The Thames Tideway Tunnel by Phil Stride

Author:Phil Stride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

King’s Stairs Gardens Public Meeting at The Bosco Centre, Bermondsey.

Given the length of the process (September 2010 to November 2013) and the detail involved, together with the passions shown by all of those with a view to our storage and transfer tunnel solution for London’s future waste water requirements, we had a lot of colourful experiences. In the end, as with many things in life, a great deal came down to the personalities involved.

Barn Elms and Putney Embankment Foreshore

The Barn Elms initial main tunnel drive site and ultimate CSO interception site, together with the nearby Putney Embankment Foreshore CSO interception site, have a strong historical heritage that is keenly felt by the local communities – for example, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, used to reside at Barn Elms Manor. Meanwhile, adjacent to the site at Putney is St Mary’s Church, the location of the human rights-related Putney Debates during the English Civil War. Against such a cultural backdrop, many local residents questioned the actual need to connect the associated CSOs to the Thames Tideway Tunnel. ‘Stop the Shaft’ were the principal catalyst behind local opposition at Barn Elms. They were specifically against a main tunnel drive site being located in a major west London area of Metropolitan Open Land and well-used sports fields.

Specific engagements, of which there were many, included our meetings with the Putney Working Group, where our plans at these locations were discussed with the local MP Justine Greening (who chaired a number of the meetings) and other local stakeholders. The meetings were held regularly from 2011 and were an exemplar of how a major project should interface with a local community. Justine Greening did an excellent job in inviting local community and business leaders to participate and we came up with a solution that really met the needs of local people. It was the only example where members of the group visited our offices at Paddington and sat down with the designers, working together to come up with solutions that were acceptable to all. Another was our public exhibition regarding the Barn Elms location on 14 June 2012 at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Wetland Centre at Queen Elizabeth’s Walk in SW13, where we attracted many local residents.

One of the most surreal experiences in the whole engagement process was the meeting at St Mary’s Church Hall in Putney, with Graham Stevens of Bluegreen UK and a very tolerant Justine Greening, to discuss blue-green alternatives to the project and how nanotechnology would soon make our solution redundant. We concluded that said nanotechnology was still being developed, and is yet unproven.

Other fond memories include a certain Putney resident who made a video to demonstrate that the Carnwath Road Riverside protestors were exaggerating their traffic issues on Carnwath Road, which she brought in to show me. At a public meeting in Putney, the same lady shouted out that Richard Aylard and I were the ‘two guys with the flash watches’. Also Sian Baxter, a Barnes lighting specialist, who showed

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