Formula E car racing for Battersea Park - but why not send it to SE19?

Attempting to cycle through Battersea Park a week or two back, was puzzled to find way impeded by huge teams of men and machines resurfacing the wide road that rings the park.

They were going at it with such vigour, and with such precision, that it made one wonder: why here, on this park road, which is banned to normal traffic and is perfectly adequate for the runners and cyclists and skaters who normally use it. Surely there were plenty of potholed roads in the borough of Wandsworth  that were  much more in need of re-surfacing?

This wide, verdant road circling Battersea
 Park is soon to host some much speedier
 action. Come June, the runners, skaters and
 cyclists who flock here will be ousted by
 140mph Formula E electric racing cars

A letter in the Evening Standard brought sudden enlightenment: Wandsworth council has given permission for the PArk to be used for the finals of the Formula E Motor racing season, at the end of June 2015.

The letter-writer was complaining about the impact on  local residents and park users, as well as London's pollution levels.

I immediately prepared myself to go into full righteous indignation and anger mode: how dare this Tory council yet again put the interests of its corporate buddies above those of its own  residents, and the environment of a large area of south west London?

Psyching myself up to unleash a verbal onslaught on the petrol heads of Wandsworth,  I looked up Formula E and felt a bit stupid. This (as you will probably know or  have guessed) is a sort of Formula 1 but for cars powered by electricity.

So there you go - Wandsworth is backing an initiative which should raise the profile of "green" electric vehicles, and pocketing a fair wad of cash at the same time.

But again, it's not so simple. As the letter writer pointed out, the big race will involve hundreds of (non-electric-powered) trucks, vans and cars making thousands of journeys into and out of the park to prepare the circuit and the viewing areas.

The park itself will be closed to the public for at least two full days.

On race day, there will be 30,000 spectators making their way to the park along roads already badly overused and compromised by all the roadworks contingent on the Nine Elms  re-development.

Locals who love this park are already used to finding it wholly or partly closed down for various events. Several big city financial organisations book the whole park for their summer sports days and running events; large tracts of the park are often closed off for film companies. Each year the whole park is sealed off to all except ticket holders for the big firework display.

So, nothing new, but just another, even more annoying thing for those of us who simply want to stroll through this lovely peoples' park without the risk of being flattened by a 140mph electric racing car.  And what about the Buddhist monks and devotees trying to make their way to the Peace Pagoda on the north side of the park? Presumably they don't make the wailing noise of their petrol-fuelled brothers. The race is scheduled for 27 or 28 June, potentially one of the best weekends of the summer.

Back in the 60s, world-famous GP drivers used
 to thunder past the remains of Crystal Palace
 and the BBC TV transmitter. Why not
restore this track for Formula E?

Also - I wonder if the Formula E People considered holding the race at  another south London location, more given to sports of all types and in dire need of revival? I mean Crystal Palace, which still has a twisty little racing track that up until the mid-1960s was a regular location for all types of car and motor cycle racing events. It must be about the same size as the Battersea PArk track, but it has the advantage of going around a large and distinctly under-used National Sports Centre, which would not be disrupted by such an event as it has full access via bridges. It's actually a better, more scenic track, specifically designed for this sort of sport, and it is not (as is the case at Battersea) almost entirely lined by avenues of mature plane trees.

As a kid I was often taken there by my sister and her successive boyfriends; I remember clearly seeking all the stars of the era (Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Bruce McLaren, amongst others) throwing what looked like family saloons around this cute little track at unbelievable speeds. Then they did the same thing even faster in their formula 2 Lotuses and Coopers.

That track certainly would need re-surfacing and probably widening as well - but given the collapse of the latest Crystal Palace regeneration proposals, surely this could have been an opportunity to revive the fast-disintegrating facilities of this famous site?

Kate Hoey MP attacks "shocking" Nine Elms development

A new reason to be grateful to live in the constituency held by Kate Hoey, an old-school Labour MP with some oddball ideas but her heart in the right place.

The constituency is called Vauxhall but it takes in a long thin slice of north and west Lambeth, including all of Stockwell and Clapham Town, most of Brixton and the mysteriously-named Vassall ward.

At an outdoor hustings in Kennington last weekend, Ms Hoey spoke out against the monstrous development of luxury housing alongside the river between Chelsea Bridge and Vauxhall, the development I have (yawn) very tediously tried to rebrand as Nine Elms Disease.

Interestingly, it seems most of this development is actually just outside her constituency, as the Vauxhall boundary (according to the OS constituencies map) runs more or less along the Wandsworth Road as far as Queenstown Road, then heads up Cedars Road to the north side of Clapham Common.

But in all other senses this development will have - is already having - a massive and baleful impact on

her constituencies. It's not just the transport and infrastructure pressure that all those new rich people's homes with their SUVs in their underground car parks will create on the surrounding streets, not the visual pollution already hideously apparent from the lego-style apartment blocks going up along the river front. You also have to look at the damage done to roads by the constant stream of tipper trucks on all the surrounding trunk roads for a start. Or, try breathing as you cycle up past Battersea Park on a windy day, and fill your lungs with acrid dust.

Ms Hoey kept her words short but to the point:

"I think what has happened along the South Bank and along Vauxhall has been shocking...We have lost out on so much value of that land. It has not gone into affordable housing but private developers."


Hear, hear, Kate! Good on you. So what will you do about it?

"I want to see a top band of council tax brought in for all those multi million developments along the river."

Yeah well, so do we all, it might help a bit.

Maybe you wonder why Kate hasn't made a bit more noise about this before now? Well, she had, but MPs have no role in planning decisions, and anyway, as already pointed out, the majority of the land is in the neighbouring Battersea constituency.

And what about some more drastic legislative action at a national level to remove planning consent powers from individual local authorities for schemes  which are so massive they will disrupt the lives of residents in all the surrounding boroughs as well?

The apologists for this development continue to extol the virtues of a new tube extension - to the Northern Line of all over-crowded lines, for god's sake! And the linear park, which in architects drawings looks like something out of a very scary video game. You can almost imagine the poor and the beggars and the scruffy kids clambering up the walls and fences to gawp at the rich within, and to dodge the plastic bullets and tasters of the private security guards….

Ok, a maybe not too distant fantasy… which in part could depend a bit on who one votes for next month. If I hadn't already decided, this latest speech would have reminded me there's really only one option.