does anyone know of any new activity with the pools story, must admit i havent read this thread for a couple of weeks?

any news from the council or movement on any listing of the pools building?

I was informed today that another application to list the pools was once again rejected by English Heritage despite the list of Louise House next door. This leaves the way open for Lewisham council to consider options that retain the frontage or demolish the entire pool building.

I hope the council will consider both possibilities and make sure we get the best pools facility possible, and find some use for Louise House at the same time.

more than a year has passed since this thread was started, and we seem to be no nearer to getting a new pool in FH - possibly even further away, given that the development would have been dependent on some new housing to subsidise the cost.

We are in the middle of award ceremony season, so perhaps we should create the new award of 'how to lose a community facility forever' - and present it to the man who decided getting Louise House listed would be a good idea!

Ah, that's not true. Wait till the snow melts and we can all have a swim on the tunnel undr FH station. Chilly I grant you but still a pool.

Glad to see this thread bumped, even with a rather provocative post!

Seems to me that it is time for Lewisham to cough up for a few boxes of assorted end of line tiles and a big bag of grout and get one of their chaps to patch it up.
A swimming pool is not a space rocket after all - just a big hole in the ground.

Something patched up is better than nothing at all.

There is a Forest Hill Pools Stakeholder Meeting this Thursday 5th. With luck, interested parties will get an update and may even be able to post some news here.

I'll get my suit out and write a speech then, but I won't be doing a Kate Winslet.

The current state of play with regard to Forest Hill Pools is that we are awaiting the outcome of a Feasibility Study ordered by the Mayor and Cabinet on 17th September 2008. This study will look at the land and money available and consider, among other things, the possibility of retaining the pools frontage block. I am hoping that we will hear more about the results of this at the Stakeholders? Meeting on Thursday 5th February 2009.

In the mean time there have been a number of developments:

1) The Save the Face of Forest Hill Campaign has found common cause with the Forest Hill Society and the Sydenham Society on two fronts. We are all pressing Lewisham Council to improve their consultation methods for any new designs and to hold an architectural competition this time round.

2) A SFFH supporter and local architect has produced a series of sketch proposals. These demonstrate that it is possible to fit in two new pools behind a retained frontage block and suggest ways in which the retained building could be reused perhaps as a cafe and gym. These sketches have been shown to the Sydenham Society, the Forest Hill Society and two local councillors at an informal meeting. They were formally presented to Lewisham council officers at a meeting at the Civic Centre on the 8th January 2009. There has been no response to these ideas as yet.

3) We and others have had discussions with a local playwright and artist with a view to investigating a proposal for the reuse of Louise House as an arts centre and rehearsal space.

The SFFH Campaign Group is seeking to raise five agenda items on Thursday:
a) Improving consultation
b) Having an architectural competition
c) Asking about the Feasibility Study
d) Presenting a range of ideas about the future of Louise House
e) Presenting the sketch proposals to the Stakeholders' Group to test opinion

I am sure that minutes of the meeting will become available on this site once it has taken place.

I think Tim deserves an award for his hard work in saving what will be a great local asset.

If anyone thinks that the pool would have been built lby now if the current buildings had been saved, then think again.

Has the council done up the high street in Sydenham yet? No, it's delayed.

Has the council finished "lewisham 2000/Lewisham gateway yet? No.

Has Bell Green been done up yet? No.

Has the new pool near lewisham station been finished yet? No.

The councils plans for the pools were dependent on creating housing. As you can see next to the station in Forest Hill central and the empty flats on Kirkdale, new builds are not selling, not generating income.

If you didn't have people like Tim around, the council would destroy yet another interesting building and you could be left with landfill for years with no guarantee of a pool and no Louise House or Pools building.

So I, for one, would like to congratulate Tim and everyone involved on his hard work.

Well I think that this is a rather selective revision of history.

First, option one was entirely supported by their capital funding (cash that they have) without any receipt from housing.
Second, the other options were only relying on receipts from housing for a relatively small percentage of their budget and it is entirely possible that had receipts from housing failed to materialize the sum could have been found in the Council budget or borrowed through prudential borrowing.
Third, Lewisham Council recently built a rather good pool in Deptford, completely out of capital funding that was made to appear almost magically out of a sudden "previously unidentified underspending" of a few millions, just as an example of how money can be found sometimes if there is the will.

I think that the commitment of Lewisham Council to build the new pool could not have been clearer, they wanted to get rid of an old building that they didn't want to maintain and make space for a few houses to help them with their housing targets. They made clear that they would have built a new pool and committed a large sum. That was their agenda, you may disagree with it but it's not any absolute evil.

I think that it is quite possible that by now works would have started on the new pool, and this becasue we're only just over a year away from election and failing to do so would have meant a much bigger risk of the end of the Labour administration of Lewisham than the current one. Lewisham would have looked for a developer for the housing part and failing to find one the site would have stayed empty until either the market picks up again, whenever that is, or a publicly funded social development is built.

With the current situation there will be financial hurdles to face and possibly compromises will have to made and let's hope for the best. I am still convinced that the listing of Louise House was not a well thought decision really.

I'm glad that things are moving on however find it a little rich for some to cajole the council for delays when a major factor in same was the disruption of the due process by the listing of Louise House by getting their mates round to do them a favour. Thats what happened here. And don't give me any more about impartial value free judgement - theres no such thing.

