Total: 28 posts
Posts in: Community
Southall community concerns.
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Worried about as yet unknown, unseen long-term impacts
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My house has been wrecked and the people who are working for Berkley are unable to listen to me and also the other neighbours
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every evening, our bathroom drain lets off STRONG odour. It is awful! the smell spreads around the whole house - opening the windows is not even an option! daily use …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Updates
Lift-Off! Ealing Elections Special
🐸 Going Green 🐸
Peter Mason celebrated another election victory yesterday morning by going green.
Solomon Cuthbertson, a Labour activist, posted a photograph at 6:08 a.m. captioned:
“Good morning from Ealing where @EalingLabour has just won an historic fifth term."
The photograph shows Mason at a podium against the Ealing Council branded green backdrop, in an olive-green suit.
Mason had spent much of the final week of the campaign amplifying national Labour’s attack line that …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Features
The Meeting that Ended Local Democracy in Southall
On 10 July 2019, around 200 residents packed the Dominion Centre in Southall to confront their councillors, their MP, Public Health England, the Environment Agency, and the developer of the former Gasworks site about the toxic fumes — benzene and naphthalene — that had been making their families ill for years.
The meeting was filmed. It runs to ninety minutes.
Investigations
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Health
Ethics
The Drugs Don't Work
This is the story about how Ealing’s incredibly valuable and (very likely) hugely under-resourced drug and alcohol treatment service has been moved about, along with its vulnerable service users, for what appears to be — at least partly — political gain by Ealing Labour.
The scale of the borough’s substance misuse crisis is real.
According to the council’s own 2025 Substance Misuse Service report, Ealing has an estimated 2,103 opiate and crack users and 3,658 alcohol dependent drinkers. …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Research
Ethics
Cactuses Never Die
Yousef Qandeel was not born in al-Dawayima. He arrived five years too late for that. But he carries the keys.
Three iron keys on a ring, dark with age and heavy in the hand. They open nothing now — the house they belonged to no longer exists. The village it stood in no longer exists. In its place, since 1955, sits an Israeli settlement.
Where Palestinian families once marked the boundaries of their homes by planting prickly pear cactus — sabr in Arabic, the same word as patience — the land has …
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
AI
Back to the Future
Great Scott. Ealing Council’s welcome guide for new residents was written in 2010. The DeLorean is still parked on their website. And they haven’t changed a word.
If you moved to Ealing recently, you may have been directed to the council’s Welcome Guide for New Residents.
Well, no, you probably weren’t. Unless you’re Ukrainian.
The welcome for the rest of you is sixteen years out of date.
It’s still live on the Ealing Council website, cheerfully promising …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Features
When is a Hustings not a Hustings?
I attended the West London Citizens “Accountability Assembly” at St Anselm’s Church in Southall Green on Tuesday night. I left after an hour, before any of the candidates had answered any of the preset questions.
In that hour, I listened to Peter Mason talk — yet again — about his family upbringing in damp and mouldy temporary accommodation.
[Video courtesy of another audience member.]
Three months that made him a lifelong socialist, committed to ensuring others don’t …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Features
BREAKING NEWS
"This Place Has Turned Into a Bloody Slum": Southall Wards Meeting with ECI candidates
I arrived late to the Ealing Community Independents' Southall Wards Engagement Evening at Parkside Yards — the usual traffic gridlock on The Green and South Road up to the station. Normally I would walk, but I’d walked all the way up to Oswald Road via the canal footpath the previous afternoon and my poor feet and body were telling me no. After a beautifully warm and sunny spring day, the heavens looked like they might open soon, too. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.
I …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
When "deport six million" becomes mainstream: what Ealing Labour won't tell you
Two weeks ago, and again today, Ealing Labour attacked Grace Hunter, a Conservative candidate for Pitshanger ward, after a TikTok clip surfaced in which she said:
“The solution to our housing problem isn’t building six million more houses… it’s deporting six million people.”
This is fascist propaganda reminiscent of the policies of the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s — and of our own present-day far right, which is leading the polls and looks set to reshape the …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
Canvassing with Minni Dogra: A Councillor in All But Name
Last week I spent a lunch hour with my friend and former Ealing Independent Network “running mate” Minni Dogra, as she canvassed a street near me in her effort to win enough votes to be elected as a councillor in Ealing Labour council leader Peter Mason’s own Southall Green ward.
