Two futures for Walthamstow (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Two futures for Walthamstow

2:42pm Friday 27th March 2009

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By Janet Wright »

Please get to the Sunday 29 March cinema meeting if you can! It starts at 4.30pm, St. Mary’s School Hall, Rectory Road, Walthamstow. This could be a real chance to rescue Walthamstow town centre.

The cinema and town-centre revival -- and our finances as council-tax payers! -- are under further attack by the council's lunatic new scheme to pour £35 million into redeveloping the arcade site itself. A cabinet meeting on 24 March refused to do a feasibility study and voted this massive expense through without even a figleaf of consultation. We all know that the price will start spiralling as soon as the ground is broken. And if they do manage, as planned to put a cinema in there, it will kill all hopes of reopening the Granada/EMD.

The council is also planning to let the UCKG open the cinema building on Hoe Street as a 'church', to hold the meetings at which they raise their multi-million pound tax-free profits.

The cinema is far from being a lost cause. A series of cinema operators have tried to buy the Granada/EMD in order to reopen it, but have been scared off by leaks from the council that a multiscreen will be built on the arcade site next door. Now that the developers have dropped out of the arcade site, a multiscreen (or anything much other than cramped flats) no longer looks remotely possible.

The cinema is a vital issue for anyone who cares about either Walthamstow or the arts, for two reasons.

1) negative. A UCKG meeting-place would be the death-knell for any cultural life in Walthamstow, and a warning to any entrepreneur not to come here. We'd have traffic chaos and a town centre thronged with religious fundamentalists, who don't spend their money in the market or cafes or galleries.

There would be no town-centre revival but the opposite: places would close down and the area would die off. (Look at poor old Finsbury Park around the former Rainbow Theatre, now a UCKG centre, to see what we could expect here.) And the cultural deadness would spread out to the rest of the town.

2) positive. The EMD/Granada as the glorious, glittering heart of a lively town centre would create an upward spiral of new shops, restaurants and cafes, bringing in a clientele for galleries and the High Street market and so on. Visitors would spend their money in the area, businesses would thrive, small specialist shops and stalls would open, the market could be revitalised, and it would start looking like a good place to move into again.

One of the deadening hands on Walthamstow has been this council's bizarre hostility to people visiting from outside. Remember their vision of the Morris gallery as 'somewhere [local] children could throw paint around' rather than a magnet for art-lovers? Most councils encourage people to come in and spend money. A flourishing scene around the cinema -- enjoyed by local people and money-spending visitors -- would provide further evidence in favour of this.

We need the Granada as a cinema. Come on Sunday and help achieve this.