A great deal could have been achieved and cross subsidy in place before the housing market collapsed. Sometimes its good to realise when the opportunity is there and when you need to make the most of it.

I trust the Face Off Forest Hill campaign will also be trying to secure funding for this new Louise House venture, funding that is revenue as well as capital, and funding which does not a) have to come out of the public purse and b) have to come out of the expenditure reserved for the Pools thereby causing even further detriment. And hopefully it will last longer that many of the other inspired new ventures in Forest Hill.

The fact is that local people want and always have wanted a decent facility, not an monument to destitution, repression and child abuse masquerading as historical cultural capital- another nice piece of revisionist history along with the usual Sir Steve bashing.

Well, I suppose that's a counterbalance to the new myth that Lewisham has been steadfast in its desire to provide decent swimming facilities on this site and has only been thwarted by a load of conservation loons - or that any dissatisfaction with, or criticism or scrutiny of His Steveness must be an unjustified and unfounded personal attack.

Lewisham have undertaken to publish on their website, the presentation made last night to the Stakeholder Group. It's not there yet. The Council is looking for comment from stakeholders by the end of next week for input to the Mayor and CAbinet meeting on 28 February. The following is deliberately made without comment:

Three options were presented, two of which involved using the redundant Council depot on Willow Way.

Option 1 - A proposal putting housing and a lesure centre on the existing site.

Option 2 - A leisure centre on the existing site with only Louise House used for housing. Housing to part finance the project to be built on the Willow Way site.

Option 3 - A leisure centre to be built on the Willow Way site part financed by housing on the leisure centre site.

Oops Sorry!
Option 3 should say "... part financed by housing on the existing site"

And the Mayor and Cabinet Meeting is 25th February (not 28th).

Following on from the meeting last night the Council is in the process of updating its website. In the meantime here is a link to the presentation made to the stakeholder group:

http://www2.lewisham.gov.uk/lbl/document...050209.pdf

A report presented to the Mayor and Cabinet on 25 February will contain reworked plans for the site. Details of the 3 draft options, together with estimated costings and valuations, will be included in the report and will be available to members of the public 5 working days before the meeting.

One of the options is a second Sydenham Pool rather than a replacement for the Forest Hill Pool. I think it would be a real shame to lose swimming on the current site and it would see more businesses in Dartmouth Road going the way of Provender. However, the Willow Way site sounds good for housing, it is a shame that the council did not manage to come up with this idea sooner.

I'm going to need to study the details of this report before commenting further.

From a brief look at the PDF, I am stunned...

When did relocation to Willow Way become an option for Forest Hill Pool? Not only that, but Willow Way is noted in the summary as the ONLY affordable option.

I also notice (the first ever?) reference to a design competition (bizarrely using Option 3 to illustrate from), but only to say doing this would take an additional 10 months (is that such a big deal after all this) - no mention of it as one of the options for the mayor's decision on 25 Feb.

Am I going crazy?

Option 3 is not acceptable. It puts the pool right up by the junction with Kirkdale. For someone coming from Honor Oak (me!), it's probably about the same as going to the Bridge. And what a mess they've made of the existing site - the modern housing does not sit at all well with the retained Victorian frontage. Ugh!!!

Assuming that the retention of the front is a given, the only acceptable option is option 2, which is automatically ruled out by reason of cost.

I feel that their scoring matrix is unfairly skewed. And as for planning issues, why is it acceptable to build modern housing on the leisure centre site, but not on the old depot site? Why not offer to "swap" employment site designation with the existing pools site. Employment is a hot issue at the moment, so that's probably going to swing the deal. It used to be housing, but that's not the gravy train it used to be, so you'll find them racking up the density as they go along.

I could rant on for ages .... Basically the whole thing stinks!

Lewisham Council obviously want to build Option 3.

This can be seen from the disgusting degree of spin on the feasibility of each of the 3 options, which, just like the previous 'consultation' amounts to blackmail on three counts:-

1) 'You can have a pool in Forest Hill if you accept the demolition of the frontage and high-density housing' (wouldn't want to be a resident, given it looks highly likely to be built on the cheap, probably out of c**p material which will result in a huge repair bill within 20 years or so), or

2) 'If you insist on a conservation/decent option for the look of the area or comfort of residents of housing, we will take the pool away from you altogether' (ironically resulting in them rewarding the very area whose 'activist residents' and their FH-based front organisation SFFH have done the most to put a spanner in the works - congrats guys BTW, this is better for you than you could ever have dreamed of! ), or

3) 'If you push for a competition to produce a design which might prevent us from doing one of the above, the pool will take a lot longer to build' (Although in fairness, the competition would genuinely take time to organise, showing it up against Option 3 - The Rush Job for comparison is a heinous and transparent tactic amounting to a form of threat IMO)

If Option 3 goes through, I will never vote for Labour in a Council election again, I intend to ensure that the Lewisham Labour Party are aware of the fact, and encourage everyone else who is as disgusted as me at this to do the same.

Textbook Lewisham Council.
But it doesn't end here because you know what's the risk of building a new pool in the catchment area of an old one? That the old one goes out of fashion and is declared unaffordable.
And so the revenue budget for the Bridge could ed up offsetting the investment for the new pool and Lewisham end up with 4 pools instead of five.