Since the reforming of the Friends of Thornbury Park, visitors there will have noticed some better attention paid to this important but occasionally neglected local recreation space.
When we first met in November 2015, there were many ideas discussed and proposed to improve Thornbury Park. At the time, there was no council resource to help make any of them a reality apart from holding the parks maintenance contractor to their schedules and encouraging the police to up their patrols to address varied anti social behaviour.
I was, however, as a councillor, able to submit bids to the unspent S106 planning gain fund insomuch as historic developer contributions could be applied to a) schemes local to Spring Grove developments and b) for parks type projects. In 2016 I was teased with an award of £4,200, which, in the scheme of things, was almost not worth getting off the swings for. Persistence paid off in January 2017 with a second allocation of £75,977 making a total of £80,177 to start to realise some of the November 2015 ideas.
Hounslow Council’s Parks Team and the parks contractor Carillion have now produced proposals and costs for improvements at Thornbury Park over and above the maintenance contract. Details can be found on the spends spreadsheet here and trees and shrub reduction and new pathways suggestion here.
Readers will note that so far, a proposed spend of only £25,839 has been identified and these are listed on the spreadsheet, leaving decisions to be made for the remaining £54,338 and that is why it would be good to see as many Friends and users of Thornbury Park next Wednesday.
You may also wish to follow Friends of Thornbury Park on Twitter and Facebook.
As always, am happy to discuss.