Tag Archives: Hengrove Leisure Park

THE PLEBS DON’T NEED OPEN SPACE SAYS LABOUR PRAT

Inns Court

Interesting local Labour Party response to an Inns Court residents meeting in the autumn to discuss the building of an Onside Youth Zone on their valued open space.

Learning that local residents had had the sheer affront to hold a meeting and propose alternative brownfield sites for this large sports complex in a corporate shed, Tom “Arse” Canham, the LGBTQ Officer for Bristol South’s CLP, took to Twitter to condemn the working class upstarts.

Just hours after a meeting where residents described the proposed site as a well-used green space with lots of wildlife, Tom Arse popped up on Twitter to claim the land was “public land that isn’t being used at all and isn’t much use to any one”. He continued, “Somehow some people oppose [the Youth Zone] being built on a roundabout where literally nothing is there,” and “It’s literally an empty field”!

None of this is true. It’s a wildlife rich open space and residents hadn’t opposed the Youth Zone. They had just suggested building it on a local brownfield site such as at Filwood Broadway, Hengrove Leisure Park or Imperial Park. Proposals that reflected a spirit of compromise rather than opposition.

No such spirit of compromise from Labour’s Tom Arse when presented with the facts, however. Instead he switched on caps lock to shout “NIMBYs gonna NIMBY” at anyone daring to disagree with him. He then claimed that the people of Inns Court had a problem with young people.

A ludicrous claim as Inns Court and Knowle West residents have worked together recently to pay for and create a garden for a local 7 year old girl with Downs Syndrome as she had been unable to use her dangerous garden since she was born. What’s Tom Arse doing for young people in the area apart from demanding their open space is concreted over as soon as possible?

Vote Labour: get arseholes.

THAT RARE BEAST … An informed comment on the Evening Post website!

In response to claims that Cineworld at Hengrove isn’t viable and “the cinemas for years have been dead”:

RARaspberryEgg17 HRS AGOReply to AwrightMeBabberz

You are wrong on this one.

At the current time, Cineworld charge £6 a ticket.

Around 400 of us have the Cineworld “Unlimited” Card, where, for a fixed monthly fee, you can watch as many films as you want (I know the numbers because Cineworld set up an unlimited group on Facebook for each cinema)

Cineworld themselves haven’t helped with their scheduling :

The Sopranos spin off, “The Many Saints of Newark” was released yesterday. Hengrove gets just one showing per day, at 4.40 PM, not great when you factor in people’s working commitments.

In the Cineworld App, both Yate and Weston have two showings per day, at 5.40 PM and 8.30 PM. Further afield, Cineworld cinemas in Newport, Cheltenham, Gloucester and Swindon have four showings per day, and this scenario is repeated for other films.

Prior to Covid, Hengrove was designated by Cineworld as an “International Film Cinema”, showing many Polish and Bollywood films, with Poles and Asians coming from as far as Thornbury, Newport, Cardiff, and Gloucester, to watch films in their native language (with English subtitles) that they could not watch nearer home. Since Hengrove re-opened, precious few foreign films have been shown

As a benefit of having an unlimited card, we had regular early preview showings of films, before they went on general release. Outside the screen, there was usually a table set up for us, offering free film posters, badges, water bottles, etc, and occasionally a tub of sweets or a drink. Again, this has all stopped.

Those of us with unlimited cards have long suspected that Cineworld themselves have wanted to close Hengrove, irrespective of any housing development.

Worse still, Cineworld are just silent when we ask questions via their social media channels….

NEW HENGROVE HOUSING HORROR

Hengrove Leisure Park

More good news for South Bristol as a planning application before Bristol City Council’s Planning Committe ‘A’ today proposes to demolish Hengrove Leisure Park and build 350 homes in its place.

This latest housing site is conveniently nestled between Hengrove Park, where 1,500 homes have planning permission, and the new private equity development ‘Urban Quarter’, where 250 homes are being built. 

A few hundred metres east of the site, on Hengrove Way, is Barratt Homes’ recently completed Filwood Park, a development of 150 homes and next to that is the emerging Skanska/IKEA ‘Boklok‘ abomination built on the verge of Airport Road with 173 homes.

The existing facilities at Hengrove Leisure Park – the cinema, bingo hall and the majority of food outlets – which only opened with much fanfare in 1998, are all proposed for demolition to make way for housing. Because, according to the planning application before councillors, the existing facilities are ‘not viable’.

Residents of Whitchurch, Hengrove, Hartcliffe and Knowle West are furious at the news that some of the last leisure facilities in the area are being thrown into the dustbin of history under the cover of “the housing crisis”. 

A slogan that, in the hands of the property industry, is nothing more than a populist ploy to extract large profits from overdevelopment. Is it any surprise that as house prices in south Bristol head north of £300k, the international private equity industry is taking an interest?

Residents also complain that they have been fooled by Bristol City council and its planners as the 1,500 home development on the hugely popular Hengrove Park was only signed off for planning permission on the basis that there were public facilities, like the leisure park, in the area to support new housing. The leisure park is even listed as part of ‘Phase one‘ of this new development by Bristol City Council.

This proposal is also another major disaster for the credibility of Bristol City Council planners who, 25 years ago, foisted this car-friendly development – a large car park with some large retail sheds – on south Bristol as their vision of the future for the area.

Indeed, so enamoured were council planners and politicians with their exciting new corporate-leisure-in-a-car-park future, they even granted the privately-run operation an unprecedented 1,000 year lease on the council-owned open space of Hengrove Park to realise this dream.

Whether this ludicrous 1,000 year lease to a corporate allows the new owners of the leisure park, AEK UK, to demolish it and build housing remains to be seen.