Following the row over the cherry trees that were to have been planted on Turnham Green, the trees will now be planted in Heston rather than Chiswick.

Cllr Joanna Biddolph blocked the tree planting on 15 February because she said members of the Friends of Turnham Green community group had raised ‘concerns’. .Jill Spencer, a member of the Friends’ Landscape committee, had complained that the decision hadn’t been made properly, despite a majority 21-7 vote at the Friends’ AGM in January in favour of planting the non-fruiting trees to fill in the gaps in an existing avenue of cherry trees.

Cllr Samia Chaudhary, Cabinet Member for Leisure Services, said today: “Despite productive meetings between members of the local community, unfortunately the tree planting event organised by the Friends of Turnham Green, which was postponed from February 15, has not been able to progress.

“The council has ambitions to see thousands of trees planted across the borough. We appreciate the efforts residents went to to get the cherry trees and understand their disappointment that the planting hasn’t happened.

“We have agreed to reimburse the costs of the trees and are relocating them to Sutton Row Park, Heston, where the local community has been planning a planting. The council always likes to support community groups who want to improve their local areas, and the borough, and hopefully agreement can be reached and and new trees will be planted on Turnham Green soon”.

The trees were to have been paid for by a private donation, along with other trees, yet to be decided on, elsewhere on the Green. But as a result of the cancellation of the tree planting the anonymous donor withdrew the offer.

Both Karen Liebreich of Abundance London, who organised the planting, and Rebecca Frayn, former chair of Friends of Turnham Green, resigned from the group in protest.

“Once a tiny minority, supported by Councillor Joanna Biddolph, successfully blocked our planting day last Saturday, despite the overwhelming vote in favour of the tree-planting at our well attended AGM, it became apparent that they had now set a precedent whereby a motion passed by a majority of our members will only actually be implemented if that vocal minority, together with Councillor Biddolph happen to agree with it” said Rebecca.

 

The camellias are in bloom at Chsiwick House. The annual show (free in the Conservatory) has been brought forward because the weather is so mild and the plants are already blooming their little socks off.

This year is the tenth anniversary show and will run daily between 10.00am – 3.00pm, from this Thursday, 27 February – Sunday 22 March.

In the words of the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, recently it’s been a case of ‘Water, water everywhere. Nor any a drop to drink’ as it’s rained heavily but the drinking fountain on Turnham Green Terrace has remained steadfastly dry.

All that is about to change. The water has been switched on. It still has to be tested and signed off by a plumber, but all being well we will soon have a working water fountain again on the Piazza.

The restoration of the disused fountain began nearly a year ago after Cllr John Todd secured funding to do the necessary work. It has been cordoned off while the work was being done, leading to complaints that the barricades around it were unslghtly and the work was taking too long.

Now it’s nearly ready to use. No more need for plastic bottles, as we can fill out reusable bottles from the drinking fountain and dogs can drink from the trough at the bottom.

The alternative modern fountains provided by Thames water are hideous and have been described as like ‘the love child of a exocet missile and a smurf’.

Thank you John Todd for persevering with the Victorian pink granite.

BBC journalist Julian Worricker interviews Michael White, formerly the Guardian’s political editor, assistant editor, columnist and foreign correspondent, for The Chiswick Calendar’s Media Club.

Michael wrote for the Guardian for almost 45 years and retired from the paper in October 2016. In nearly 50 years as a journalist he has done all kinds of writing but it was politics which fascinated him most.

‘I was always interested in politics and applied for a Westminster vacancy that was earmarked for someone else, who turned it down. Within a year, I was the Guardian’s sketch writer. A lucky fluke, but Machiavelli – a better observer than a doer – was right to say luck is half of everything’.

He was the Guardian’s Washington correspondent during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the paper’s political editor through the prime ministerships of John Major and Tony Blair.

What words of wisdom does he have to pass on, having had a front row seat at so many significant events? What were his greatest achievements and most embarrassing moments? What does he think of Boris Johnson and the current state of British politics? Or of the existential crisis facing the newspaper industry?

