Mill Farm Site.    Case study background.    1997 Timeline.

1996 Premonition

Summer

Richmond Borough Council Commission a specialist firm
to investigate soil contamination around the Farm Road Flats, a site with the same previous land use.
1997 Hatching the plot

July
2nd

 Richmond Council resolves to oppose plans to redevelop the the local 'Bull Building', at the eastern end of the 'Feltham Marshalling Yards' notwithstanding a deliberate attempt to mislead the Committee:
The developer's agent denied any significant connection with the rest of the site.

In the meantime Hyder Consulting Ltd.
are visibly conducting a soil contamination survey on the Mill Farm Site.

Some of the background to the area in question is given in
a contemporaneous letter to the Richmond and Twickenham Times

Oct.

28th

 During a routine Councillor's Area Consultation meeting, I ask the chair of the Policy and Resources Property Sub Committee: "what is the sale price of the Mill Farm Site?"
Looking bewildered, he purports to know nothing at all about it.

Nov.

10th

 The scheduled date of a Property Sub-Committee, the agenda for which happens to include an item re. the very same site.
Notwithstanding the public interest , wirh regard e.g. to land contamination, the matter is held in secret, press and public excluded.

Dec.

11th

 As announced by a letter we circulated to local residents,
Councillors meet with the public meeting in the local school hall to consider the prospects.

Dec.
16th

 Described by Vincent Cable, M.P. as "planning thuggery".
Hounslow Councillors approve plans to replace the 'Bull Building', with 24 hour access for heavy vehicles.

Dec.
25th

 A planning applications is submitted to LB Hounslow. Subsequently described, disingenuously, in a letter to Richmond residents as a "realignment of Godfrey Way to serve employment development on Feltham Marshalling Yard", thus failing to point out that the access road would be widened to take more than 750 vehicles daily, with 628 car parking places proposed.
Indeed, this was actually a full application to create a huge industrial estate including an amalgamation of the Twickenham and Kingston Royal Mail sorting offices, hence an enormous 5 acre work shed. 
Thyus to be lost was 40 acres or so of woodland and scrubland, about one half of what that London Ecology Unit experts had described as "probably the largest and best quality wasteland site in greater London." (ir according to the Nature Conservancy Council) "...over half the known resource of quality urban wasteland")
There was no sign, however, of any Rail Freight Link, as was stipulated by Hounslow Council's Unitary Development Plan.
Discontent with official attempts to stitch up of the issues, We conduct a door to door survey, hence hopefully a true analysis of the residents' local land use preferences, as subsequently submitted to the Council's planners and as reported in
a letter to the Richmond and Twickenham Times
1998
 etc.