Wandsworth Park’s six entrances could carry banners, flags and illuminated advertising for the next five years, under an application that has drawn 78 objections and no support. Public comments close today.
The charity that runs the borough’s parks told the council, in the covering letter accompanying its application, that the biggest banner it wants is seven metres wide. The form filed alongside that letter asks for one 31.64 metres wide and 14.04 metres high, lit from the outside.
The council’s own cabinet member for the environment has come out against it. Cllr Ethan Brooks, one of the three councillors for Thamesfield, the ward containing the park, told residents last week that the council was not informed before Enable submitted, that officers would be approaching the charity to understand its thinking, and that the application does not have his support.
The application is also the first thing residents have seen come out of a rule change they fought last summer. Under the old policy, the park’s Friends group would have been asked before anything like this was decided. Under the new one, they found out when it appeared on the planning register.
Things have been complicated by the fact that the council’s planning software is going through an upgrade until 28 September so any objections have to go by email to planning@wandsworth.gov.uk, quoting application 2026/2978, and they have to arrive before the end of today.
The council is allowed to weigh how the advertisements would look, how they would affect people living beside the park and using it, and whether they are safe. Whether a public park should carry advertising at all is not something it may take into account.
What Enable asked for
Most of what Enable is asking for would be banners on entrance railings, the covering letter explains, with directional signs during bigger events. “The maximum banner size applied for is 7 metres x 1.2 metres,” it says, “although many banners are considerably smaller depending on their location.”
The form lists four. The smallest is an A-board, 90 centimetres by 60. Then the seven-metre banner. Then a five-metre-square LED screen, lit from within, carrying letters up to a metre high. Then one 31.64 metres wide and 14.04 metres high, lit from outside at 500 candela per square metre.
That last one is four and a half times the width the covering letter promises and nearly twelve times the height. The banner described in the letter covers 8.4 square metres. The advertisement on the form covers 444 square metres, fifty-three times as much, and would stand taller than three double-decker buses one on top of another.
The application from Enables goes far beyond what it allows anyone else. Hire Wandsworth Park for a wedding or a fun run and Enable’s rulebook states that banners on the railings “shall not exceed 5m x 1m”. Nothing may be lit from outside without Enable’s written permission. Anything left up afterwards costs £250 plus VAT, and a directional sign left behind is £50.
A hirer gets five metres by one, which is five square metres. Enable has asked the council for 444 square metres, lit, which is eighty-nine times as much.
One of its rules goes further than size. Hirers may not advertise “any event or commercial concern or activity taking place outside of the Parks or open space”. It is unclear whether Enables thinks that rule will also apply to itself but it gave as an example of what the advertising would provide the events programme for Battersea Park, which shows two Battersea Park events, a concert series and a comedy festival, as well as advertising for a wedding open day.
How to object before the end of today
Comments close today, Tuesday 15 September. The council’s online form is switched off, so objections have to go by email. There are three steps.
1. Open an email to the council. This link opens a message in your own mail app, already addressed and with the subject line filled in: Email planning@wandsworth.gov.uk If nothing opens, write to planning@wandsworth.gov.uk, copy in postbox@putney.news, and use the subject Objection to application 2026/2978, Wandsworth Park.
2. Copy the objection below into it. Select the text, copy it, and paste it into the email. Put your name and address where the brackets are, and add a few words of your own about what the park means to you. An email in your own words carries more weight with a case officer than an identical one.
3. Send it. It has to arrive before the end of today.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I object to application 2026/2978, advertisements at Wandsworth Park, Putney Bridge Road, SW15 2PA.
The advertisement applied for is 444 square metres, fifty-three times the area of the largest banner the covering letter describes. That is out of all proportion to the entrances of a small park and would harm the amenity of the area.
Two of the displays would be lit at 500 candela per square metre. The park forms part of a dark corridor along the Thames and is kept unlit for bats. This would harm amenity after dark.
Wandsworth Park is Grade II on the national register of historic parks and gardens, list entry 1000285. Regulation 3(2)(a) makes historic interest a factor relevant to amenity.
[Your own words here: what the park means to you, how often you use it, what you would see from your window.]
Please record this objection and take it into account in determining the application.
Yours faithfully,
[Your name]
[Your address, including postcode]
Why these three grounds. On an advertisement application the council may only weigh amenity and public safety. Size, light and the park’s Grade II registration all sit inside amenity. Whether a public park should carry advertising at all, or that Enable consulted nobody, are real objections and not ones the council may lawfully count. Put those to your councillors instead.
Nothing is sent or stored by us. The copy to postbox@putney.news is because the council is not publishing emailed objections until 28 September, so nobody can otherwise see what has been sent.
What people have written
Light is the single biggest theme of objections. Of the 77 letters, 52 raise illumination and 48 raise wildlife or trees. Wandsworth Park is kept unlit on purpose: it forms part of a dark corridor along the Thames, and the Friends of Wandsworth Park have campaigned for years for bats that lose their bearings under artificial light.
Mrs C. Heilman told the council her children had learned to tell bat species apart on an evening “bat walk” run by the Friends. “As I understand it,” she wrote, “lighting is not allowed in the park specifically to allow the bats to inhabit the park undisturbed.”
Suzanne Mobed put it harder. She wrote that the council had previously refused more lighting in the park, which residents had asked for in order to feel safer after dark, on the grounds that it would harm the bats. Now the council is considering doing exactly that – on commercial grounds.
Enable’s two lit advertisements are specified at 500 candela per square metre – another rule that would be broken. Just this month, the council insisted on a night-time brightness at 300 in a different advertisement application. At the size it has asked for, the screen at that brightness would be the equivalent of 45,000 phone screens.
