A litany of nonsense
It appears that the issues over the changes to hiring times for the public hall in Woolwich just won't go away. The Asian Chamber of Commerce appears to still have serious concerns about why the changes occurred, and two public questions were submitted to the Council meeting last week. The responses were, to say the least, interesting.Firstly, the Council leader confirmed that the changes were made due to complaints from people living in the local area. What however we found most interesting was the list of reasons given for the changes. In fact they’re so interesting we're going to go through each of them here.
1: Apparently, there’s a problem with people "drinking, urinating and vomiting" in Market Street. Given the road is directly opposite the Director General is this really something that can be attributed to the public hall? Does the public hall get regularly hired out to groups of binge drinker and those that publicly urinate?
2: There is apparently lots of loud talking and closing of car door "well after" the 11pm closing time. If it's well after the closing time how can it be linked to the hall? Again, the Director general is across the road.
3: There was a problem with vehicles driving the wrong way down the one way street. Well doesn't that sound familiar? Why can't the same high-minded principle of enforcement be applied elsewhere in the Borough?
4: There is illegal parking on the street. Correct us if we're wrong here, but isn't Woolwich Police Station on Market Street? Oh no, hang on, it's only open Monday to Friday, 0700 to 2000 and Sunday 1000 to 1800.
5: There were also a number of complaints about "lack of adequate cleaning of street". Yes, that's right. The failure to clean the street is not the fault of the Councils, it's the fault of the people that hire the public hall. Why on earth didn't we see that?
It gets better though; Chris Roberts went on to say that the changes to opening times had "assisted in reducing, though not entirely eliminating the problem". Could that possibly be because the reasons given are spurious nonsense and would happen regardless of the times the hall was hired out?
We did, however, get to the crunch of the matter in the leader's response to the second question on the subject. He said the "cost associated with managing noise nuisance and anti social behaviour" was problematic. So there you have it. It's too expensive to deal with anti-social behaviour and noise nuisance on a street that is not more than 200m long and has a police station at one end.
And people wonder why we set this site up?
posted by greenwich.watch at 8:44 am
4 Comments:
Not that I use the place so I'm not certain if it is still open, but surely Fusion the nightclub next door to the town hall has a late licence, which must contribute to the vomit, urine and rubbish outside. Also I went to a wedding at the Town Hall a few years back and the worst problem was the dog crap on the pavement outside, perhaps they hired the hall to Crufts the night before!
This hall has been used over the years for saturday night dances, dance school shows, weddings, and practically any other cumunal get together, we have had Teddy boys, Mods, Rockers, and various other groups, I have attended many of these various functions and cannot remember one instance where there has been serious problems, even on the nights that the poly had a dance that coincided with any of these. Granted there was nearly always security on the door, but they never appeared over worked.
If I recall apart from the Police Station, courts, and health centre, there are only four houses in this street, there are other halls in the borough, in far more densely populated areas, are they also to be given the same consideration
I think it depends on who lives in the street.
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