About our Campaign
The campaign began with four main aims:
1) to persuade Kensington & Chelsea Council to find another means to pay for a new community building at Meanwhile Gardens other than with a housing development;
2) to prevent the Council from building over green space – the Scented Garden, or encroaching into the Wildlife Garden;
3) to persuade the Council to carry out a proper public consultation to discover what ideas local people might have for Meanwhile Gardens and certainly to consult before the Council submits a planning application with a preferred option;
4) to arrive at a place where the Friends of Meanwhile Gardens and Meanwhile Gardens Community Association, who manage the gardens, are working in co-operation so that we can face the Council together.
Where we are now:
After relentless pressure from this campaign, Cllr Paget-Brown, RBKC’s Cabinet Member for Regeneration, has written to us stating that “…we want to see whether a scheme can be designed which sees a new community centre and housing built within the footprint of the existing factory site, with no requirement to move the scented garden. Officers will be instructing consultants accordingly. We will discuss the resulting report with MGCA and MIND, with a view to then moving to public consultation”.
You can be sure that we will be watching the Council’s actions every step of the way. If we can get a scheme that protects the green space / Wildlife Garden, and includes public consultation before the planning application stage, then we will have achieved 2 of our objectives.
Another objective was achieved at our hugely successful “Big Meanwhile Gardens Campaign Gig” at Inn on the Green, (off Ladbroke Grove) on 14th October. It was at this event that FOMG and MGCA publicly agreed to work in co-operation, and we will both decide how to take that forward in the next couple of weeks. Apart from the fact that it’s better working together to achieve an aim, than not, there were people out there, who failed to understand what the campaign was about, branding FOMG as “the enemies of Meanwhile Gardens”. Nothing could be further from the truth. If this campaign did not exist, then the Council would probably not have decided to instruct consultants to investigate a new development design, nor would they be offering a public consultation on the outcome.
