Aug
30th

The site owner's Development Officer sends a letter to some local residents and work immediately begins.

An access gate is created but all the trees still stand.   

Sept
3rd

Oct
7th

Oct
22nd

With the entire western end of the site cleared, I challenge a worker on the site, and in vain I search the Council's web site for any trace of a pertinent planning application so I telephone to ask the Council's help desk:
"... with respect to this site, has any application been made with respect to this site, this year?"

The answer was a definite 'no'. 

Thinking that this is odd and unsatisfactory, I express my general concern to the Editor, 'Twickenham Online'.

Oct
23rd

Inundated with smoke from a bonfire burning felled trees, I am moved to visit the Civic Centre to put the same inquiry:
The answer was definite: 'no new application', but at least I get to see the approved outline plans plan and the decision notice, dated 27th December, 2001.
When I ask especially to to see any subsequent correspondence relating to 'reserved matters', the request is refused. One is only supposed to see objections.

During a subsequent visit to the offices of the architect, I am kindly informed of an intention to apply for permission to fell trees marked on the approved application as being protected.

With the previous advice in mind I take that to to mean to refer to a subsequent full application, yet to mature, but to be sure I go back again to the Council's reception desk especially to ask: What would he thus possibly have meant to refer to?
In return, no mention is made of any actual application. My reward is merely a compliment slip, with the name and number of the the tree officer thus supplied.
I also talk, for some time time, by telephone, with the Council's Land Contamination Officer. He mentions no actual application to the Council apart from the outline application that I refer to.

Oct
24th

I telephone the case officer, Mr Wilson, who purported to have been completely unaware of what was happening on the site. He mentioned a "reptile survey" which he had not looked at in detail, but no mention was made of any formal application with respect to any planning conditions.

This circumstance I explain in a contemporaneous message.

Oct
29th

The site is all but completely cleared but another telephone call discovers that the Council's tree officer also seems to be completely unaware of events, as was explained in another letter to Twickenham Online

Nov
1st

Another tree has gone so I visit the Civic Centre again in the hope of checking the particular designations of protected trees.

The actual plan was not available, just the decision notice from which I copy out the pertinent conditions.

Then, eventually, via the good auspices of another officer, I get to see the case officer and the questionable site plan which, he confirms, did not indicate the complete destruction that I complain about.

Nothing was announced to me about any formal application to review the moot conditions.

Nov
5th

I get through by phone to the Greater London Authority Biodiversity Manager. In October he was away.  According to stated stipulations, he is supposed to be consulted.

He tells me that E-mail messages that I had copied to him had prompted him recently to try in vain to get in touch with the Council's planners.

Otherwise he had heard nothing more about the site since last year.

Nov
8th

Cllr. Butler, mmber of the Planning Committee and the Board of Richmond Housing Partnership, owners of the Farm Road Flats, declares that he has no intention nor the time to be involved in matters outside of his ward, West Twickenham.

Nov
13th

Councillor Coombs, who is supposed to have briefed, seems rather to have lost the plot. During a public consultation meeting he supposes that the UDP Inquiry changed the Council's provisions for the site.   It did not.

He also talks of a "contamination survey" yet to be completed.   As a matter of fact a soil survey was completed in 1997 and refered to recently, not least in a message sent to him, October 25th.

The Chair censoriously asserts that this had "nothing to do with the application.".

The soil report was nevertheless cited as a background paper to the officer's report: October, 2001. 

"05/12/02"

The date shown on Clive Chapman designs to destroy trees