River Gardens Update

Bellway opened show flats and a sales office for their portion of the River Gardens development on the 23rd of June. Three of us spent some time on the river walk talking to prospective new neighbours about the proposed cruise terminal at Enderby Wharf which didn’t seem to have been included in the sales marketing despite the terminal’s proximity.

We also noticed the shoddiness of the new riverside railing installation and that they didn’t match the existing railings despite being part of the same development. This was brought up at the next Bellway consultation meeting a few weeks later and after a number of emails Bellway have now admitted that top part of the railings is temporary and will be replaced. They haven’t said they will move the join between the two disparate railing designs to a corner where the difference would be less noticeable. It would mean installing 3 panels of the existing design. This might seem trivial at first glance but this is the public realm part of the development, the bit we have to live with, and it needs to be done to an acceptable standard. Much of the public realm, especially the paving on the already built part of River Garden isn’t good enough and we don’t want any more of the same from Bellway.

There are now 3 licensing applications with the council for the River Gardens. The first is for a shop in the long-unoccupied commercial space under Ernest Shackleton House, 70-72 Banning Street. That’s the middle building on the landward side of the street. The shop in question will be a Simply Fresh small supermarket/deli. The second came through the letterbox today and is for a Co-op across the street under Granite House. The third also concerns Granite House and is for a pub and pizza offering called The Taproom on the river side. It will be run by a local craft brewery called Hopstuff which has a number of other pubs in south east London. The two shops are applying for off licenses to run during shop hours, 6:00 to 23:00 hour in the case of the Co-op, 7:00 til 23:00 for Simply Fresh.

As long as Greenwich keeps the licensing hours the same for all the local pubs there shouldn’t be a problem with patrons of any one moving from one to the other along the river, this is important as there is a rumour that Enderby House a bit further along the Thames Path may become a pub as well. There may well be other issues for the residents of River Gardens as some of the flats are very near but we’ve heard nothing yet. The proposed premises doesn’t appear to be very large and there isn’t much space between it and the Thames Path. Separating pub patrons from the path and cycleway will need to be taken into consideration. I’m not sure of the timeline for the pub as I’ve only seen it mentioned on a Hopstuff social media site.

As EGRA gets more information on any of the above issues we will update the website.