After pressure from the Sydenham and Forest Hill Societies, Lewisham Council has announced that a public meeting will be held on August 21st at 7pm at Forest Hill Church and Methodist Centre, Normanton Road SE23, to explain the proposals for the redevelopment of Forest Hill Pools and Louise House. Despite requests, the time frame for the consultation was not extended and closed on August 8th.

Both local amenity societies have been extremely critical of the way in which the consultation process has been handled. In other recent consultations (eg the planned improvements to Sydenham Road and the 2006 boroughwide consultation on Controlled Parking Zones) the proposals were printed in an A4 brochure in the Lewisham ‘house style’ and delivered throughout the area. These brochures contained a tear-off sheet which could be completed and posted back to the town hall. In contrast, residents in Sydenham, Forest Hill and Perry Vale were alerted to the proposed redevelopment of the pools by means of a single sheet of A4 paper. This did not include images of the three proposals but gave residents two alternative ways of finding out about them: either via the Lewisham website (with an online response box) or by means of physical displays – an afternoon and morning in the car park of Forest Hill Station, and an ‘exhibition’ in Forest Hill Library. For the first few days the exhibition consisted of display boards propped on chairs, accompanied by the message that it was ‘incomplete, due to supplier failure’.

The more fundamental problem with the consultation process is that it has not involved the design brief from which the three options (see box on right) for redevelopment have emerged. Since the public consultation in 2005, at which a strong community preference for saving the pools was expressed, new facts have emerged – mainly the leakage of the pool tanks and the unquantifiable cost of retaining them. But the design brief which followed on from the decision taken by the Mayor and Cabinet in February this year excluded the possibility of retaining the frontage block of the Pools and Louise House – the historic streetscape of Dartmouth Road – which on the evidence of opinion in 2005 was a popular alternative.

A new campaign group has now emerged called Save the Face of Forest Hill in which several Sydenham Society members are active. As of now we support this campaign.

All three options involve the complete demolition of the Pools and Louise House. A new open space would link the site to the town centre, incorporating the ‘pocket park’ and the space in front of Salcombe House. The options are as follows:

1. A new building of approx 2,500sq m. One pool, some dry leisure facilities, no learner pool and no meeting room. Paid for by £7.5m from Lewisham; no new housing.
2. A new building of approx 3,000sq m. Pool, learner pool, 2 studios, fitness suite. Two blocks of new housing – one in line with Salcombe House, the other on Dartmouth Road, making a total of 25-30 housing units.
3. Facilities as 2, in a 7-storey building of approx 3,500- 4,000sqm to accommodate a large space for meetings, performance etc. This building would connect to the library by means of a walkway at second-floor level. (Interestingly, the graphic for option 3 indicates a line of Victorian windows in the east flank wall of the library – these currently do not exist and there are no plans to construct them.)

At a well-attended AGM of the Sydenham Society in April members voted overwhelmingly in support of an alternative ‘vision’ for the Dartmouth Road site – one that retained and enhanced the historic streetscape by means of preserving Louise House, the Superintendent’s House (the frontage block of the Pools) and created a new pools complex behind and to the side, utilising the pocket park, the loss of which would be offset by the ‘greening’ of the area to the front of Louise House and the Pools (see illustration below). Presented to Council officers in June, these ideas were rejected as not providing enough space for a modern leisure complex.

The Sydenham Society put forward the plans in good faith, in the belief that they had conformed to the design and space requirements set out by the Council. However, it was an ‘indicative’ scheme – meaning that it was basically a suggestion for what could go on the site and how the historic buildings could be used – possibly converted into flats to provide funding for the scheme. The Council’s response was that conversion into flats would not yield enough revenue – for example, their independent assessment of Louise House valued the building at just £168,000.

The Sydenham Society believes that a fourth option should be put on the table – one that retains the current streetscape and is not dependent on high-density housing for funding. The facilities may not be as ‘highspec’ as those on offer in options 2 and 3 but they would allow for the retention of the streetscape and not lead to the domination of Dartmouth Road by a leisure complex and housing shoehorned into an inappropriate space. Just like the Mayor and Cabinet, we wish to get swimming back onto the site as soon as possible, but in our view the demolition of the historic buildings and the construction of a large block of flats is too high a price to pay.

In the current economic climate, looking for a ‘crosssubsidy’ from housing to fund new leisure facilities is a risky strategy. Housebuilders are reporting major losses and development sites are currently being mothballed. Many commentators foresee a slump lasting from two to three years, with mortgage finance difficult to obtain – particularly for first-time buyers. Locally, this situation is exacerbated by the fact that a number of housing developments are currently under construction in Forest Hill – along with the Berkeley Homes development on Perry Vale a new block is going up at the rear of the Dartmouth Arms and the Print Works has recently been completed.

Funding the pools by means of the sale of flats in a new five or seven-storey building now seems like an outdated financial model. The risk is that the buildings will be demolished without a developer found to take on the project. It is our belief that in the current credit crunch a development which includes higher quality flats and townhouses, which would appeal to families, has more prospect of selling than one and two-bedroom flats of which there is currently a glut in Forest Hill and for which potential buyers are currently finding it almost impossible to raise mortgages.

The four public buildings on Dartmouth Road were built on ‘glebe’ land gifted to the people of Sydenham and Forest Hill by the Vicar of St Barts, the younger son of the Earl of Dartmouth. Holy Trinity School, the library, swimming pools and Louise House all reflect the Victorians’ interest in education, health and social care. As a set of buildings they are unique – a fact recognised by English Heritage who have commented on their interest as a group. While Louise House and the Pools are not as embellished as the library they are striking and attractive buildings in the Queen Anne style. Refurbished and renovated, and with their original features restored, they could be converted into desirable flats – demolition would be a scandal. The craftsmanship that went into their construction cannot now be easily replicated and the materials from which they were built are now too expensive for modern developers. As a group they lend a ‘sense of place’ to Dartmouth Road.

The London Plan supports the ‘recycling’ of old buildings because it is a more environmentally friendly approach to development. As English Heritage explain in their 2008 Heritage at Risk Register, this is due to the concept of ‘embodied energy’: ‘In bringing [neglected structures] back to life we not only respect the craftspeople who created them… but also the planet from which they are made. Demolition and replacement means not only losing all of the resources embodied in the original building but also the investment of yet more energy for demolition, the creation and delivery of more building materials, the building process itself and the disposal of the resulting waste. Each year more than 100 million tonnes of construction and demolition materials and soil end up as landfill – roughly half of the UK’s total waste.’

Each of the three options consists of a building which ‘turns its back’ on the listed library and is built right to the edge of the building line. The scale of options 2 and 3 (either a 5 or 7-storey building) appears completely at odds with most of the buildings in this part of Dartmouth Road; those blocks which date from the 60’s and 70’s benefit from generous open space to the front and do not dominate the landscape.

As a 'least bad' option, the Sydenham Society responded formally to the consultation process by selecting option 1.