WCWRA History
The Wimbledon Common West area has always been unique, and the WCWRA was set up to protect the area. Paul Bonner has written a history of the WCWRA, illustrated with his photographs, to share the founding, development and achievements of the Association.
Contents
Background to the area
The Founding of the association
The Association's Development
The Association's Achievements
Background to the area
The area across the Common to the west of Wimbledon Village Green has a proud history of individualism. Up until the end of the nineteenth century it was a self-contained hamlet. It consisted of five large houses with substantial grounds, a farm, two laundries, a timber yard, a shop and a group of workers cottages. It also had two pubs, a small primary and secondary school and some almshouses.
In 1871 the farsighted MP for Wimbledon, Henry Peek, sponsored an Act of Parliament to preserve the Common as open land. This prevented any further development beyond the boundaries of West Side, West Place, North View and Camp View and limited building along the lower reaches of Camp Road to private land on the south side of the road.
The resulting enclave was an area almost unknown outside the Village and Parkside areas of Wimbledon. It tended to attract as residents individualists of one sort or another. Amongst others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were a campaigning feminist, an anti-vivisectionist and a theosophist group.
By the nineteen fifties and sixties, with the larger Victorian houses of North and Camp View turned into flats, the area had taken on a slightly bohemian air. It was a very mixed community. There were, amongst others, four actors, two artists, a poet, two cinematographers (one an Oscar winner), two lawyers, two journalists, a television producer, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, an architect, a chartered surveyor, an engineer, an accountant and a senior civil servant. And finally there was a somewhat unconventional industrialist and long-time doughty fighter of any threat to the area who became, in effect, the founder of the Wimbledon Common West Residents Association. His name was Tom Springer.
The Founding of the Association
In fact during this period the community suffered little outside interference, living under the benign governance of the then Wimbledon Borough Council. The only real threats came from nature. More than once the enclave was cut off by deep snowdrifts in The Causeway (then a two-way road) and West Side. The sense of community was social rather than political. People often threw parties for their neighbours but in 1977 an ad hoc committee organised a grand party for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in the school hall.
In a sense that organising committee was an embryo of the WCWRA. Not long afterwards the London Borough of Merton, which had taken over Wimbledon in the 1965 local government reorganisation, decided to replace the gentle swan-necked lamp posts and their dancehall-type mirrored reflectors and tungsten bulbs, that were characteristic of the area, with harsh concrete sodium streetlights. There was outrage at this threatened damage to the character of the area but the new Council adamantly refused to change its plan.
The residents formed an action group with Tom Springer at its head. When the council workmen had finished for the day, residents came out of their houses and pulled the new lampposts out of the still-wet cement and laid them carefully in the gutters.
This time it was the Council who were outraged. After the third time it happened, there were threats of legal action. The residents invited the Council officers responsible for the decision to a Sunday lunchtime meeting over wine. A compromise was reached. The old swan-necks had to go - they were deemed unsafe, as was tungsten lighting, but the Council accepted that the imposed designs were not appropriate to the character of the area. Victorian-style lamp lanterns were agreed, at a cost of some £50 per household.
Tom Springer then fought off a threat to develop the Old School (now The Study prep) into 'executive housing'. He was by now keen to get the support of other residents in his battles to preserve the area - not necessarily by the sort of direct action used against the lamppost imposition but by more regularised methods, like organised lobbying and publicity.
By 1989 he had formed a group that included residents with relevant professional expertise. Later, widening its constituency to include all West Side and Chester and Sycamore Roads, this became the Wimbledon Common West Residents Association. In 1994 Tom Springer stood down as Chairman and Paul Bonner took over.
The Association's Development
It was during his time that the Association formalised itself with a written constitution. In 1998 he was succeeded by Eric Benedict. Early in the new Millennium the Chairmanship at last moved away from North View to West Side, with the election of Bryan Barkes. All these chairmen were served by the same supportive and resilient Treasurer, David Jenkins, who also produced the much-praised WCWRA Newsletter (now effectively replaced by the web-site). David Jenkins has now been succeeded by John Hosking. Robert Holmes, as a long serving Committee member, also provided invaluable advice to successive chairmen - and continues to do so. It was he who, with the then owner of Manorcourt, defeated a plan by the Conservators to provide a Car Park on the Common opposite West Side during Wimbledon Fortnight.
The Association's Achievements
Other battles fought by the Association during these years include the battle to have Cannizaro Gardens locked at night and opened in the morning. Again a compromise was negotiated. The Council's workmen would lock the gates at night and a roster of residents would unlock them in the morning. Out of this dispute came the valuable spin-off from the Association - the Friends of Cannizaro Park.
Successful campaigns have included obtaining a separate cycle track across to the Village and the gaining of visits by the Mobile Library. When these were cut by the Council after three years, the facility was greatly missed by older residents in particular. There were more contentious disputes, like the negotiations to get the Commons Conservators to restrict commercial dog-walkers to no more than four dogs at a time.
There were Planning fights, like the objections to the number of houses proposed for the development of the Oak Tree House, White Chesters and IPD sites in Camp Road. In all these cases the Association was successful in reducing the housing density to limit the amount of traffic on the already overloaded Camp Road. Traffic has been the focus of much of the Association's work in defence of the area. It fought off an ill-conceived scheme to put a mini-roundabout at the intersection of West Side West Place, Camp Road and The Causeway. It also successfully defeated the Council's intention to put parking meters in the roadway of The Causeway and the plan to make the whole area a Controlled Parking Zone. And most recently access to the Association's activities has been opened up to all with this web-site.
All this could not have been achieved without a sizeable active membership of the Association. If you read this and live in our delightful area and are not a member, please join us by clicking on the membership link.
