horticultural skills centre

Entrance to the proposed Horticultural Skills Centre

An application for planning permission to demolish some of the buildings at the Parks and Open Spaces Depot site on Shooters Hill and create a new Horticultural Skills Centre has been added to the Royal Borough of Greenwich planning web site. However it isn’t open for comments at the moment, and it doesn’t give any timescales for when we would need to make any comments.

This is the next step in the council’s joint project with Hadlow College to develop the Horticultural Skills Centre. Hadlow College also run the Equestrian Centre further down the hill.

The planners will need to consider policies on Metropolitan Open Land and the Green Chain in making their decision about this application. A comparison of the plan of the existing buildings with the proposed Horticulural Skills Centre plan, below, suggests that the new buildings will have a smaller footprint than the existing ones which will help prove compliance with the policies.

The new buildings sound like a great improvement on the current constructions:

The form and massing of the building along with the detailing and proportions around the windows, doors and the large roof overhangs will provide a contemporary modern design. The façade materials however, have been chosen to complement the woodland setting so the scheme will relate well to its surroundings taking references from the local woodland context.
Cedar cladding will be a dominant feature of the façade, which is then broken up by window and door elements. Blue engineering bricks are proposed for the plinths. The timber boarding will be fixed vertically and will be naturally finished. Cedar contains natural oils that act as a natural preservative providing a long lasting low maintenance finish. The metal framed windows/doors and roof fascia will be finished in polyester powder coat aluminium with an agreed colour finish which will again provide a low maintenance finish.

My only concern at the moment is with the assertion in the Design and Access Statement that the site “does not contain buildings that are listed, or are of special architectural or historic interest. There is also a low potential for archaeology on the site.” The old coach house on the site may be of historic interest and I’m pleased to see that a building marked on the western edge of the site on both the current and proposed plans suggests that it is not going to be demolished. The latter statement about archaeological potential is contradicted by the council’s Areas of High Archaeological Potential document which is part of the current consultation on the Greenwich Core Strategy. It contains the map below, delineating the Shooters Hill Settlements area of high archaeological potential, which clearly includes the site of the Horticultural Skills Centre.

Greenwich Areas of High Archaeological Potential No 7 Shooters Hill

The archeological interest stems from various interesting finds over the years, such as those from the Time Team excavations. The Areas of High Archaeological Potential document mentions:

Bronze Age ditch and associated bronze working slag from the area east of Cleanthus Road
Ditch with Early Iron Age pottery sherds and 63 kg of iron slag
Prehistoric/Roman pits and ‘huts’ recorded from the Woolwich and District War Memorial Hospital site
Remains of a Saxon musical instrument from the roadside area of Shooters Hill Hospital
World War II evidence that identifies the area as being part of one of the ‘Stop Lines’ that ringed London

I think the council and Hadlow College need to think again about archaeological potential and allow for it in their development plans and activities. But the new centre still looks like a benefit to the borough.

I wasn’t aware that there were plans for a Horticultural Skills Centre on Shooters Hill, as well as the Equestrian Skills Centre, until I saw ?Stewart Christie’s (@5tewartChristie) tweet yesterday about Greenwich Council’s decision to give a grant of up to £495,000 to Hadlow College for the development of such a centre. Hadlow, who also run the Equestrian Centre just down the hill, will put £73,000 towards the cost and will be responsible for any overspend and ongoing running costs.

It is proposed that the new centre will be built at the Parks and Open Spaces depot opposite Eaglesfield Road, which is going to be empty from April. The site already has buildings on it and from the preliminary plans it looks like the new centre will have a similar layout and footprint as the existing development, even keeping the little roundabout at the entrance. It will “encompass a teaching, administration and a facilities block, alongside polytunnels and raised beds for planting and growing”. They still need to get planning permission for any work, so we will have a chance to comment on the plans. They are working to a tight timetable: they reckon the work will take 3 to 4 months, but want to be able to open the new centre by the end of summer in time for the start of the autumn term.

As well as the grant the council will let Hadlow College have a 15 year lease on the site for a peppercorn rent. The Equestrian Centre also has just a 15 year lease.

Preliminary Plan for Horticultural Skills Centre

The aim of the new centre, according to the council report is:

This element of the Skills Centre is designed to exploit the potential for horticultural jobs both in the Royal Borough, including the Borough’s Council’s own parks and open spaces, and in surrounding areas. The Service Level Agreement will set out the scope of the skills training to be delivered, which will include pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship training at levels 1 and 2, adult and community learning, NPTC short courses in areas (e.g. pesticide spraying), embedded literacy, numeracy and IT skills, with the aim of equipping students with a range of transferable skills that will increase individuals’ employability, and provide potential access to a range of jobs and careers.

On the 1894 and 1914 OS maps of Shooters Hill the area where the Parks and Open Spaces depot is now was occupied by a mansion called Summer Court about which I know very little, though it was occupied in 1900 by a bankrupt named William Carter. From the old maps it’s possible that an old coach house on the site, pictured below, may be a remnant of the Summer Court buildings; I’m glad that the preliminary plans show that it will be retained within the Horticultural Skills Centre.

Old building in the Greenwich Parks and Open Spaces depot

At the bottom of Shooters Hill the Hadlow College Equestrian Centre is now occupied and has its first students, though it won’t be fully running until the start of the 2013/14 academic year in the autumn. One of the conditions of their planning approval was that they had to submit a community use scheme, allowing for a minimum of 82 hours of community access each week, to the council planning authority and get it approved. The Greenwich Council planning pages show that Hadlow have submitted a scheme, but the document itself is not included and comments are not being accepted. Its status is “Pending Decision”. When I dropped in to the Equestrian Centre earlier today I was told that they planned to provide riding lessons for local residents in the evenings and at weekends starting at the end of the summer.

The Horticultural Skills Centre sounds like a good idea to me, and an enhancement to the area, but like the Equestrian Centre it seems that Greenwich Council are going about it in a slightly odd way.

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Horticultural Skills Centre Planning Application