The second theme is scope, and it is not all opposition in principle. Anthony Nonnis, who lives a street back and walks his dog in the park three times a day, told the council he had “no objection in principle to modest operational or wayfinding signage genuinely required for a specific event”, but that this proposal was “far too broad” and risked “materially changing the character of the park”. Adrian Cole said he did not object to the smaller unlit banners, only to the illuminated screens.
The Deodar Merivale Florian Residents Association objected as a body, saying there was no evidence the effect on the homes overlooking the park had been assessed. Alex Luke read the Local Plan and told the council it prefers externally illuminated signs in all circumstances while the application asks for internally illuminated ones, and that no evidence has been supplied about how power would reach them without disturbing an archaeological priority area.
The park itself is protected. It has been on the national register at Grade II since 1 October 1987: eight hectares of Edwardian public park laid out under Lt Col J J Sexby, opened in 1903, with more than 350 trees and the river in front of it. Where an application affects a registered park, the council has to weigh its historic interest before deciding.
In October last year the Gardens Trust, which councils must consult on applications affecting such places, called them “irreplaceable resources” needing investment rather than treatment as assets.
Not everything on the register is an objection. One resident of a riverside block nearby wanted the opposite: “Can we please have night lights in the Wandsworth Park its very scary to crose it at night and not safe at all.”
How it got here
Enable can ask for any of this because of a change Wandsworth made to its own rules last summer. The council rewrote the policy covering events in its parks against more than 860 consultation responses, a clear majority worried about commercialisation, noise and overuse, and against a deputation the Friends of Tooting Common delivered to councillors in person. The Cabinet approved it without a single amendment.
What worried people was not what would be allowed in the parks. It was who would get to say yes. Advisory groups had been consulted before large events were approved. Under the new policy they would be consulted after the council had given the green light, leaving nobody able to object first. Residents who asked for mapped exclusion zones around sensitive habitats were told the council would “consider” them later, so nothing was written down.
Enable is a registered charity, set up in October 2015 to run leisure, sports, arts and cultural services for Wandsworth Council. It runs the events programme in the parks, and the council expects to make around £1 million a year from commercial use of its green spaces. The more events there are, the better that works.
On the form, Enable ticked No to consulting neighbours or the local community, and No to asking the council’s advice before applying. It ticked Yes to having the landowner’s permission. The landowner is Wandsworth Council.
Advertisement applications carry no duty to consult anybody, which is why the council posted no letters about this one either. The policy change removed the stage at which somebody could have asked.
The Friends of Wandsworth Park say on their own website that they have been “working hard with Enable Parks’ Development Officer to take an active part in supporting Wandsworth Park”. The Friends of Tooting Common asked the Cabinet last summer for a public review of the events policy at least every six years. Enable wants five years with no review in it at all, and gives its reason as “operational certainty” and “reducing the administrative burden associated with more frequent applications”.
Mara Vaivars, who walks through the park most days, told the council she had noticed nothing about the proposal in the park itself, and had found out through a community group.
She may be right that little has been visible. The published objection count reached 78 on Friday morning and has not moved in the four days since, and people have not stopped writing. The council’s own notice says representations emailed during the shutdown “will not be published or available for public viewing on the Council’s website”. For the last five days of a consultation on a five-year consent, you can object, but you cannot see that anyone else has.
What happens next
No committee date has been set and no officer recommendation published, so the decision sits with the council’s planning department.
The five years Enable asked for started on 1 July. It signed the form on 27 July, and the council registered it on 25 August, by which time seven weeks of the consent had already run and nobody outside had seen a word of it. If it is granted, it runs to 30 June 2031, past the next borough election. Nobody will be asked again until then.
Have your say before the end of today
Comment on application 2026/2978 by the end of today, Tuesday 15 September. The online form is unavailable until 28 September. Email planning@wandsworth.gov.uk, quote the reference 2026/2978 and the address Wandsworth Park, Putney Bridge Road SW15 2PA, and give your own name and address.
What the council is allowed to take into account: how the advertisements would look in the park, how they would affect the people living beside it and using it, and whether they are safe. Light spill, harm to the park’s dark corridor, the effect on a registered historic landscape, and the size of individual advertisements at the entrances all sit inside that. Whether a public park should carry advertising at all does not.
Your Thamesfield councillors: Cllr Ethan Brooks, cllr.e.brooks@wandsworth.gov.uk · Cllr Robert Morritt, cllr.r.morritt@wandsworth.gov.uk · Cllr Salvatore Murtas, cllr.s.murtas@wandsworth.gov.uk
Enable’s parks team: parks@enablelc.org, 020 3959 0060. The council’s parks team: parks@wandsworth.gov.uk. Friends of Wandsworth Park: friendsofwandsworthpark@gmail.com
I have seen how the parks team works at closer range. The pocket park on Swaffield Road carried a budget of £400,000 and was delivered on the lightest possible community engagement. I asked for a breakdown of the figures under the Freedom of Information Act. That request ran for more than seven months and no breakdown ever arrived. Whatever value for money test is supposed to sit behind £400,000 of public money, I have seen no evidence it was applied, and no evidence anyone intends to show me. Just think about it … £ 400,000 without any transparency on how it was spent.
Also residents were put at risk during the build programme. Several residents complained which fell on dear ears and our wards councilors as usual were uncontactable. All this took place in the build up to the local elections and I emailed both sitting Labour councillors about it. And they now wonder why they lost a seat in Wandle !!
I also contacted the cabinet member for the environment and again no response.
A charity set up to run our parks should not have to be reminded whose parks they are. Enable has put profit ahead of people here, and it should be embarrassed to have imposed this on residents without asking a single one of them.
How the Swaffield Road park was delivered shows this.
Excellent work there in publicising this, Kieren, thank you!