This year we are celebrating the Platinum Jubilee of the Queen. To mark the occasion, we have chosen an assortment of memories and local pictures from our archive.
There are 3 proposals in the planning system to build 11 tower blocks (between them) on the west side of the High Street, along the top of the ridge over the Ravensbourne Valley. Though the Churchill Quarter and Maplins sites are on hold at present, they will be quickly built if this one is approved. These, and the others planned down the high street, will change our town from a friendly market town to a mass of high rises.
Continue readingThe trio of tower block developments in the heart of our historic Market Town is now fully revealed with the latest application at 2-4 Ringers Road alongside the ‘Maplin’ and Churchill Quarter Sites.
The developer onslaught has ramped up another notch with the latest 11 & 14 storey tower block application at 2-4 Ringers Road. This is immediately behind the contested 16 storey ‘Maplin’ site and both developers claim their buildings are fully justified by the adjacent and still-undecided 16 storey Churchill Quarter and the Site G/10 policies in the Local Plan.
The 2-4 Ringers Road development is now a registered Planning application. We ask you to please object.
Continue readingHere are some of the latest visuals that the Council’s development partner, Countryside Properties, have released alongside our photos showing how the area looks now. There are no significant changes from the 2018 planning application, and proposals for Library Gardens are even worse.
Help us stop this monster Council co-development which, if approved, will also set off a chain reaction of other tower blocks starting from the Churchill Theatre to the Railway and beyond, ruining this historic Town Centre forever.
The red line on this developer’s visual shows the latest modifications to the 2018 planning application by the Council’s development partner, Countryside Properties. This application was deferred since it attracted overwhelming opposition from the public, Historic England, Councillors and residents’ groups, as well as BCS. It has now returned virtually unchanged for new public consultation.
We are delighted to announce that, last month, Bromley Council agreed to a new conservation area for Shortlands! And to extend the one in Bromley Town Centre.
The Lubbock family lived in the mansion house of High Elms, near Downe. Sir John Lubbock (born 1834) was the son of Sir John Lubbock (born 1801) and was a banker for his family company.
He is best known for his “antiquarian” interests (nowadays this spans the disciplines of Geology, Archaeology, and Social History) and he conversed and corresponded with Charles Darwin about evolution and his academic interests – they were neighbours and exchanged land.
On the national stage, he was notable for saving the site Avebury Circle in 1871, as the stones were being broken up for building (it is now a World Heritage site). This is why, when his Baronetcy was raised to Baron, his peerage was named to Avebury. He also came up with the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic to describe the Old and New stone ages.
As an MP, Sir John Lubbock introduced bank holidays – Bank Holidays Act 1871.
His mansion was left to the council, when it was used as an art college and then a home for nurses. In 1967 it was burnt to the ground. The outline of his terraced gardens can be explored in the country park, and there are bricks in the grass to show where the walls of the house were.
There is a Lubbock collection of art and artefacts (see here) and some of this is on display at the Central Library, since the Bromley Museum at the Orpington Priory has closed.
Farnborough village history have an informative article on the Lubbocks at High Elms, here: https://www.farnborough-kent-village.org.uk/lubbock_high_elms.html
We have been told that the proposals to spend £1.2m on the B&Q giant green house, and two basket-shaped concrete sculptures, have been dropped!
We couldn’t do it without everyone’s help, sharing the news, and writing to object.
Thank you!
When I was living in Bromley, during the war I was staying with my grandparents in Sharpes cottages when a bomb dropped into the carpark of the Greyhound hotel and no more than 50 feet from where I was sleeping. It didn’t explode and was later found to have been sabotaged during assembly by French workers with ”bon chance” written inside the bomb casing.
I was probably four years old at the time of the incident.
Brian
Mr Arthur Sheppeck
Some recollections from Arthur Sheppeck, who played in the brickfield, mainly from 1941 to 1949. He remembers the Brick Pit being 60 feet deep.
He told Friends of Havelock Rec, in 2015:
‘One day, one of the ARP wardens approached us boys. He told us “For God’s sake don’t do what I’m going to do” and he took an incendiary bomb he was carrying and lobbed it into the pit. It exploded with a blinding flash of white light, and the warden told us “that could have been you”. I can tell you, it fair put the wind up us…!’
Browse our old photos, in
from being dominated by tower blocks: Look here and email our ward councillors about:
* High rises in the Local Plan
* housing and a hotel on the civic centre (old palace)
and
* 16+ high rises from the draft Master Plan down the Lower High Street
* and there's others...
