Enable has withdraw its plan to put advertising across Wandsworth Park, the Friends of Wandsworth Park told supporters yesterday.
By then, over 60 readers of this paper had already emailed the council to object, most before 9am. Stephanie, Keith, Ana, Christopher, Max, Caroline, Susan, Li and 50 others, adding to 75 objections already lodged with the council.
Keith has used the park since 1965 and told the council he now enjoys it from a wheelchair. Ana wrote that people go there to rest and protect their wellbeing, not to be told what to buy. Christopher takes his goddaughter to the playground three times a week and said the plan would turn the place into Piccadilly Circus.
The Friends say parks management has requested the withdrawal, although the council’s planning portal still shows application 2026/2978 as registered and open for comments. We have asked Enable and the council’s planning department to confirm its withdrawal, and are waiting on confirmation.
But it is fair to assume it is true and the plan has been scrapped on the final day of public comments. The question worth asking today is not whether this was a win but why it took a local community group, a newspaper, and 60 people’s mornings to force a rethink on something that should never have been proposed in the first place.
The stage where somebody could have asked
Of the many thousands of people that use Wandsworth Park every day, not one got a letter. Advertisement applications carry no duty to consult anybody, so the council posted none. That would have mattered less a year ago, because there was a consultation system for parks in place. Until recently, plans for the park would have been shared and discussed with the voluntary organisation set up to look after it, in this case Friends of Wandsworth Park.
Last summer Wandsworth rewrote its policy covering events in its parks, over the objections of more than 860 people – one of the largest responses ever received by Wandsworth Council. A clear majority of those residents were worried about commercialisation, noise and overuse. The Friends of Tooting Common sent a deputation to councillors in person to say so. It was to no avail, Cabinet approved the policy without amendment.
What people were worried about was not as much what would be allowed in the parks. It was who would get to say yes. Advisory groups had always been consulted before large events were approved. Under the new policy they are consulted afterwards, once the council has already given the green light.
The new arrangement has produced an entirely unsatisfactory result for everyone. It was not hard to foresee that Friends of Wandsworth Park would oppose the installation of huge, brightly lit advertising hoardings, and so Enable simply didn’t ask. Wandsworth expects to make around £1m a year from commercialising its parks – and Enable is the body that has been told to go and earn it. From the perspective of the Enable staff member that put together the application and cleared it with council staff, they did their job.
Which is precisely the problem. The incentive to sell the site sits inside the same organisation that looks after it, and the backstop of the residents’ voice before decisions are made has been actively removed. The subsequent U-turn when faced with a wave of resident annoyance and the upset it has caused is a direct results of the previous administration’s decision to drive things in a more commercial direction.
There is a real cost to this kind of conflict: a volunteer group spent weeks working behind the scenes. Dozens of residents and readers spent a morning writing to the planning department. Officials drew up, posted, reviewed and approved the proposal. And in the end, nothing was achieved but damaged trust between the organisation looking after the parks and the people who use it every day. A five-minute conversation with the Friends of Wandsworth Park, could have resolved all of it before it even got started.
Put the asking back
The fix is not complicated, and should be done at the next available opportunity.
The Conservative minority administration that took over in May inherited a council where pre-decision scrutiny had been abolished. In one part, it has already restored it through the confidence and supply agreement that was signed with independent councillor Malcolm Grimston: committees now look at decisions before the cabinet takes them, rather than afterwards. The reasoning was that being consulted after a decision is not being consulted.
The same reasoning applies to the parks. Friends groups should be consulted before consent is given, not after, and advertising consent in a park should be treated as the kind of decision that needs asking about. That is one paragraph of policy. It was in the rules for decades before being scrapped last year – it’s time to put it back in.
We have put questions to Enable about why no consultation took place, what revenue the advertising was expected to raise, and whether it intends to try again here or in another park. We have asked the council’s planning department to confirm the application’s status. We will publish what they say.
Until then, the park remains a park – not a spare piece of land on which to place ads – as a large number of residents ensured on a Tuesday morning. Those actions were admirable. They should also not have been necessary.
