The John Scott Centre and the Children’s centre are, I believe, part of Woodberry Down and all the people working there are therefore members of WDCO.
At the Fun Day I spoke to the doctor on the John Scott Centre table and asked whether they were taking on new patients and consequently discovered that she had no idea that there would be 584 new homes coming on stream over the next year albeit perhaps 150 would be residents moving within the Estate.
Following on from this I met up with Anne Collings, Practice Manager at the Heron centre. Although she has been there for several years she had not heard of WDCO and knew very little about the Woodberry Regeneration and had never met with any of the Hackney or BH teams. I gave her a schedule for the new blocks and the numbers moving in over various dates in the next year. She will discuss this with the partners at the practice to make sure they are prepared. If necessary the doctor on the stand said they may have to take on another doctor. I also suggested we have some practice flyers to give to all new residents.
At the Fund Day I also discovered that the practice has free activities every day for patients registered with the practice. These activities are run by Hackney Volunteers and started before Lockdown. They cover walking groups, yoga, art, meditation, gardening, coffee mornings, crochet and tai Chi. They started slowly but the numbers have built up and the activities are popular. They use one meeting room upstairs in the Centre and the larger room at the back where the Covid Vaccinations were given but Anne admitted that venues were a problem as the staff also need to use the upstairs room for practice meetings etc. I mentioned that we had been looking into the question of venues onsite and the type of activities that could be run for the community and there appeared to be a huge overlap and so we should be working together to help more people on the Estate.
Earlier in the week I had dropped by the Children’s Centre because younger people here had talked to me about the lack of nursery facilities on site. A similar situation arose. The guy on the desk who has worked here for some years had never heard of WDCO and knew very little about Woodberry. He asked me as many questions as I asked him! It turns out that even though the buildings have been extended they only take 46 children and babies and are completely full with a waiting list of over 100. They have just started a 0 to 2 group of 9 children ( 3 children to 1 staff member) and there will be no places in that group for about 15 months unless a family move away. Now it seems to me that although there may be nursery provision down in Stoke Newington and in Haringay etc, young parents living on the Estate who need to work do not want to have to take a baby or young child in a pram down to Stoke Newington on a wet winter day but would prefer, and deserve, a facility on the site. So why do we not have better provision. We know that many young people move here and start a family, We also know from chatting to a few of them that they will probably not stay once the children have been in school a few years because of the size of the homes and the cost of moving to something larger so there may be a constant demand for nursery places. We do not seem to have any accurate data on the number of under 4’s at Woodberry. I am looking into how we could acquire this.
When we have been at Design Committee Meetings the Council have said there was sufficient capacity in schools, nurseries, medical centres etc but it appears they have never spoken with the people who run the facilities on site. And the papers produced by the Council to support their claims of adequate capacity cover facilities up to 1.5KMs from here and not on easy bus routes. Woodberry is going to house a large number of people within a small area and we need facilities on site or very close. I have agreed to join the Patients Forum for Heron Centre which meets quarterly and that way I will be a bridge and let the practice know what is happening on Woodberry and vice versa. But surely we need more than this. These people should be part of the group we are talking to regularly re the ground Floor Strategy. The Block D site would have been good for an extra nursery and could have shared some facilities – I do believe one applied but do not know why it was turned down.
I think there are lots of things happening in the area but there seems to be a complete lack of coordination. We need to share facilities, information about what is happening, and knowledge about the regeneration as it progresses.
We need to ensure that Berkeley’s and /or the Council keep local schools, doctors, nurseries and dentists aware of completion dates and numbers in future. Representatives of these very local entities are unlikely to have the time to attend WDCO meetings and there is no need for them to attend anything regularly anyway but we do all need to work together and perhaps an annual update meeting with representatives might be beneficial – we should certainly have had their input to the Masterplan. We talk a lot about the vision for Woodberry and wellbeing of residents is mentioned often so we should all be working together on projects that involve healthcare in the broadest sense and education, especially early education, as these are critical to the well being of most residents.
Hilary Britton, 10/7/2024
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July 2024, Other