themarkedman

Will, not sure where you're starting from, but if you end up on the southside of Lambeth Bridge its likely that your quickest route is over the hill to Camberwell, Up to the Oval around Kennington park, through the lovely Cleaver sq and up Black Prince Road. That essentially is my route from friern Rd to Lambeth Bridge. Takes me longer than it used to!! combination of aging aching limbs and greater caution than my younger days! About 30 mins - though I did get home in 20 once when I was late for a parents evening.....

It is simply not true that there is no open space for the boys to play in. The boys will have a playground and they will have space to run around in, play football etc etc. It is true that the site is small, but it is this that has necessitated the demolition of the old buildings not the fire, a new school on that site was never going to work ith the existing buildings. Thesensible mitigation of the smallness of the site is that the boys will have staggered breaks so that only some of them are using the outside space at anyone time. This has other benefits as mixing small 11 yr olds with quite large 15/16 year olds doesn't always work and schools with larger outside play areas also do this. I'm with Adam, whatever the drawbacks to the site, its important that we get behind the school and make it part of, and responsive (nay work for...) to, the community.

Hi I'm 'local resident' George Leahy. Brenda's e-mail in the previous and now locked thread seems to imply I'm not local. My right to speak at the Planning Committee in favour of the proposal was because I live within 100 yards of the proposed new school - I'm as local as anyone else. i did not neglect to mention I'm a long-time Labour supporter and have an association with Tessa Jowell - it was not materially relevant. I've have never hidden my asociation with the Labour party and when I was leading the EDEN campaign this was considered rather useful! Brenda seems to be suggesting that my speaking at the Planning Committee was politically motivated. It was not. I would not have spent more than 3 hours of a lovely evening at a committee meeting if I didn't believe what i said. As someone who campaigned for a new school in the area for 4-5 years I strongly believe that the boys in the area need the school and the community needs it to (I was rather dismayed to see an earlier posting referring 'gangs of boys' - we must stop this demonising of young people). Finally my daughter. I didn't send my daughter to Waverley because it wasn't good enough. It was the parlous state of the school that was the catalyst for the EDEN campaign. Waverley had successfully resisted a proposal to go co-ed when the Charter got approval. That happened because we all missed a trick or two - we all thought we would get in to teh Charter and ignored the Waverley co-ed element of it. If as a community we had concentrated on both, we wouldn't have this situation. The failure at that point made it impossible to get Waverley to change - they weren't even technically a failing school according Ofsted, so we had no power over them at all. That was how EDEN happened, that is why we are going to get a new school for the area and the area will be better for it.