Woolwich Community Centre to move into disused building
Plans have been submitted by Greenwich Council to move a Woolwich Community Centre and nursery into refurbished adjacent buildings.
The refurbished building formerly operated as a nursery but has been disused for some time.
Extensions and reworking will increase the size of buildings beside Leslie Smith Square leaving the existing centre empty.
The current square alongside the new community centre site is, to be polite, not very good. One side has an inactive frontage due to disuse and the place is car dominated.
There’s no trees, no greenery and its pretty bleak. The only investment for a decade is – what else – a wooden bollard. It does nothing against poor parking.
A welcome aspect to these plans is removing the inactive frontage through rebuilding which will open up the front, though there’s little sign of overall improvements in the square outside which operates as a focal point for the estate.
Locals have raised concerns about parking with new buildings and events held on site. It’s the same issue from Greenwich Council – a near complete lack of enforcement and subsequent extensive parking on pavements and over dropped kerbs. The authority compound the issue with random street clutter achieving little except to further hamper pedestrians.
Replies to concerns pretty much brush the issues off.
The new community centre would “consist of two 125m2 halls which would each cater for 80 sitting / 140 standing spaces at peak capacity.”
The transport statement lists travel times from, err, Uckfield station to the centre for some reason instead of Woolwich Arsenal. That may be a typo, but it also claims five trains an hour to Luton – which is completely wrong, as is just about everything here:
With it getting rail figures so wrong, can we have much faith in an assertion that the impact of a centre for up to 280 people “will be relatively low and accommodated for by Leslie Smith Square car park or the un-restricted parking in the surrounding neighbourhood”. Yep, the same area where parking is all over pavements as it is.
An issue to keep an eye on is what happens to vacated buildings currently occupied by the community centre. New homes?
Click here to view plans.
- Support the site to ensure daily news and issues covered by clicking at either Patreon or Ko-Fi
- There is also now a From The Murky Depths Facebook page. Click here to follow and see stories on your Facebook feed.
Looks like the council are finally going to deliver one of those attractive & beautifully maintained mixed-use community spaces you find in cities like Barcelona.
Horrible! What a soul-draining, spirit-crushing, examples of architecture! If I’m correct in my thinking, these buildings are rife with black mold outbreaks, poor ventilation, out-dated, inefficient, expensive to run heating systems, along with every other deficiency that has led to the demolition of other buildings of the same design, from the same era. These are the types of places that seem to be germination vessels for crime, addiction, gang activity, underachievement, and ever other societal ill!
C’mon Paul, the first image could pass for Barcelona (admittedly circa 1938 after a bombing raid). As for the bollards & semi-demolished walls, Gaudi eat your heart out.
It’s for the plebs, no need to make it pretty.