Do the Council care about Charlton?

I'm spitting teeth at the moment, truly.

I've just discovered that the Council are to close the Health and Fitness Centre at Charlton Football Ground. I discovered about it by reading a post on The Last Boy Scout's blog. Another source of the information is the icSouthLondon website which has the story here

Of course there's not a mention of this in the Greenwich Time propaganda rag, somehow despite Greenwich's substantial publicity budget they managed to skip that piece of information. They do manage to find room for lots of comments about how the Council share our priorities when it comes to spending our money.

Oh really?

Floyd Road looks like a rubbish dump despite numerous calls to Cleansweep.

Boasting about spending a whole £1m on tackling gang crime while spending £2.5 million more than other local authorities on publicity.

Cutting £500,000 from the budget for parks and open spaces. Do the Council really think that us residents would rather have Greenwich Time than parks and open spaces? Is it possible that if we're told enough how great Greenwich is we'll somehow overlook the lack of greenery?

What with the state of Floyd Road and now the closure of the really rather good health and fitness centre I'm left with the impression that the Council just really doesn't care at all about my area. Enough people around here are going to vote Labour regardless of what they do, we're irrelevant to them.

I've really had enough of Greenwich Council right now, I really want to get out of here. I'm a life long Labour supporter and while the national Government have managed to tarnish my opinions of Labour Greenwich Council have managed to really break my trust in it.

I'm going to keep on trying to get this street sorted out, letters will be written and so forth, but I know I'm on my way out now.

Oh and in case you're under the delusion that the members of the opposition have any interest in tackling this go and check out Councillor Nigel Fletcher's Blog. He's managed one post since the end of January and that was about the upcoming GLA elections how great Boris Johnson is.

Labour don't seem to care about Greenwich as they know they'll get elected whatever they do.

The opposition don't seem to care about Greenwich as they seem to view it as a leg up the political ladder.

Another "Don't Care"?

On my travels out and about around the area I've begin to notice something new, well it's new to me, I might have just been unobservant in the past.

What I've seen are a lot of parents, well presumably, out walking with their young children while they listen to a music player through headphones. Typically the parent's walking just ahead of the child who tags behind them.

Is that really safe?

Aside from the safety what does it do to the child to know that their parent would rather listen to music than talk to them?

It can't be good.

What "matters most" to the Council, what "matters most" to us?

I've had the latest issue of Greenwich Time popped through my door, which is good timing as I need something to line my green food caddy with.

The front page boasts about how the Council are spending £1 million on a new police initiative to fight gang crime. This, they say, is a "part of [the council's] ongoing commitment to focus Council spending on the issues and services that matter most to local residents."

Remember that Greenwich is the Council that spends £3.1 million on publicity every year.

Bexley, Bromley and Croydon each spend an average of just over £0.8 million a year each.

£1 million a year for tackling gang crime.

£2.5 million more every year than other local Council's to tell us how good the Council is.

I think it's pretty clear which are the "issues and services that matter most" to the Council and I don't think they're the ones that matter to local residents.

PS: I've brought the spending on publicity up several times and I don't apologise for doing it again. It's important that we know about it and if just one person reading this remembers to tackle a Council member about this come election time (which is about the only time that we see them) then I think it's worth it.

More Don't Care Didn't Care

Floyd road is looking like a rubbish dump again, people are putting the wrong stuff in the wrong bins and they're not being collected. Black bags are also being put out week on week in the wrong week. Ultimate fault for that lies with the selfish idiots doing it, however we're about 7 weeks into the new scheme and you think the Council would be doing something about those that are spoiling our neighbourhood. Well apparently not.

The idiot at the top of the street who was responsible for this is still at it. I don't think his/her bins have been emptied since the new scheme started and he/she keeps dumping rubbish in the street.

They're not alone either, walking down Floyd Road there's at least one more household of muppets who have perhaps entered into a "let's see who's the most selfish" competition with the people at the top.

This is what you'll see if you do my walk...
What is it with these people that they somehow see what the front of their home looks like and think it's acceptable? Do they blame the council perhaps for not taking it away? Have they not thought to wonder why everyone else's bins are being emptied?

I have a suspicion who's dumping the rubbish at the top of the road, I think I know their name.

As I mentioned here there was a box dumped amid the first pile of rubbish they put out that had a name and address on it, well here's a censored version of the photo that I took.Now do I name and shame them on here? That's of course presuming that the individual concerned actually has any sense of shame, which given the outside of their house is somewhat doubtful.

I've contacted Cleansweep about this before, I'll try again, that's if I can get through to them. If I don't get any joy I'm going to have to write to my local Councillor. This really is getting beyond a joke now. It's also good for my own peace of mind that I at least try to do something about getting this sorted out rather than just grumbling about it and the Council.

Every couple of weeks thousands of away supporting football fans pour into Charlton and walk down Floyd Road, those photos are one of the first impressions they'll get of Greenwich.

Considering that the Council see trying to protect and promote their image as being so important to them that they'll spend more than three other local Councils combined on publicity, which in turn is something more important to them than funding our youth you'd think that they would care about what visitors see. Apparently not.

Living next door to Charlton

I'm not a follower of football, it's a whole tide of life that used to just pass me by.

