onionbagblog

“Do you live in the borough of Lambeth? Do you find yourself in a daily struggle to control the bubbling rage that seeps from beneath your very pores, causing you to erupt in an incandescent torrent at the slightest provocation?

A cocktail of low employment (just 67% of adults are in a job), poor health, drugs, and population density, means that Lambeth is the angriest place in the country.”

Now read on…

I wonder what the correlation is with this map?

Heads up @se1.

Anger is an energy.

With limited opportunities available to swim in public pools in Lambeth, I thought I would attempt to uncover the other options available within the borough boundaries in which to swim. You would be surprised to know as to how many swimming pools there are in Lambeth. You just have to know where to look for them, or even whom to ask.

I’ve not set out to offer an exhaustive list. This is only the start. I was going to start a Help Me Investigate topic to try and collaborate the crowd sourcing. It’s a fine online tool that @paulbradshaw and others have established.

But given that I blog mainly about (i) swimming and (ii) South London, I thought perhaps this would be a better place to start.

And so my mission is to map the hidden (and perhaps lost) swimming pools of South London. I hope you are able to join me in the search, by offering assistance in the comments below.

This *isn’t* a historical or political quest; I want to share the options that are available to swimmers in the borough whilst our friends @lambeth_council attempt to save their leisure policy from complete meltdown. I found it ironic though to discover that I actually live in a specific part of the borough with the highest concentration of swimming pools.

The very essence of the search is going to be that most pools are private. Paying for a private swim in Lambeth is now no longer a crime against your political conscious (arf.) The privatisation of the public pools has already seen to this.

There’s some hidden treasures buried away in the borough (and on the map) such as the strip of pool at Tudor Court at the back of Brixton Hill, and the *shhh* private family pool just down from Streatham Common. Accessing the Google Maps via the satellite view will open up a whole new world of South London swimming pool snooping.

There are also some heartbreaking cases of previous botched Lambeth Council leisure policies, such as the filling in of the Kennington Park Lido during the late 1980’s.

Lessons to be learnt, swimming pools to be found. Please feel free to add any other suggestions. The count is currently on twelve fifteen sixteen – a pool a day for a fortnight would be my ultimate South London swimming fantasy.

The first person to put a pin on The Rookery at Streatham Common as a swimming location gets a dunking in the temporary pool whenever / if our friends @lambeth_council get round to building it.

Heads up @se1, @dominiccampbell and @lambethcpcg for assistance in pool hunt.

First Chuka, now Tally Hoey.

Falling out with the local Lambeth Labour party over leisure seems to be something of a recurring theme for prospective parliamentary candidates around my little patch of South London. You can’t really argue against the cause.

Fresh through the letterbox on Sunday lunchtime, and I read with interest:

Kate fights for local pool facility.

Kate has always championed sport and exercise for everyone, particularly children since long before she was an MP.

When she was Sports Minister, and now as the Mayor’ advisor on grassroots sport, she is committed to giving everyone access to decent sports facilities.

The community hub at the old Lilian Baylis School in Kennington is now being used for a wide range of sports and recreational activities, and Kate is supporting its becoming a Community Trust.

Well – who wouldn’t support such fine ideals?

To be fair, Kate Hoey did speak out about the demolishing of the pool at Stockwell Park High, after her local party on the ground ruled out the re-building of the pool as part of their prestigous new school build project.

Yet in my own area of London, Stockwell Park School, which already has a 25 metre swimming pool, is going to be totally rebuilt with money from the Building Schools for the Future fund – minus its pool. To the surprise of the community Lambeth Council says the government guidelines don’t specify a swimming pool as being necessary and there isn’t enough money. Schools Minister Jim Knight in a written answer to me said that it is up to the local authority to decide whether to replace the pool.

So here is a classic example of where all the fine words about tackling obesity fall down at the first hurdle. A school in one of the most deprived areas of inner city London with a swimming pool is losing it. The extra cost would be around £750,000 – a small amount when just a few miles away billions are being spent on the Olympics.

