He has since reported back and I paraphrase here a letter he received from Director of Housing Denise Hadfield:
- the Anti-Social Behaviour Team are liaising with police. If the perpetrators are identified as tenants "appropriate enforcement action will be taken"
- Wardens and Safer Neighbourhood Team have been alerted and are increasing their patrols
- an audit of estate safety has been requested from the Lewisham Crime Reduction Partnership
- Greenscene (Glendales to you and me) have pruned all the bushes (where muggers hide)
There is presently no CCTV on the estate. There perhaps needs to be something covering the Ha'Penny Hatch area. Creekside itself is not very well lit. Residents have opposed CCTV in the past, and it is likely there are not the resources anyway to maintain it.
Please leave your comments if you have any. Do you feel unsafe on the estate? Have you seen a warden recently?
I don't feel unsafe in the area at all. The only problem as you say is the ha'penny hatch as the lighting is down at the moment. A camera there (even a fake) would act as a deterrant as it is a bit isolated and with blind corners.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that someone has put up a (home-made or studio-made) periscope on the Greenwich side of the Hatch, highlights the problem of visibility.
ReplyDeleteReturning to Creekside at around 9pm a couple of weeks ago, I became aware that there were people on the bridge but as the approach is on a bend and the lights aren't working, I couldn't see who it was. So, with hearing turned up to maximum sensitivity, I found myself trying to assess whether I was walking into an ambush, holding to the left-hand side so that there was no direct line of vision. A very short while later, with a ''if it's going to happen, it's going to happen'' sort of fatalism, I decided to go on.
It actually turned out to be 2 police, or community support police, who had stopped 2 rather crusty-looking two men on bikes, and who appeared to be searching them.
So, a mixed account: yes, it poses risks with restricted visibility, broken lighting, no CCTV. On the other hand, at least - for that night - it was being policed. And it is quite well used, bringing a ''safety in numbers'' factor into play.
On an incidental note, can someone explain to me who is responsible for maintaining the lighting on the bridge? The hatch straddles two local authorities and as such is on the very furthest outskirts of their respective domains.
I don't feel safe. I'm female and of small build and am often returning home from work late at night from the station to Frankham. We quite often have people hanging around on our stairs taking drugs, smoking, spitting and being generally menacing. I tend to take the staircase which they aren't on, but it's not nice and I do feel vulnerable. I've never seen police around here. I would never walk down the side of Frankham from Reginald Road at night - someone got badly mugged there last year and the lights are often out.
ReplyDeleteAnon, thanks for your comments. I now feel more than a little ashamed that I didn't herd the walkabout people over Church Street and around Frankham. But as I was enlisted to do this walk without a brief, I could only speak about problems I was aware of. I didn't know that there had been a mugging there last year nor did I know that the lights were badly maintained. Same goes for the stairwell dwellers you mention - over in Holden we do get the very occasional druggie or urinater up on the stairs, but they're generally rare events and I've never seen more than 2 at a time.
ReplyDeleteThough I haven't taken that path alongside the Tidemill School nature garden for years, I can see how visibility is severely restricted there and that malfunctioning lights would make it even more dangerous or intimidating.
Though there's a technical problem with google comments at the moment, they will fix it some time, and I'll talk to Sue, who did most of the work putting this site together,about putting up a page for estate problems so that residents can easily post comments up. That way, information might circulate around the estate quicker. And there will be a public record of the problem or complaint.
Security lights at Frankham has been an ongoing problem, which, as I understand it, the TRA had been pursuing for some time. The Frankham lights were not attended to at the same time as the rest of the estate, but according to the Leaseholder Repair Breakdowns for this year, ground floor lighting repairs were done twice in Nov 2008. Anonymous, you should report when lights are not working to the Repairs Team (even though the caretakers should be doing this) and the TRA, and email crosswhatfields to get it posted on the page Marmoset mentions that we have just set up. Report the stairwell lurkers to the ASB Team (and start to keep a record of where and when). The phone numbers are on our information page. Sorry if this sounds like all the onus is on you...
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