Filed under: Local News
Following the fire in Dean Street on July 10, I wrote to the Fire Commissioner Ron Dobson in my capacity as a London Assembly representative on the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, asking for his comments on the concerns raised by constituents.
Press reports had indicated that the Soho fire station in Shaftsbury Avenue was unmanned when the fire broke out, with its appliances and firefighters away attending another fire. It had also been suggested that the computer system which calls in a standby fire engine from the nearest available station had been overridden, resulting in a delay in appliances arriving from the Euston and Knightsbridge fire stations.
The commissioner promptly wrote back to me with a detailed response to the points made. He confirms that the appliances from Soho fire station were attending two other incidents at the time the call was received to the fire at Dean Street – one at Covent Garden Underground station and another at the Carlton Club in St James’s Street.
As the commissioner points out, the situation can arise where the appliances and firefighters from a particular fire station are already attending a prior call at the time that a potentially more serious call comes in. However, because fire cover is provided strategically across London, rather than from the local station alone, when this is the case appliances are mobilised immediately from the nearest stations.
This is what happened in response to the Dean Street fire. Appliances from Knightsbridge and Euston were ordered to attend the fire as they were the closest available at the time. In addition one of Soho’s appliances did attend the fire at Dean Street later on when the incident commander requested additional resources.
The worrying claim that the mobilising computer at the Soho fire station was overridden have been investigated and the commissioner informs me that this was found not to be the case. The appliances from Knightsbridge and Euston were ordered to the Dean Street incident in the normal way without any delay.
I had been hoping to raise the Dean Street fire at the meeting of LFEPA on July 16.
However, quite understandably the Camberwell fire with its civilian fatalities dominated the proceedings. However, I hope that the concerns of residents and employees in the West End have been addressed.
The commissioner has assured me that in the Dean Street incident the first engine from Knightsbridge got there within six minutes and the second from Euston in less than eight.
I shall be asking LFEPA to examine the concentration of fire incidents in and around Dean Street.
Hopefully after investigation a safety plan can be drawn up that puts preventive measures in place, which hopefully will allow us to avoid the use of fire engines in the first place.
Published in the West End Extra, 21 August 2009
August 22, 2009
Murad outside a boarded-up Broadley Gardens
Mayor Boris Johnson has now told Londoners which parks he will be funding to improve the local environment. But Broadley Gardens, on the south side of Church Street in Marylebone, is not one of them, after local expectations were raised so high. I could say l told you so, but instead l think the pressure now is on the City of Westminster to do something urgently.
We do not have many open spaces in Church Street ward, particularly one as popular with young families as Broadley Gardens. It has already been boarded up for several months, since well before Christmas. The onus is clearly on the council to get it open again as soon as possible, and local residents need to make this clear to them.
March 5, 2009
Those of us who use Edgware Road tube station to travel west regularly will know full well how unreliable the Circle Line is. More often than not in order to reach destinations in West London beyond Gloucester Road you have to rely on other lines, like the District Line, even though this involves changing at Earl’s Court. It also appears that the Circle Line is stopped at the drop of a hat, when we have bad weather or the other lines are disrupted for any reason.
The new plan by Transport for London to extend the Circle Line to Hammersmith and increase the regularity of the service should mean that one of the worst lines on the tube map will get a whole lot better, but we could do with some other improvements.
Edgware Road station is central to the new arrangement and many things need to be done in and around that particular station. It has been in a big hole in the ground for many decades and clearly neglected, with an adverse impact on both passengers and London Underground employees. There is a lot of rubbish at the back of the station that needs to be cleared immediately (see picture below). Staff are still working and resting in temporary accommodation in the form of portacabins. The entrance on the Marylebone Road should be kept open more often and the signage to the Bakerloo Line is pretty awful.
Let’s try and get this all done before the enhanced service begins in December.
March 5, 2009
London in recent times has been given various names by admirers and critics.
Both the New York Times and the Economist have recently referred to London as Reykjavik-on-Thames, since like the Icelandic capital London is home to a stricken financial industry which once underpinned the economy. But this is only one of many names that London has been given by commentators both here and aboard. In the late 1990s, as New Labour’s pact with the City with its light touch on regulation took effect, London become known as Manhattan-on-Thames to financiers and architects. For others, like the French anti-terrorist police who were angry at the alleged relaxed manner of dealing with Islamist extremists, it became known as Londonistan. Another name, Londongrad, was adopted in response to the influx of flamboyant Russians and the servicing of their extravagant lifestyles.
Yet, for all these pseudonyms, which reflect the many aspects of life in central London, Londoners should regard the metropolis as simply London-on-Thames. If anything, the issue to hand is that not enough Londoners identify with London, particularly those in the suburbs, where people talk about going “into” or “up to” London to work or shop, and do not think of themselves as actually living in London – when in truth these areas have long been captured by the great metropolis that London-on-Thames has become. The “doughnut effect”, with the inhabitants of predominantly white suburbia seeing themselves as separate and apart from multi-ethnic, multicultural areas of inner London, was successfully exploited by Boris Johnson in last year’s mayoral election.
This division between inner and outer London is strangely reflected in the postal codes for Greater London, which in the suburbs are still the old county codes for Kent, Surrey, Middlesex and Essex. Even one of Boris Johnson’s deputies, Ian Clement, has been apologetic about having a Kent postcode while representing London. So is it not time to put an end to this historical anomaly and change these postal codes to London ones? Well, that would be a change and a half and something developers would no doubt be keen on, as they are the agents of redefining areas as part of London more often then anyone else. It could perhaps make a symbolic contribution to undermining the mentality behind the doughnut effect.
That said, let’s be grateful that after their invasion in AD 43 the Romans moved the provincial administration from Camulodunum to Londinium, otherwise the capital might still be in Colchester, Essex, and almost certainly not the global centre we are today.
February 4, 2009
This week we learned that Boris Johnson has failed to intervene in a bid by Hammersmith and Fulham council to scrap all the proposed rented social housing units from a key development in Shepherd’s Bush.
I am stunned at this volte-face on the part of the Mayor in failing to insist that Hammersmith and Fulham ensure that a reasonable proportion of affordable homes are available in the development at Bloemfontein Road. By not intervening in the process the Mayor has effectively removed all the social housing units originally planned for this development – around 40%. It is directly contrary to Boris’ own words at the July Mayor’s Question Time meeting where he said that he would ‘certainly’ use his Mayoral powers to direct refusal of a development if he felt the application was ‘not achieving targets that would be for the benefit of London.’
This looks like a political decision on the part of Hammersmith and Fulham council – led by Councillor Stephen Greenhalgh, who sat on Boris’ Forensic Audit Panel. If this is going to be the Mayor’s future approach to such matters then I am extremely concerned about the precedent this could set for other key housing developments. Questions certainly need to be asked about the Mayor’s views on the value of social rented housing and whether he understands that for the poorest Londoners, shared ownership is still not an affordable option – we need to know what he is going to do to help this group.
It’s another example of the Mayor saying one thing and doing another. Despite his waxing lyrical at Mayor’s Queston Time on the need to protect London’s playing fields and open spaces, he didn’t stop his chums at Kensington and Chelsea selling off part of Holland Park School’s playing fields for development. If this is a sign of things to come I’m very worried.
August 6, 2008
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