There’s no mention in the election literature of Kate’s fight for other local pool facilities at Streatham, Clapham and Brixton. One would presume that if a Lego pool is worth fighting over, then so are the three main closed pools in the Rotten Borough?

And as for “the Mayor’s advisor on grassroots sport” – I wonder what exactly Kate advises Boris about when it comes to closing three swimming pools in your home constituency? It all must get slightly embarrassing when talks turns to 2012, and all that.

Still, there’s always the 12m Lambeth Lego Pool at Lillian Baylis to boast about, which Kate so kindly poses in front of for the cameras. But only until April. @se11_lurker provides some background commentary on the botched attempt to open up Lillian Baylis as as a genuine cooperative (geddin there!) community hub (urgh.)

Streatham and Vauxhall *should* be safe Labour seats come polling day for the general election. The Chuka ‘n Kate roadshow will be hoping that the little spot of local bother over leisure doesn’t derail them.

Ah, so this is the <irony>real</irony> reason that are friends from @lambeth_council are so busy closing leisure centres all around the Rotten Borough: to fleece customers for the joining fee each time they are forced to become a swimming refugee elsewhere.

You may remember how I was asked to pay a £10 hidden cost when I tried to transfer my GLL Lambeth membership to a wider Swim London membership. I could see that the leisure policy of Lambeth Labour was in meltdown, and for the same monthly £26 payment, I wanted other options.

A bit of behind the scenes work from the lovely GLL management, and my £10 online membership was refunded. Rightly so, seeing as though I had already paid to join (join what?) when I first purchased my GLL Lambeth membership.

Fast forward to this week, and for the first time since the privatisation of leisure in Lambeth, I was able to see the nice man from the GLL membership office during the daytime at Brixton Rec.

We were reassured at the Clap’ham Users Forum to signal the end of swimming in SW4 that all memberships would be automatically transferred over. I wasn’t too concerned at the time. My Swim London membership is valid at all GLL pools throughout London, and I had indeed used it up at Oasis and London Fields.

But then once I became a Clap’ham refugee, my card failed to swipe early each morning. It was a mild irritant at first, but then given the 7am opening time, the lovely smiling receptionist and I came to an agreement.

That agreement was to take up the issue in the membership office at The Rec. Seeing as though kicking out time for public swimming in SW9 is 9am, and the membership office isn’t open until 9:30, this wasn’t exactly practical.

Until half term week that is, where I took the opportunity to sort out my non-swipeable card.

“Your membership has expired,” said the GLL membership chap. “You’ll have to pay £10 to renew it.”

Eh? Where the chuffers did that one come from?

There was more…

“You’ll only be able to swim at Brixton.”

Overlooking the minor issue that there isn’t actually anywhere else in the Rotten Borough where I can swim right now, I would rather like the option of swimming up at Oasis or London Fields. My membership is called Swim London, not Swim Brixton (But Only Between the Hours of 7-9am.)

I was extremely confused, and so it seems was yer man from GLL. It turns out that my original Swim London membership was linked to Clap’ham Pool. For some unknown reason, the swimmers of SW4 were given the status to be able to swim anywhere. Maybe GLL knew what was coming all along with the Streatham and Clap’ham closures?

Highly unlikely. A more sensible analysis is simply the confusion that crept in at GLL, following the pimping out of leisure by our friends at @lambeth_council. No one is entirely sure right now which particular swimming packages exist, and exactly where and when you can use them.

It’s all about the swimming, isn’t it?

I can’t get angry with the lovely smiling GLL receptionist at 7am each morning (she really is rather lovely.) Likewise I can’t get angry with the other GLL staff on the ground at the Rec, who always stop and make a point of filling me in with the political pressures they are operating under. GLL management are also rather decent, and go out of their way to contact me over any woes I have with my membership.

The real reason for the complete meltdown of leisure in the Rotten Borough comes when the party in powers allows *anyone* but itself to take responsibility for leisure provision.