Come and find out and ask him a question or two of your own.

Date: Tuesday 10 March at 7.30pm
Venue: Boston Room at George IV
Tickets £10 / £8.00 students and Club Card holders

The Cookbook Festival, after two years working alongside the Chiswick Book Festival, will not be a part of the Book Festival this year over the 11 – 14 September weekend. Instead they will develop their supper clubs and workshops throughout the year.

Publicist for the Cookbook Festival Donna Freed said: “After two years under their wing, we’re now ready to fly on our own. We will continue with our schedule of supper clubs celebrating cookbook authors and fantastic food, as well as workshops, book launches and other unique and entertaining events”.

Torin Douglas, director of the Chiswick Book Festival, said: “We are delighted to have helped the Cookbook Festival establish itself in Chiswick and grow to a position where it can now go it alone. Lucy Cufflin and her team run fantastic events in an area that loves its food, and we will continue to work with them, promoting their supper clubs and other exciting activities. We are very grateful for their energy and enthusiasm, which has extended awareness of the Chiswick Book Festival to a new audience, and for helping us raise even more money for our charities.”

Cookbook Festival founder, Lucy Cufflin said: “We are looking forward to unveiling what comes next for the Cookbook Festival; we have big plans so please stay tuned.”

Their next event will be a supper club with award-winning cookbook and travel author Eleanor Ford, with a menu from her book Fire Islands offering recipes from Indonesia. News of their rolling programme of events will appear on their website: www.cookbookfestival.org

The proposal to set up a flower market on Chiswick High Rd met with an enthusiastic response at a public meeting in George IV last Thursday. The idea, put forward by a consortium of residents and businesses, including The Chiswick Calendar, is to have a market on the first Sunday of every month in Chiswick’s historic market place – the car park outside the police station– to attract people into the area and revitalise the local economy.

The problem of empty shops in the High Road is as bad as it has ever been. Ollie Saunders, whose idea the flower market is, told the packed meeting he would like to see the market become “the Columbia Road of the West – but better”.

“If you have not been to Columbia Road recently – go! I have been going for the last 15 years and it has seen a massive gentrification of the retail economy. There are 60 independent shops and over 5,000 shoppers on a Sunday morning. There is much doom about our High Streets but for them to thrive they have to offer things the internet cannot – it’s about personal interactions and having a great place to go to. Chiswick has this”.

Ollie noted that if you look at the entry and exit figures for London Underground stations at Turnham Green and at Kew Gardens on Sundays, it indicates an exodus, as people leave Chiswick to spend their Sunday elsewhere, while people in Kew tend to stay put and are joined by an influx of people from outside the area.

Karen Liebreich, Director of Abundance London, said the group had been working on the project for three weeks, talking to traders in Chiswick and potential stall holders, developing a business plan and setting up a Community Interest Company to run it.

“We are looking to work in partnership with LB Hounslow, who would deal with matters such as traffic management orders and cleaning up after the market”.

She said the group had been “inundated with ideas” from people who shared the concern about the High Rd and the desire to reverse its decline. One of those ideas is to have free Cargo bike deliveries taking plants to people’s homes for them, with a small charge for other purchases they’d made on the High Rd.

Our ambition is to have the market up and running by the beginning of May and to run a six-month pilot and for the market to generate enough income to pay a market manager to run it.

Support from local businesses

Ben Bullman, General Manager of George IV, was on the platform representing local businesses. He said he believed the pub should be the heart of the community; he wanted George IV to be part of this and said Fuller’s would support anything which would help re-invigorate High Rd. He’d be happy to open the pub early to provide traders and customers with breakfast and to extend the creche facility which the pub already offers on Sundays for children to engage in art and craft activities.

John Fitzgerald, who runs Snappy Snaps and has been a retailer in Chiswick High Rd for more than thirty years, said “I love the positive energy. It’s what we need. It’s a no-brainer, a very positive thing”, a comment which was echoed by the meeting, attended by 120 – 130 people, with many traders among them.

