Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty

From the Wimbledon Park Residents' Association Newsletter, Winter 2025 "Save Wimbledon Park - Eternal Vigilance"

This is a tribute to the leadership of our Residents’ Associations and Civic Societies. There are also many, many more, past and present, who have campaigned, attended Council, GLA and Court Hearings, leafletted and contributed to fund raising (from “Here’s £5, I’m sorry it can’t be more” to those able to contribute more). Five years in, the developer has chosen to litigate rather than to sit down and talk constructively with its community, despite the Court of Appeal now stating that SWP has a “real prospect of success”.

“That you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing” (John le Carré, 2008, A Most Wanted Man).

On the 150th anniversary of the Public Health Act 1875 which provided open spaces owned by the community for the benefit of all, these words remind us of the efforts made by the people of Wimbledon to preserve the heart of Capability Brown’s Wimbledon Park Estate. They celebrated its openness through the use of part as a golf course from at least 1898, and, with developers eyeing every chance to build on the rest, in 1914 they obtained an Act of Parliament to buy and maintain the whole Estate as public open space.

Transferred to the new Borough of Merton in 1965, the Estate’s public open space status was reconfirmed by legislation. Public resistance to a new lease of the golf course in 1986 forced Merton to regain control of the lake and introduce much more public access. In 1993 a massive public outcry tried to stop the sale to the AELTC, fearing just the development now proposed. A walkway around the lake and covenants never to develop were agreed, but this sale failed to overturn the public’s rights to the open space. None of this should be consigned, as the developer would wish, to history or to a battle in the courts. What can we do?

We have power in the ballot box, as Council elections in 2022 illustrated. At Merton’s Local Plan Inquiry (2022-4) we stopped the allocation of the Wimbledon Park Estate for development like the brownfield sites on the Broadway. How do we defeat a developer who can buy in massive corporate and legal resources? With knowledge, commitment and passion, skills and experience, we are exposing laws and obligations the developer denies, and inaccuracies in their publicity.

Through Save Wimbledon Park Ltd, Environmentalists have investigated, Architects have redesigned, Engineers and Mathematicians have recalculated, PR experts have told the story, Accountants and Bankers have organised the funds, Historians and Lawyers have researched and argued. Above all, the community has come together, just as it did in 1898, 1914, 1965, 1986 and1993, but this time in even greater numbers and across Borough boundaries.

We have waved banners, crowded into Court and Council hearings, packed meetings and given generously. Young and old, from Gabriel to Thelma, we have shown our commitment.

When faced with opposition, property developers with no Plan B trot out the old jibe about “Nimby’s”, standing in the way of progress. Not so. Locals know their neighbourhood best. Inappropriate, unlawful development is happening all over the country. Wimbledon Park is one of 50 sites around London, protected but threatened, which local people are trying to preserve.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.” (Wendell Phillips, 1852, speech to the Anti-Slavery Society)

Thank you. We fight on … for the environment, our children and grandchildren.

Christopher Coombe