Tesco, the Cathedral Group, GLL – *anyone* but @lambeth_council itself. I think this is called a *shhh* cooperative form of local government.

Once again it took some online intervention from the lovely GLL management to resolve the issue. I have very kindly been given a free month of membership to make up for the inconvenience, which makes for all of the above moaning seem slightly over the top.

GLL is proving to be very decent at managing a near on impossible situation that it has inherited with the provision of leisure in Lambeth. Staff from the shop floor up to the management have made the most out of a very difficult situation.

To be fair, the Cabinet Member for Culture and Communities was also rather helpful in offering assistance (and apologies) online.

I was peeved though at being asked to pay a joining fee that I have already paid twice. Imagine if the 5,000 daily users at The Rec are also peeved? That’s a lot of political muscle to exercise out there.

And so what price on the privatisation of leisure by Labour led @lambeth_council? Apart from the inconvenience of the nearest GLL swimming pool that is open during the daytime being up in Camden, my calculations make it just under £177, 000 per annum..

I filed a Freedom of Information request a few weeks ago, asking how many Greenwich Leisure Limited memberships have been cancelled in Lambeth between 1st December 2009 and the 31st January 2010.

This timeframe corresponds with the closure of Streatham Leisure Centre at the end of November 2009, the closure of Clapham Leisure in mid-January 2010 and the reduced opening hours at Brixton Rec at the end of January 2010.

The £177, 000 figure is calculated by multiplying the £26 basic GLL monthly membership price with the 567 cancellations as stated in the FOI request. This gives a monthly figure of £14, 742. Multiply this figure by twelve, and you get the annual revenue loss of £176, 904.

The £177, 000 in lost revenue only relates to leisure users in Lambeth that had signed up to become GLL members. The figure doesn’t take into account the number of lost swimming sessions by pay as you go users, who also now have nowhere to swim in Lambeth.

The reduction of monthly cash flow becomes something of a convenient self-fulfilling prophecy for local politicians. Streatham was closed because it needed investment. With nowhere to swim in SW16, the users cancelled their memberships. The council is then left with a reduced money pot in which to justify making the necessary repairs.

The FOI request also states that 308 cancellations took place in the corresponding timeframe twelve months previous. I accept that this suggests that there may be a seasonal trend happening here. Losing 259 further members in a calendar year is still a pretty heavy loss in income.

A combined figure of 875 cancelled memberships over a two year period indicates that something is pretty rotten to the core in the way that leisure is currently managed in Lambeth.

It is interesting to view this £177, 000 shortfall in the context of the John Lewis cooperative style of government that Lambeth Labour proposed this week. GLL was name checked as a success story in this style of local governance.

The John Lewis model is a social experiment imposed on the people living in the Lambeth Petri dish direct response to the Tories up in Barnet and their Easy Jet two-tier system of local government:

“The Tories in Barnet have come up with a plan to offer no-frills public services along the lines of budget airlines like Ryan air. What that means is minimal or sub-standard services offered to most people with better services only available to people wealthy enough to pay more for them.

Looking at the options open to leisure users in Lambeth, and there is little to choose between the two main parties and their high street branding attempts to become electable.

Leisure is already run as a two-tier service in the Rotten Borough. If you want to swim, then you have to go down the private route of paying up to join Fitness First. The standard no thrills service offered by @lambeth_council is a closed Streatham Leisure Centre, a Clapham Leisure Centre that is in the hands of private capital and a bonkers opening timetable at Brixton Rec.

But it’s not all about costings – what about the health benefits of leisure? The real price for the privatisation of leisure by Labour led @lambeth_council is the reduction in exercise taken by local people at facilities in the borough. You can’t even begin to put a costing on this

Prologue – high hopes and plenty of political optimism ahead of a public meeting to try and resolve the Streatham Hub project. Steady the buffers, old boy. I think you know that there is unlikely to be a happy ending here…

And so how do you solve a problem like the Streatham Hub?