In 2022, I did the same canvassing and amassed a whole 223 votes — 2,633 fewer than Peter Mason. It is a mammoth task. But four years ago, Mason lost the largest share of votes of any Labour …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Community
Features
Research
Exposes
What Happened to Southall?
A substantial new report on Ealing Council’s record in Southall landed this week, and it deserves your attention.
What Happened to Southall? is published by Community Powered Reporting, a volunteer resident-led research group, and it covers waste, housing, asset disposal, health, democratic accountability and pension fund investments — with extensive sourcing from council documents, FOI responses, and public data.
I haven’t read every page yet, but what I have read is rigorous, …
Investigations
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-tipping
Two weeks ago, I reported on the results of my research into the fly-tipping epidemic that has hit Ealing, and Southall in particular.
In short, fly-tipping across the borough literally doubled from July 2016, immediately after Ealing Council reduced household waste collections from weekly to fortnightly.
It’s remained at that high level ever since, and residents report that it’s getting even worse in recent years.
The nature of these sudden and sustained increases strongly indicate …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
Exposes
Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall
This is the shocking story of how for sixteen years Ealing Labour councillors talked rubbish about having to make “difficult choices” to cut services to save money, ignoring thousands of residents' protests, and in doing so created a massive mess that a decade later still costs millions to clean up every year and leaves children’s and disabled people’s lives unnecessarily poorer.
It’s a story about an ambitious New Labour leader - politically aligned with Tony Blair …
Investigations
Environment
Community
Exposes
The EA Files: What Regulators Knew About Fire Risks at Southall Recycling Site
A Site That “No One Checked”?
When a commenter asked why “no one from the council checked” Sam’s Recycling before the Johnson Street fire, the short answer is uncomfortable:
The council did check. Repeatedly. For over a year.
And officially, they found nothing.
Yet the risks were documented.
What follows is drawn from Environment Agency inspection reports, enforcement correspondence and Environmental Information Request disclosures obtained in early 2024 by a local resident (anonymised here). …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Health
Pollution
How to Report Nuisance and Pollution in Ealing
Reporting a Nuisance in Ealing
A short epic of civic persistence (and becoming the problem)
Please complete this form.
Invocation
Sing, website, sing.
Of forms and thresholds, boxes small,
of windows that open into darkness,
of daytime hotlines that take you to voicemail
by those who never lived the night.
Sing of a citizen with sleep in debt,
who brings a sound, a smell, a (non-epileptic) tremor
to the gates of order —
and finds, beyond the gate,
only more order.
I. The Omen
It starts with …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Pollution
Exposes
The Council Investigation That Found Nothing
They Did Check It Out. That’s What Makes It Worse.
A response to “Why didn’t the council investigate?"
Following publication of my article on the Johnson Street fire, a reader asked: “Why did no one from the council check it out?”
The answer is more disturbing than regulatory neglect.
They did check it out.
They conducted almost a year-long investigation.
They made site visits. They reviewed evidence.
And then they claimed to find nothing.
This isn’t a …
Investigations
Environment
Community
Health
Pollution
Exposes
A Fire We Were Warned About
Literally within a couple of hours of posting my update on the Southall Gasworks / Toxic Town scandal yesterday, the recycling site just behind our home burned to the ground. My wife was terrified the fire would spread to our home with our two young children and now my elderly mum, too. Fortunately for everyone living nearby the emergency response was rapid and effective, and while the fire caused a great deal of inconvenience for weary travellers due to the closure of the adjacent Great Western …
Investigations
Community
Research
Health
AI
Toxic Town - Have You Been Affected?
Last week I watched last year’s Toxic Town series on Netflix, and then the Horizon documentary from 2020 (available on DailyMotion).
For anyone unfamiliar with it, Toxic Town tells the story of families in Corby, Northamptonshire, who were exposed to toxic dust during the reclamation of the Corby steelworks in the 1980s and 1990s. Nineteen families had children born with limb differences or other serious health problems - at least one resulting in the death of a newborn baby.
Over time, …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Features
Personal
Pollution
Southall Odours
I step out of my house and immediately notice the artificial “cotton fresh” scent of odour suppressants wafting south from the old Gasworks site. How can this be? They finished remediating the contaminated earth in 2019, and people have been living there in the new homes they built since 2021.
