result of a successful community campaign) must be amended. Thousands of local people have complained that this would set a dangerous precedent for the future, and demanded to know why the Flats site was chosen.
The Save Wanstead Flats campaign called a mass community picnic on the site on September 5th. Despite a grey day, around 200 hundred people turned up to enjoy their green community space, share food and drink, and show their opposition, not least by grilling Paul Thompson, the City of London Corporation representative who was there. He told locals that the site was chosen because it was the cheapest (at £170,000), but that he wouldn’t reveal the other possible sites on the grounds of ‘commercial sensitivity’ (even though it’s our money, as taxpayers, that is being used!). The campaign has also collected several thousand signatures in a matter of weeks as a way of building opposition to their plans. The police have been conducting a PR spin ‘consultation’ exercise (at a cost of £49,000), consisting of a travelling exhibition, and asked the campaign to send down a couple of representatives to a meeting, an offer which the campaign (sensibly) turned down, inviting them instead to a public meeting on October 6th. 300 people turned up, filling the hall, and subjecting the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Corporation to a barrage of informed and intelligent questions covering accountability, cost, the environment, security and traffic. Unsurprisingly, the vote on the proposal held at the end of the meeting was unanimously against.
The next mass action is a ‘Beating of the Bounds’ – a traditional community event to mark the boundaries of land owned and used by the community (to show the size of the proposed security base site). We’ll be taking back Wanstead Flats on Sunday November 21st at 2pm – bring your family and friends, see you there!
Get involved in the Save Wanstead Flats campaign – come to our meetings, lobby your councillors and MPs, and visit our website at www.savewansteadflats.org.uk