Anette Megyaszai, who runs Chateau, on the corner of Linden Gardens and the High Rd, was not able to be at the meeting but gave her enthusiastic support: “people don’t just come to a hight street to shop any more. What attracts them is an experience, especially one they can put on Instagram, so a flower market is perfect”.

Dominic Hughes, who runs Pot Pourri florist, was at the meeting and has given the Flower Market his enthusiastic support. Spencer and Jason Wheeler were also there. They too have said they’d be willing to take part, although they already run a stall on the High Rd.

Effect on parking

Debbie, who lives in Elliott Rd, said she thought the flower market was a great idea but would be worried about people parking in her street. “A super idea, but it will need traffic management”.

Ollie agreed that the market would need the council to design a traffic management plan to prevent that. Having the market would probably mean losing 37 parking spaces, but the inconvenience to drivers would be offset by more people coming into the area, bringing trade to the shops and restaurants. The disabled parking spaces would need to be relocated nearby. We think we have sourced private land for the traders to park their vans so they would not be taking up public parking spaces.

Other ideas to revitalise the High Rd

Speaking for The Chiswick Calendar, I introduced some of the other ideas we’d received: a proposal for a Vintage Clothing market, Art and Crafts shows and a Vegan food market. I also talked about our Club Card scheme, which enables local businesses to offer deals and discounts to subscribers to our newsletter, as a way to encourage people to spend their money locally.

Ruth Mayorcas suggested we follow Twickenham’s example and have guided tours of Chiswick, available on market days. Charmian Griffiths, a Blue Badge guide in the audience, said she would be very happy to do guided walks.

The organisers of the meeting have recorded these and other ideas, to see how we might progress them.

Photographs above: Left to right Bridget Osborne, Ben Bullman, Karen Liebreich, Ollie Saunders, Andy Murray

Landlords and Tenants association

Ollie Saunders also spoke about an idea which is separate, but related, of setting up a Landlords and Tenants association, to share information about rents and rates in the area, so that new traders starting up here aren’t persuaded to pay higher than the market rate.

That idea too was enthusiastically supported. Kambiz, who runs Lizard women’s fashion in Turnham Green Terrace, said he’d been running his shop for 36 years. “The only way Chiswick can flourish is to have independent shops. Rents are the biggest problem”.

Diane Barton, who owns the dress shop De Joli, spoke also about the problems she’s had with rent and rate hikes and the unfairness of it.

Jeremy Day, who took over as Commercial Director at Whitman & Co at the end of last year, told the meeting: “The future is rosy. Rents are coming down”. He said that in some shopping centres rents were down 30% and pointed out that when Brentford Stadium opens, it will bring thousands of people to western end of the High Rd. Jeremy will be working with Ollie to set up the Landlords and Tenants association.

Ideas needed for the Turnham Green part of the High Rd

Elizabeth Whittaker, who used to be a member of the old Chiswick Traders Society, said she thought the market was a wonderful idea, but that we should think more widely about the whole of Chiswick.

Mandana Kalati, who owns The Wild Bunch café opposite Turnham Green and is surrounded by empty shops, put in a plea for something to regenerate the other end of the High Rd which is dead because of planning blight. Lendlease bought the Empire House site, winning a court action against redevelopment, terminated the leases of the shops, cut down the mature trees on the site and then failed to develop it, leaving a parade of empty shops for several years.

Lou Reddan, who works and lives in the Old Packhorse pub, also spoke about how depressing it was at that end of the High Rd. “I would like to see something happening on Turnham Green – festival events such as Ealing Comedy Festival and maybe artists using the shop fronts”.

Leader of LB Hounslow Steve Curran was at the meeting, as were several of our local councillors, Sam Hearn, Ron Mushiso, Ranjit Gill and Joanna Biddolph. The meeting was chaired by Andy Murray of the Grove Park Group.