We may be screwed for leisure in La La Lambeth Land, but at least we can still have a laugh. The refusal of Tesco to attend a public meeting on Wednesday to explain why a new ice rink and leisure facility still hasn’t been built by the supermarket giant, was met with the time honoured tradition of placing a big bag of lard on the empty seat.

Not just any old big bag of lard either – this was the finest lard procured from the shelves of the newly opened Morrisons in SW16. I think that’s what you call a double political whammy for the absent business partner for Labour led @lambeth_council.

The headline news (pay attention @streathamguardian) is that the multi-national will decide in March if it can be bothered to continue with the whole project. A high-powered board meeting will deliver the judgement on the Little People of Lambeth. I hope they have some decent sarnies to eat during their pow wow.

And then…

The Man from Tesco, he say YES! …we can hold the supermarket to account and make sure it delivers what it promised almost a decade ago.

The Man from Tesco, he say No! …@lambeth_council we’re screwed. Our elected politicians will squirm out of the affair with continued claims of “commercial confidentiality,” before then going to erect a temporary gym at The Rookery on Streatham Common – SERIOUSLY.

You’ve heard of the Lambeth Lego Pool, but now a tent in the great outdoors with a few dumb bells (oh the irony) is actually being considered by @lambeth_council as a serious alternative, irrespective of Tesco continuing with the project.

The meeting was told that it would take “two to three years” to build the hub, and in the meantime, the tent / gym is a temporary option.

And what if Tesco walks away from SW16 after a wasted decade? No guarantees of a Plan B were given. Back to The Rookery it is then. The temporary becomes the future and a generation of lard arses, deprived of leisure in Lambeth, will eat their own weight in microwave chips. But not from Tesco. Obviously.

As the good @CllrMarkBennett tweeted in reflection after the meeting:

“I shall not be shopping @tescostores until they give Streatham what they promised – a new ice rink, pool and leisure centre.”

Cripes. It really was one of those seismic evenings. There was a sense that a turning point has been reached. The good folk of Streatham have long since lost all patience with the supermarket giant, and the issue now seems to have divided Labour in Lambeth.

@CllrMarkBennett wasn’t alone in breaking from the party line being spun so disastrously from the stage by Councillor Rachael Heywood and her cabinet colleague, Councillor Lib Peck. Nu Labour poster boy @ChukaUmunna later told me that he “doesn’t trust Tesco,” and that he “honestly doesn’t know” if @lambeth_council will be able to deliver on the Hub.

Blimey.

Time maybe for a bit of backtracking. With the Tesco owned Streatham Ice Rink being held together by a bit of gaffer tape, and the Leisure Centre next door not looking much better, @lambeth_council did the dirty with Tesco to build a brand new rink and leisure centre. In return, the multi-national gets to set up a rather large corner shop in SW16.

But this was all some seven years ago. By now and the Hub should be complete. Instead we have an ice rink that is unable to stage Redskins’ matches, and a leisure centre that has been shut because it is unsafe.

The public meeting on Tuesday evening called by the fine @streathamaction was supposed to be the opportunity for Tesco to come clean. You get an indication of the company’s commitment to Streatham by its absence on the night.

Instead we had the Cabinet Member for Culture and Communities, Councillor Heywood, and the Cabinet Member for Housing and Regeneration, Councillor Peck, left to squirm explain away on the stage almost a decade of mismanagement.

I’m not the greatest flag waver for the failed Nu Labour privatisation project in the Rotten Borough (you don’t say…) but even I felt pity for the local politicians that have been left to hang out to dry by the corporate beast with all the economic and political muscle.

Ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight, and all that?

This was an angry political floor, with its constituents made up of beefed up hockey players, muscle-toned swimmers and mischievous bloggers that really have nothing better to do on a wet Wednesday evening in South London.

