Thank you to everyone who came to our AGM last night, especially Jim Dowd, MP - incidentally re-elected as a Sydenham Society VP - and our guest speaker Peter Ranken, director of Envirowork Lewisham, and shortly to become a member, I am told.

In a couple of years, after the current repairs to the Victorian gas mains have been done, and the Transport for London financed improvements to Sydenham Road implemented, will our High Street continue to be the favoured meeting point for a group of street drinkers, displaced from other parts of the borough?

We hope not.  We are very well that we are dealing with a serious and intractable social problem, but there are better ways to manage it than ones which deter people from using local shops when official policies are to support them.  Several local groups, including the Sydenham Society have supported the local Safer Neighbourhoods Team in doing something about this, in the first instance getting the bench in front of the Naborhood Centre removed.  The drinkers subsequently brought along an old sofa - which appears not to have amused the local police.

Another part of the solution could be allocating the space currently used by the drinkers for a flower stall, although at the time of writing, it appears the council bureaucracy for the necessary street trading licence is grinding rather slowly.  Let's hope they get moving soon - and allow the planter originally donated the Sydenham Society be seen in a rather more salubrious setting!

April 12th - Update - this is now in place, and Angie Lawson who is running it is a happy bunny.