Southwark Council surely isn't going to fall back into the hash they make of this in the1990s?

In 1991, they decided to be the only Council in the country (and probably the world) prepared to turn a city park into a graveyard.

They took 5 acres of Honor Oak Rec for burials, but stepped away from trying to take the rest of the Rec, and sell off adjoining land for development, in the face of huge protests. (After Friends of Honor Oak Recreation Ground was formed in 1992).

No other council in the country then, or now, would even consider turning a current urban park into a graveyard. And Honor Oak Rec is a massively well-used park. 't's right next to a high density Council estate, christened Tenement Town. Honor Oak Rec was chock even before it lost 5 acres.

The national body for cemetery management held a special session in 1997 (eighteen - 18 - years ago) to debate the situation in Southwark. This professional body offered its expertise to help resolve the so-called "burial crisis". The clear and universal response from these experts was that councils who want to carry on offering burial should reuse their existing grave spaces after a practical lapse of time.

This practice, to keep reusing the existing cemetery space, happens in cities all over the world and has done for hundreds of years.

Southwark has 100 acres of cemetery land, formed of Nunhead, Camberwell Old and Camberwell New. They have expert advice freely available to help them continue to use these cemeteries - if they decide to carry on offering burials within the borough. (Councils can choose to offer only cremation, cemeteries are hugely expensive to run, and fewer than one in five people opt for buriall). Why on earth are they talking about turning a heavily used 11 acre public park into a new cemetery, while refusing to use a whole 100 acres of existing cemeteries for burial?

Especially as there have been at least 8 or 9 "public consultations" on exactly the same issue since 1991. In 2001 I added up the Council's own figures on the cost of all those exercises to date, and it came to over £200,000. Two hundred thousand pounds. Spent on repeating the same information, and getting the same answers, over and over. By now, it must be, what, half a million pounds?

In 2012 the Council seemed to have heeded expert advice and to have come up with a well developed plan to make use of the existing Camberwell Old and New Cemeteries.

Southwark must know that if it goes back on this, it will only be because it is now giving in to pressure from the small but noisy group who want the cemeteries closed down and turned into a "hundred acre wood". The origin of the "hundred acre wood" is in the early 1990s when some ambitious individual at the London Wildlife invented the idea. The idea being that all three cemeteries, all this public space, would be taken out of public ownership and run by....the London Wildlife Trust as a nature reserve. Give them their due, the LWT enthusiasts are very good at public relations, and growing empires. But we all know that public relations is more concerned with image than reality. A huge amount of nonsense has been pushed at the public about the cemetery spaces. Their are petitions and posters all over the borough, claiming that the cemeteries are "ancient woodland". No they aren't - as a moment's thought or a minute Googling shows. They were all open land, laid out as cemeteries within the last 140 years. Trees grew up in Nunhead in my generation after the private cemetery company that owned it went bust. A lot of them were sycamores. Until very recently, huge parts of Nunhead were home to Japanese Knotweed and wild Rhododendron. Not ancient, not native. Large parts of Camberwell Old Cemetery have only become overgrown in the past 20 years.

Southwark must know that there is no policy or financial justification for backtracking and giving in to this PR campaign.

Does anyone know if we can call for a public enquiry into the hopeless waste of public funds and undermining of local democracy that has now been going on....and on..... and on.....for over 25 years?