Actually, that’s not true. My agenda concern is the lack of swimming in Lambeth. As a Clap’ham refugee I’ve been forced to dip my toe in the waters of Brixton. So have all the Streatham refugees, being bussed down Brixton Hill for the magical 7-9am only timeslot in SW9 each morning.

Apologies if I railroaded the start of the meeting with my Clap’ham interjections, but the good Councillor Heywood started off on the subject first.

Likewise with Councillor Lib Peck. It was a basic point of order, as she insisted that the Labour administration was in control of the timetable of closure in Clap’ham. Um, not true, my friend. If you had attended the User’s Forum to explain the closure of Clap’ham (actually if anyone from Lambeth Labour had attended the forum,) then you would have found out that the poor, sheepish folk at Greenwich Leisure Limited were told to shut up shop by the Cathedral Group on New Year’s Eve.

But anyway, I sat back, started a bit of @audiobooing and took in the debate.

@streathamaction did a fine job in trying to keep to the agenda of (i) leisure, (ii) ice rink and (iii) library (um, falling down as well.) But the passion and anger from the electorate on the floor made the meeting rather different to cabinet two nights previous (@cllrstevereed: “this is a cabinet meeting and you have no right to speak. Be silenced.”)

Too many political mistakes have been made in Streatham over the years. This has led to uncertainty in the different services provided by @lambeth_council, and consequently a confused agenda of different interest groups on the evening.

Questions were asked concerning what cost is involved to re-open Streatham leisure centre (“no costs have been carried out,”) does an ice rink still feature in the Hub plans (“probably” – major hooter HONK!!!! alert: this is a retraction from the previous cast-iron guarantee) and how can @lambeth_council hold Tesco to account?

There was no answer given to this question, likewise for a very articulate point raised by a young girl who must have been of primary school age:

“You said ten years ago that you would build a new ice rink. If we can’t believe you on that, what can we believe you on?”

Someone give that young girl an @audioboo account now. Fine work, madam.

The point was also made that Tesco is prepared to let the ice rink run down. The suggestion is that it will then be easy to close the old rink, and conveniently forget to build a new one. Even Streatham is experiencing gentrification, and the land is ripe for some poncey new flats.

The meeting then went slightly bonkers. There was some fine fighting talk calling for @lambeth_council to take back control of the project with a Compulsory Purchase Order. A public boycott of Tesco was suggested, which then somehow descended into a Shoplifters of the World Unite moment. Only in the Rotten Borough…

Representation from the Redskins was strong. One player spoke of how the rink is the “laughing stock” in hockey circles throughout the country. It’s a very real danger to both players and spectators.

Having already lost London’s only Elite Ice Hockey League team, the Racers, because of a dangerous rink, it would be shocking to also lose the proud name of the Redskins (point of order: I gave up watching the ‘Skins some years ago, partly to do with work commitments, partly because I really didn’t want to spend my Sunday evenings in a freezing old barn.)

“I’m not proud of the state of the rink,” interjected the good Councillor Heywood, before bumbling her line when heckled about when she last went there. “Um, oh, um, I think about four months ago.”

Which all leaves us back where we started some ten years ago. It’s difficult to judge who has been more culpable over the whole sorry Hub saga, @lambeth_council or Tesco?

Both organisations are intertwined with a total lack of credibility. The utter failure of the leisure policy by @lambeth_council is a direct consequence of Nu Labour being totally dependent on big business. We’ve seen it in Clap’ham with the Cathedral Group calling the shots, and now it seems that Tesco are about to show who really is in control in Streatham.

Ah, but events dear boy, events. Something wicked this way comes, and it’s called a ballot box.

As I remarked to @Chris4Streatham, the LibDem parliamentary candidate for Streatham in the @audioboo below, ultimately it is the good people of Streatham that may just be able to resolve the Hub farce; vote back in Lambeth Labour, and the cabinet is locked into some form of unexplainable commitment to sticking with big business to try and sort out Streatham.

