If you haven’t visited the Westfield Stratford City website, its well worth a look. After stagnating for a long time, its recently been re-designed, sporting a flashy new look with some nice slideshows featuring cgi impressions of the finished article and some pics of how the work is progressing.
Stratford City - Northern Arcade
A mural featuring Leytonstone’s most famous son, Alfred Hitchcock, sporting a studded leather jacket has been painted outside 491 Gallery’s “Vertigo” building on Grove Green Road, Leytonstone…
Vertigo Mural: Alfred Hitchcock
Seems to have met with a mixed reaction. I quite like it, certainly brightens up the outside of the building – I’m sure Hitch would be amused. Further info on the 491 Gallery project can be found at www.491gallery.com.
Waltham Forest Guardian reports that the Tesco Express in Wanstead could open before the end of the year. A planning application to site a loading diectly in front of it had been rejected by Redbridge Council, holding up progress. However this has now been resolved, with Tesco agreeing to make deliveries via Grosvenor Road instead, so work can now press ahead to fit out the store.
Press release from Fight the Flights…
Anne-Marie Griffin of Fight the Flights said: “The High Court has today given us costs protection for our legal challenge to Newham’s decision allowing increased flights from London City Airport”.
Without costs protection, Fight the Flights would have been at risk of unlimited costs liability and could not have proceeded with the case. Costs protection is only normally given where the Court recognises the public importance of the case.
“This is a very important case and we now look forward to pursuing the case to the next stage.”
Fight the Flights is a pressure group formed in response to the application by London City Airport to increase the number of flights to 120,000 per year. Many Leytonstone and Wanstead residents have already been affected by recent increases and wider flight paths due to greater use of jet aircraft. Things are going to get much worse if this expansion goes ahead. Further details on the Fight the Flights Website.
A point was made at the recent Leytonstone Community Council Meeting regarding the state of Leytonstone High Road. The speaker had noted that 2 years ago the main uses for buildings on the High Road in South Leytonstone was…
He had spoken at a Community Council Meeting then about the state of the buildings there – badly run down with trees growing out of the roofs and had requested that the council do something about it.
Leytonstone High Road
So, since 2 years has passed what’s happened. Well, he’s done the same survey again and the new top uses for buldings on that part of the High Road are as follows…
Buildings are in a worse state than ever with even more trees growing out of their roofs.
Unfortunately when this point was raised the majority of councillors were out of the room deciding on Community Council Funding. However, Councillor John Macklin was present and spoke about the assumption made by the council that the Olympic Delivery Authority will be stumping up some cash to allow fund regeneration work on the High Road. Unfortunately it now seems that this money is not going to materialise and there’s no other money in the kitty. Hardly surprising given the current economic climate – Boris and the ODA are trying to cut back the main spend on the Olympics, never mind worrying about those of us on the periphery.
The tragic thing is that these are great Victorian buildings, letting them get into this state is absolutely criminal.
Driving down the High Road these days literally makes me cringe because its in such a sorry state. Surely something can be done – maybe the only way is to get up a ladder myself to chop those roof trees down!!!
Seems that Kirkdale’s has unfortunately bitten the dust. A double blow after the loss of The Loaded Dog. The way things are going pretty soon there won’t be anything left in Leytonstone!
As I sit on the committee of LARA, I attended the Leytonstone Community Council meeting on 12th October. We had applied for funding, which fortunately we got (hurrah!). There were many other benficiaries on the night, as each ward (Leytonstone, Cann Hall and Cathall) had a £10,000 pot to distribute amongst the various applicants, all voted for by the attendeed with a final decision made by the councillors. There was also a £5,000 pot for those applicants which didn’t fall into a particular ward. The majority of that went to the Leytonstone Festival (good news), though that initially looked like the Leytonstone Arts Trail would miss out. Fortunately Leytonstone Ward had a surplus, so that was given to them – great news as they did such a sterling job during this year’s festival.
E11 seems to have more than its fair share of apathy, so since the forum on this site was pretty much dormant (expect for a constant stream of attempted spam from our friends in Russia!) I’ve decided to ditch it. This goes hand-in-hand with a general re-focus/re-design, leaning towards a more regular blog/news site. I’m also currently working (well, trying to work) on www.leytonstone.org.uk which has more of an arts/editorial feel as well as aggregating streams from various other Leytonstone related sites. Hopefully the two will compliment each other rather than clash.
Recent Comments