Photographs above: Karen Liebreich MBE, Ollie Saunders, Bridget Osborne

Who’s Who In the Flower Market group

Ollie Saunders

Ollie Saunders has lived in Chiswick for 15 years and is a commercial surveyor with 25 years of experience in London advising commercial property owners and occupiers. He leads the UK commercial valuation business at JLL (which used to be called Jones Lang LaSalle). He has recently worked on the acquisition of Olympia and the IKEA deal in Hammersmith, as well as valuing theatres in the West End and data centres in Slough, and portfolios of garden centres. He lives in Devonshire Road and has shared an allotment on the Promenade since 2007.
He helped form a group called Freehold in 2011 which kept him busy on improving diversity and inclusion in the real estate business for the LGBT community and now has more than 1,200 members with a mentoring and employer engagement programme.

Karen Liebreich MBE

Karen Liebreich MBE is best known in Chiswick as the project manager of a number of community projects which have been highly beneficial to Chiswick. She set up Abundance London to collect unwanted fruit from people’s gardens, involving local schools to do the picking, to use the fruit in preserves and juices rather than letting it go to waste.

She has organised a programme of ‘guerrilla gardening’ projects and planted trees, shrubs and flowers in public spaces around Chiswick. Along with her former co-director at Abundance London, Sara Cruz, she designed and organised the installation of the Chiswick Timeline mural on the railway bridge at Turnham Green Terrace. Last year she refurbished the area of common ground beside it, replanting it, buying new benches and installing a community artwork on the wall, rechristening it the Turnham Green Terrace Piazza. When she’s not doing all of that, she is also quite a prolific author.

Bridget Osborne

Bridget Osborne edits The Chiswick Calendar. The website is a ‘celebration of life in Chiswick’ with daily listings of all the events going on in the area, from the biggest and most commercial to the tiniest event put on by local community groups and charities. The Chiswick Calendar also puts on its own events: a monthly Jazz club in the Boston Room of George IV, annual art and photography exhibitions at the Clayton Hotel Chiswick, a Media Club discussing journalism and ad hoc current affairs discussions.

The Chiswick Calendar Club Card scheme is a Shop Local initiative, to encourage people to spend their money locally. See all the current deals and discounts on offer here.

Also involved in the group are surveyor Steve Nutt, landscape gardener Stefano Marinaz and events organiser Amanda Parker. Other local professionals are supporting the venture in a wider group acting as consultants.

We are in the process of setting up a website for the Flower Market. If you have any ideas or comments about the market or about revitalising the High Rd, or if you would like to volunteer at the market

email us at: info@chiswickflowermarket.com
follow us on Twitter @ChiswickFlowers

We are delighted that Wave Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club has joined The Chiswick Calendar Club Card scheme.

Wave Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a friendly and focused BJJ and martial arts club based in Chiswick right by Stamford Brook station.

As well as BJJ they offer classes for women’s self-defence, Muay Thai, wrestling, MMA, movement flow and kids capoiera. Classes are size limited for all levels for both children and adults.

The Club Card offer is £50 of credit towards your first payment when using discount code “CHISWICK” This can also be used towards any of the club’s great beginner offers.

The first lesson is in any case free.

wavebjj.co

There’s lots of great stuff to do with children in and around Chiswick this week.

There’s a fabulous programme of children’s theatre, with The Man Who Wanted to be a Penguin on today, Tuesday 18 – Thursday 20 February for 3 – 10 year olds at Watermans in Brentford and Star in the Jar at the Lyric, Hammersmith from today until Saturday 22 February.

There are all sorts of making and doing classes, from making a flying wooden bird puppet or string art at the Maker station in Brentford, to a kids cooking class, teaching them how to make cornbread muffins and chocolate chip cookies at the Italian Job in Devonshire Rd.

Lots of physical activities on offer too, with half term camps at The Little Gym offering gymnastics, dance and martial arts for 3 – 12 year olds and ArtsEd offering drama sessions (both at a Club Card members discount).

William Hogarth School has a Mad Science camp daily from 10.00am – 3.00pm for 4-11 year olds.

For these ideas and many more, have a look at our half term guide here.