Vote *elsewhere* and solutions are on offer to actually establish who is in control of Streatham – the democratically elected and accountable political party, or a multi-national big business that probably can’t even locate Lambeth on a map, let alone the mean streets of Streatham.

Yer man @ChukaUmunna was equally good company, and also very kindly agreed to an interview after I door stopped him. With preposterous expectations laid upon Chuka, leisure is clearly an incredibly prickly issue for him, come polling day.

Being aligned to the same political party that has closed the pool in his chosen constituency has led to some distance being put between the Labour parliamentary candidate, and the local party on the ground. Will the voters buy into it? Listen to yer man…

A final footnote – many thanks, as ever, to the server testing patience that is @markrock and @audioboo. The medium really is the message (well, apart from the other minor message of almost a decade of development being lost in SW16, thanks to a reliance and misguided belief in big business.)

The boos below are embedded in no particular order or priority. They are just a flavour of the feeling from the floor on the night.

Another day, another leisure story coming out of the Rotten Borough. Are you getting bored of these yet? Only another three months to go until polling day…

Speaking of which – pity poor old @ChukaUmunna, the Labour parliamentary candidate for St Reatham. Chuka is replacing the Blair arsewipe Keith Hill.

Having trousered an old boys network nice little earner with his new position on the board of Lambeth Living (pimped out Council housing stock,) Keith Hill was hopeful of handing over his healthy majority to the new Chuka on the block. At least that was the plan.

With an overall majority of 7,466 back in the 2005 general election, the current poster boy of Nu Labour should be sitting on a safe local seat. Ah, but events dear boy, events. Or to be more specific, local events.

With May 6th set in stone as the date for the local elections, it looks like yer man Chuka could also be asking the good people of SW16 to fast track him to Westminster on the very same day.

But wait! What’s this? There’s been a spot of local bother with the Labour party in Lambeth. You may have read about it over here, here and here (you get the idea…)

Lambeth Labour has let down the electorate in St Reatham by closing down the leisure centre. It’s all very well asking people to put their faith in the ‘Barack Obama for Britain‘ (stop sniggering) but when Barack Chuka is aligned to the very same party that has shut St Reatham leisure centre, then poor old Chuka could become a cropper.

Yeah yeah, just the usual ramblings of a loose cannon leftie that has lost all faith in the right wing administration in La La Lambeth Land. Same old same.

Um, nope; actually not:

“The current situation regarding leisure provision here is clearly unsatisfactory.”

Cripes. It comes to something when the parliamentary candidate has to apologise for the political apathy of his own local party on the ground. I bet those St Reatham Labour Party whist drive evenings are a laugh a minute.

“The fact is that the Council administration has not invested enough in the pool for a long time, and they should all be big enough to admit as much.”

Blimey. This is the point I tried to put across to Labour Councillor Nigel Haselden during our recent podcast. Although the good Councillor was charming company, he certainly wasn’t “big enough to admit as much.”

In fact he tried to spin out the “success story” of leisure in Lambeth, and was even “alarmed” at my observations that Labour has lost control of leisure in the Rotten Borough to the private sector.

Best ‘ave a word with Barack Chuka…

Having pulled at the heartstrings by spurting out some twaddle about how important St Reatham leisure centre has been to him as a local, Chuka then advises the electorate where to go swimming instead (clue: it’s not in Lambeth but over in the Borough of Bromley. B****y Bromley!)

The timing of the latest press release from Chuka is to coincide with the public meeting called to discuss the failure of the St Reatham Hub project. We can’t even do meetings on time in Lambeth – the original date of 3rd February was put back seven days so that Lambeth Council “will be able to be clearer about its position.”

We’ve waited seven years for the Hub, what’s another seven days between friends? The meeting will now take place on Wednesday 10 February, 7pm at Hideaway. Here’s hoping Lambeth Council leader @cllrstevereed shows up to answer to the “unsatisfactory” claims made by the man who defeated him to land the St Reatham parliamentary candidacy.