How many councillors does it take to trim a hedge?

Linden Grigg cuts back overgrown branches at Staveley Gardens

Chiswick Homefields’ Conservative councillors Jack Emsley and Linden Grigg turned their hand to hedge trimming, with mixed results, after months of casework failed to clear an overgrown pavement in Staveley Gardens

Guest blog by Councillors Jack Emsley and Linden Grigg

Representing Chiswick Homefields as councillors is a huge privilege, but also requires us to wear many hats. It ranges from the serious (becoming experts on housing law and holding Labour to account in the council chamber) to the fun (being trustees for some of Chiswick’s brilliant community groups), but also occasionally branches into the slightly surreal, which is exactly the role we played last weekend when we visited Staveley Gardens to trim a hedge.

Neither of us are gardeners, a fact underlined by our crude attacks on the hedges and lack of appropriate hand protection. Perhaps the closest we come to being landscape gardeners is that we also put lots of leaflets through your doors. However, we do both love the place that we represent, so when residents alerted us to a path in Staveley Gardens that had been covered by overgrown shrubbery for years, we did what any good councillor should do and… raised it as casework.

The council responded both quickly and efficiently, sending a team to go and have a look. To really keep on top of the issue, some months later a second team returned to have another good look. The pavement remained invisible beneath a heavy wig of unwanted overgrowth.

As all councillors eventually find out, raising an issue as casework doesn’t always guarantee success.

‘How hard can it be to just clear the pavement ourselves?’ we pondered over a pint one evening. A quick call to Abundance London, who very kindly lent us some tools, followed by a Google search of how to trim hedges, and a plan was hatched for your local councillors to roll up their sleeves and get on with the job ourselves.

A quick disclaimer: this sort of guerilla gardening shouldn’t be the default response to issues like this. However effective our efforts might have been, we aren’t planning on packing it all in to become on-demand landscape gardeners. In an ideal world, Hounslow Council would deliver the services it is supposed to and keep Chiswick clean and tidy. We all pay eyewatering amounts of council tax, so at the very least our pavements shouldn’t be impassable.

But this particular stretch of pavement was becoming a farce. It has been hidden behind overgrown bushes for years. Residents had raised it again and again, and Hounslow Highways had even visited the site, only to leave after 20 minutes with only the pathetic trimming of a small hedge on the other side of the road to show for it.

Councillors Jack Emsley (left) and Linden Grigg (right) with hedge trimmers borrowed from Abundance London

So, after our regular Saturday surgery at St Joseph’s Church in Grove Park (every first Saturday of the month, 9:30am to 10:30am), we departed for Staveley Gardens. We were armed with garden waste bags, hedge trimmers, several bottles of factor 50 suncream, and a determination to fix a problem Hounslow Council had ignored for years.

Our frustration on behalf of Staveley Gardens residents was the driving force behind the admittedly eccentric scene: two councillors more familiar with the cut and thrust of the council chamber doing battle with a local hedge, hacking and sawing away in the middle of the day during one of the hottest British summers on record in an attempt to undo years of neglect.

Optimistically, we thought it would take less than an hour. By lunchtime, we’d be able to stand back and admire a tidy, restored pavement, wander nonchalantly down to the Duck and Ball for a pint and a pizza, and regale anyone within earshot of our exploits. As anyone with even a hint of green in their fingers will know, that was slightly wide of the mark…

The Stavely Gardens pavement pre-cut

After about four hours of trimming, cutting, sweeping and raking, we were beginning to realise this was a slightly bigger undertaking than we had assumed. One of the electric trimmers broke after we tried to cut too close to the metal fence. The local postman, seeing our reserve of at least 20 garden waste bags becoming perilously low, took pity on us and gave us two empty post bags to use for waste. Residents approached, both delighted that we were finally fixing this long running issue and slightly concerned at the shade of red we were turning.

Finally, after four and a half hours, the pavement emerged from under the Staveley Jungle. Was it a lot more hard work than we’d anticipated? Absolutely. Was the final result perfect? Probably not, but we didn’t think it was too bad for a couple of amateurs.

The cleared pavement at Staveley Gardens

We were elected on a promise to keep Chiswick special. It’s something we’re committed to doing by (almost) any means necessary. If that means visiting neglected pavements and estates once a week armed only with gardening tools and a determination to keep our promise to the electorate, so be it.

The answer to the headline of this article is that it takes two councillors to trim a hedge, albeit pretty slowly. And if Hounslow Council continues to neglect areas like Staveley Gardens, you may see a lot more of us in gardening gear over the coming years.

Jack Emsley and Linden Grigg are Conservative councillors for Chiswick Homefields.