Still, it’s better than the smell of petrol, which is what we had to put up with day and night for months on end in 2018. Bad enough to wake us up in the night during the long hot summer. …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
The Cuckoo's Nest
Ealing Genocide Supporters Club (aka Ealing Labour Party) held their Southall Branch meeting yesterday at the Dominion Centre in Southall. Under the guise of a “Your Town, Your Voice” community get together, our local elected repellents gathered on masse in all their finery. I couldn’t help myself as they posed for a group photo all gurning inanely as the photographer encouraged them to “say cheese!”. “Say genocide!” I offered. “Genocide …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Features
Housing
Health
Developers, if you Really Want to Help
This was survey feedback given to developers proposing to build a massive data centre on the site of the industrial estate down the road from me, but it applies more broadly to all big developers, especially those with annual profits of half a billion pounds.
I’m concerned about noise from the site causing a nuisance and health problems in an area that is already susceptible to multiple environmental health stressors, and exacerbated by deep-rooted poverty, deprivation, low pay and …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Health
Ethics
AI
I am the Leader of Ealing Council
I asked Google Bard to advise me on a local matter.
I am the leader of Ealing Council. I have received more than 250 reports about a BAD odour nuisance and air pollution from the remediation of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks land. We had a public meeting where 250 angry residents complained about health problems as a result of the air pollution, including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory problems and infections, and even cancer and death of loved ones. The developer has …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
Health
Corruption
Pollution
From the Southall Big Plan AGM in 2017
Some perennial problems that our elected representatives seem to be unable - or unwilling - to do anything about.
Some things never change!
Priority from nine years ago - clean streets! 
Julian Bell's Ten Year Plan. 
40% 'affordable homes' then. 30% 'genuinely affordable homes 'now.
Toilets?! 
'We care about Southall', they say.
That must be why they handed it over to the developers, and turned into a concrete jungle. 
Encouraging people to take more exercise by …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Health
Personal
Pollution
High Traffic Neighbourhood
Took me an hour (as opposed to 10 minutes) to drive my lad home from school this afternoon, thanks in part to the High Traffic Neighbourhood (‘Improving access for HGVs’) in Southall ‘Green’.
Like a rat, I tried the side streets and back roads option and found those to be jammed, too, and Scotts Road - although confusingly still two-way throughout - is now No Entry from the eastern end.
I would have abandoned my car and got out and walked/scooted home, but there was …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Personal
Ethics
Pollution
The Gaslighting Zone
@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit #StopPoisoningSouthall @SouthallGaswork
You guys are really taking the piss now, aren't you?
@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork .@PHE_London report on the health impact of @Southall_Wside @SouthallGaswork:
@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London Residents' own survey conducted a year ago:
Not sure how @theCALMzone think that #BerkeleyHomes and @Southall_Wside are in any way an …
Environment
Community
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Research
Health
Pollution
The Health and Other Impacts of Southall Waterside on Southall & Hayes Residents
Questionnaire first distributed in September 2018.
Any other comments about the effect the Southall Waterside redevelopment has had on your health?
Environment
Community
Commentary
Podcast
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Health
Exposes
Pull the Other One, Julian
Conspiracy theory?
Our Great Leader, Julian ‘Two Jobs, Two Homes’ Bell, claimed on Desi Radio this morning that, “unfortunately”, none of the air quality monitoring data provided to him by Berkeley Group, the developers of the old gasworks site, provides any evidence of levels of chemicals harmful to health.
Well, would you believe it?
Bribery and corruption
The same developers who paid their former finance director £9.5m to keep quiet about years of Tony Pidgley, …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Pollution
Exposes
Countering the Southall Waterside Narrative
From my original Facebook note.
1.Look how great we are!
Berkeley will tell you about all the good work they do in the Southall community:
·Giving a tiny fraction of their £600m profits to the local homeless shelter
·Creating the ‘edible’ garden (and ad hoc public toilet) outside the college on Beaconsfield Road
·Partnering with the Let’s Go Southall project to get Southallians fit, healthy and active!
·Making the (acid) Rain Garden at Blair Peach Primary School for children to …
Investigations
Campaigns
Environment
Community
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Corruption
Pollution
Exposes
Berkeley's School Governors Board Member
This has shocked us all to the core.
@BerkeleyGroupUK's Head of Construction at #SouthallWaterside asked to join the board of governors at the adjacent Blair Peach Primary School.
This is from the minutes of that meeting (29/11/17). 1/7
"The HT reported that a smell/odour from the building works has on certain occasions been extremely strong, resulting in headaches ad asthma attacks. In addition, a white cloud / mist was apparent for two days." 2/7
"The HT confirmed that she …