Subsiding café, paths full of holes... welcome to the Fields

Published: 27 August, 2010

• MY children and I had a great time at Highbury Fields Fun Day.

I would like to thank Islington Play Association and everyone else involved in creating such a great day (Fun fields: Park comes alive, August 13).

It was so nice to see councillors Richard Watts and Mouna Hamitouche enjoying the delights of Highbury Fields at the event. Sadly, it is no thanks to either of them that the event was a success and the park was so well used and enjoyed by so many people.

Residents have spent years producing plans to improve the park.

Those plans have now been scrapped by their Labour colleagues at the Town Hall, who don’t seem to have any commitment to improving the borough’s largest and best used open space.

Plans to stop the One O’clock Club building from crumbling have been shelved so all our children have to look forward to now is using a rundown building that will get worse, instead of being able to enjoy a refurbished building.

I would expect more from a person in charge of children’s services (Cllr Watts) and more from Cllr Hamitouche, who I understand has ironically chosen the Play Association as her mayoral charity for the year.

But that’s not all. We have a café in the park that is subsiding.

Plans to create a new one have been axed.

The hole-riddled paths across the park will be left to get worse as the money to improve these is going elsewhere.

Plans to re-surface the much loved and well-used football pitches (which I understand were going to be funded by money from Arsenal and why shouldn’t they as we in Highbury have to put up with tens of thousands of fans) look like being taken away from Highbury and used elsewhere on Labour’s pet projects.

All these improvements were well advanced and were planned to start shortly.

Parks are a lifeline to those of us who live in social housing.

With care and investment they can make a real difference, something the new rulers in the Town Hall couldn’t give a toss about.

Councillors Watts and Hamitouche shouldn’t come to Highbury and celebrate our park until they can show they actually care about it.

It seems they are willing to see it fall to bits; they and their Labour colleagues have let  residents down and, sadly, are letting down Highbury Fields.

SANDRA LAING
Kelvin Road, N5