News

Letter to the editor: Little animal magic in Master Plan for Beckton

Alison McLucas, Newham Save City Farm

The cover of the Beckton Park Masterplan
Beckton Park Masterplan

Your recent reporting of the Council’s Beckton Parks Master Plan (Newham Voices March) gives readers a false impression and hope by referring to a city “animal” farm to replace the Newham City Farm that the Council closed some time ago. 

There was no specific commitment to “animal provision” within the plan approved by Cabinet and this is despite the public commitment made by Council leaders at meetings in 2021. In fact, the latest version of the plan suggests that animals are not so relevant these days because more people are following plant based diets. It only states that there is the potential opportunity for the reintroduction of farm animals at a point in the future but not as a priority from the start. 

It says that if there are to be animals, they will be functional to the operation of the farm but fails to recognise the important educational and therapeutic role farm animals have particularly for children with special educational needs, schools and young people needing experience for careers with animals. 

The focus of the community farm is very clearly more on a Green Skills Hub and Community Gardening. These are important, but they are activities which could and do take place in other places locally. 

They don’t necessarily need the safe, secure, enclosed, managed space which the former farm site could still provide, or address the needs of people who can’t access community gardening and green skills/ forest school activities but would benefit from animal provision. 

Most residents who have been involved in the engagement and consultation process from the beginning are unhappy with the Beckton plan which is quite different in some areas from the Final Report published in July 2023. 

It basically ignores many of the basic needs and views expressed by local people. Toilets and a café in Beckton District Park North rather than at the Will Thorne Pavillion (which was first supposed to be outside the Masterplan but now appears to be in it) and urgent upgrades to unsafe, poorly accessible paths and changing facilities for sports groups were high on the list. 

The Working Group established at the end of 2023, which only met twice, was subsequently disbanded with a reason given that participating residents had undermined the process. But, we believe the Parks’ Department has failed to answer challenging questions and has kept moving the goalposts and contradicting and changing what they have said previously which has been confusing, and frustrating. 

The Council is proudly heralding the Beckton Park Meadows as renewing biodiversity and animal habitats whilst they have destroyed or not yet cared for existing biodiversity and animal habitats. The wildflower meadows are again more of what the Council itself decided was best for us and not what people wanted. 

As far as I am aware, however, people are supportive of the urgently needed improvements to the currently dangerous Beckton Corridor pedestrian and cycle route, if it is actually ever implemented. We look forward to that happening!


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