Residents renew campaign to stop phone mast at Beaconsfield Gardens in Chiswick

Beaconsfield Gardens in bloom in the spring

Workmen have been digging holes and eying up a site which volunteers have spent hundreds of hours beautifying

Chiswick residents who live near Beaconsfield Gardens met last night in the Swan pub to discuss how best to stop a phone mast being sited in the gardens they have lovingly cultivated over the past three years, planting shrubs and thousands of bulbs.

There are some 50 or so volunteers who sign up regularly to tend the area, which is managed by the environmental organisation Abundance London. The garden, which used to be an unloved strip of grass running along Beaconsfield Road before it turns into Acton Lane, has become a meeting place for local people to enjoy and a wildlife haven.

That will all be ruined, volunteer Jen Thorndycraft told The Chiswick Calendar, if Ealing Council allows an 18.6 metre phone mast to be sited there.

Although the formal planning application for a phone mast has not yet been submitted, workmen from Cornerstone, which facilitates the requirements of phone companies for the siting of masts, have been there recently digging holes and surveying the land.

They also appeared two years ago, measuring up, but residents thought the threat had gone away. Two previous applications to put a mast on the same site in 2015 and 2016 were turned down, but the contractors have come back.

Ealing Council due to decide on whether Acton Green will remain a Conservation Area

Beaconsfield Gardens cultivated to attract insects

Ealing Council does not consider the area a ‘park’, as historically it came under the management of the housing department, Cllr Andrew Steed told us, which is why it had not been tended by the Council in the way other green spaces in the borough have been, but it has been protected to some extent by being part of a Conservation Area.

The Council’s Planning Committee is about to consider whether Acton Green should remain a Conservation Area, as part of a routine assessment which will be considered by the committee on 19 November.

“Being a Conservation Area doesn’t automatically mean they wouldn’t put a mast in”, Andrew told us, “but it might make it less likely”.

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Beaconsfield Gardens has been turned down twice before as s site for a phone mast

The site was turned down by the Council before as a suitable site for a phone mast ‘by reason of its size, sighting and design’, according to the wording of the notification. The Council decided:

‘The proposed communications mast would result in an incongruous and an unduly visually prominent addition to the public open space, to the detriment of the character and appearance of the area’.

“That was before thousands of hours of community work went into it”, Jen told me. “It would be madness if the Council allowed it now”.

She reckons by the time they have finished planting this year’s bulbs, over the three years they have been working on the garden they will have planted 20,000.

“We’ve put in a stumpery – wood that you allow to rot down so it makes a perfect habitat for insects. We let the grass grow and you can hear it buzzing with insects. It’s like being in the countryside”.

Andrew and Jen with Ealing’s Mayor and MP for Ealing Central and Acton Rupa Huq, at a community event in the Gardens in March 2024
L to R: Karen Liebreich, Director of Abundance London; Rupa Huq; Mayor Hitesh Tailor; Southfield ward councillor Andrew Steed; Residents group member Jen Thorndycraft

A mast “would destroy the character of the place”

They have a very good relationship with Ealing Council, she told me, and the Council has put in new trees as recently as this year.

The cabinets accompanying the mast would take up about 1.5 square metres initially, a relatively small area of the garden, but she said, no one would want to carry on working there or go there to spend time if there is an ugly great mast there.

“It would completely destroy the character of the place, and it would also unravel the volunteer group”.

Volunteering is an important way of combatting loneliness, she added.

A phone mast of the type they are expecting Cornerstone will apply to instal

Need for phone reception

Both Jen and Andrew acknowledge we all want a good phone signal, but they question whether a phone mast is needed in Beaconsfield Gardens.

“In other areas they’ve put masts on the top of buildings”, said Andrew. “There is a mast on the Swan pub, so there is some question as to whether another one is needed here”.

A more appropriate place, he suggested, might be somewhere like the South Acton Industrial Estate.

They are hopeful that, whether or not the area remains a Conservation Area, the Council will not allow a mast to be installed in the garden.

Beaconsfield Gardens

Wendell Park not considered suitable – so Beaconsfield Gardens should not be either

Cornerstone recently made a separate application for a site adjacent to Wendell Park.

“As part of the application they have to justify why they discarded other sites”, Jen told me.

“They discarded Wendell Park itself because they said: ‘It would be controversial to site a mast within a park or leisure space.

‘It was felt the local planning authority would take a dim view of such an application and issue a refusal’.

In the event, the site adjacent to the park was also turned down by Hammersmith & Fulham Council because of its visual impact in what was also a Conservation Area.

She is hoping Ealing Council will apply the same logic to their green, leisure space.