When I moved here I knew that there was a football club just down the road however I didn't think it would affect me that much.

Oh how wrong I was... Two parking tickets later (one successfully appealed, the other paid) my lesson has been learned.

People often ask me what it's like living so close to the ground. Well in all honesty it's really not that bad, you just have to remember to move your car on match days. Oh that and making sure you're not going to try to drive home just after a match. All told it's not bad at all though.

Would I do it again knowing what I know now? Well in all honesty I would view it as a negative to the place, but not that big a one and probably not big enough so as to make me want to be elsewhere.

I read a story on the News Shopper site today about how the club have been refused planning permission by the Council to build some new stands, you can read it here.

The capacity is currently about 27,000 so that's an increase of 4000 or so people through the gate. I don't think that's going to make a huge difference.

However I did wonder why this was the first I'd heard about it.

In part it's probably because I moved here just after the initial planning permission was granted.

However I do think that Charlton could be doing more to involve and inform local residents about what they're up to. True enough I've said that I don't really mind the effect they have on my little world, but it would be nice to think of them as the sort of neighbour who will pop over and let you know what they're up to just in case you are bothered about it.

They used to pop a leaflet through peoples doors giving the upcoming fixtures. However not only did that not include fixture changes and knock out things like the FA cup but they haven't bothered doing one this year.

Would it really be too much to ask them to pop a little letter through locals doors once a month giving all the upcoming dates?

I'm lucky, I'm on the net and I check their fixture web site regularly. Not everyone is though and the only other way I seem to know of finding out is the little sign at the top of Floyd Road. However that's often not updated to a few days ahead so it's not of that much use to people that don't get out much.

So they're not bad neighbours really, I'd just like to feel like they bear me in mind once in a while.

Don't Care Didn't Care

I'm having a bit of a downer about this area at the moment, well not so much the area but certain people that live within it.

I've lived in a fair few places in my time and I'm of the opinion that selfish people come from all walks of life. In fact I might even go as far to say that in more "affluent" areas there's a higher chance of someone being intolerably selfish.

However what I think is part of the problem around here is the sheer number of households. So although the chance of any one of those being selfish muppets is probably no different the numbers of them pretty much guarantee a healthy dose of muppets somewhere close to you.

Anyway.

I was reminded of a story that I heard a good few months ago that shows the sort of problems this area is facing, and how they're not being tackled.

I know a teacher, a child was moved into their class from another school. They hadn't been expelled, "permanently excluded" in today's terms, rather it was a "managed move". That's what happens when a child is so bad that one school wants rid of them but both the Council and the School are under pressure of keeping their number of "permanent exclusions" low, so they come up with a new term for the same thing and the child goes to another school.

So into this new school they go, the child has such behaviour issues that there's a full time assistant that works 1 on 1 with the child throughout the normal classes.

The child has a horrific home life, it's no wonder they've got issues.

However the word you'll hear most about such cases is "support". The child is "supported" at school, the lone parent has social workers "supporting" them. Meanwhile the child remains in what sounds like a living hell.

The lone parent doesn't appear to really care for the child, despite all the "support" she has. At a parents evening despite booking an appointment the parent didn't put in an appearance. That's how concerned they are about their child's welfare, a half hour (if that) chat with a teacher was too much trouble.

So the council throws "support" at the parent, the parent gives nothing back and a child is going down a very dark path to an almost certainly bleak future.

The parent won't take responsibility for their child and no one else seems to want to either.

Our teachers work hard, but this lack of interest and support from their pupils' parents is common. This is an extreme case to be sure, but it's not isolated.

There is one lesson that we can all take from this. As well as checking up on a schools figures for "permanent exclusions" do ask about how many "managed moves" they have. They're really pretty much the same thing, just rebranded.

A return to Charlton

I've been bubbling away about leaving Charlton for quite a while now, this weekend I took some serious steps towards it with a scouting mission to somewhere far away from here. Queue drives through country lanes, over old stone bridges and around various towns that I've never seen before.

I'm not naive and I know that everywhere has problems, but I did see some very nice places, and some quite ropey ones.

Charlton has taught me lessons. The best of those has been that the area has history and that I really appreciate and enjoy that. I've spent some years in my life living in a soulless commuter estate or two. After driving for several hours only to end up in an estate that felt so much like somewhere I used to live the point was hammered home that I don't want to be somewhere like that again. I'd far rather have a smaller home than one of those large commuter homes but have it somewhere interesting, somewhere you can connect with, somewhere that exists for a reason other than it being a large plot of land near a station or main road.

So I got rather sentimental about Charlton. The river, Charlton House, the history all around us and so on and so forth.

Then I come home.

It's bin day tomorrow and the morons around and the morons around here seem determined to enter some sort of incompetent muppet competition with the Council when it comes to the new bin scheme.

There's so many black sacks out and green bins with plastic bags poking out of them. How hard is it? Come on really? What's wrong with all of them.

I then read about another local blogger who's having that problem with his own bins and feel strangely lucky.

There is so much that I like about this area and while I do tell my friends that a major motivator for me leaving is wanting a bigger place without a bigger mortgage, however in all honesty I've got to admit that the uncaring minority of idiots is playing a bigger part than perhaps I want to admit.