It’s getting hot in here! Conversations in Gurnell Leisure Centre’s Sauna, Greenford

Strangers hardly ever speak to strangers and because in London everyone is a stranger, nobody ever speaks to no one! People stare into their mobile phones on the tube or sweat in awkward silences in the waiting room of their GP or at the job centre. But if you know where to look, there are places where people talk freely - little islands of random chats between people who often haven’t seen each other before…

One such island is the sauna in Gurnell Leisure Centre. Me and my friends like to go there after a week in the chill, going nuts on the assembly line, or after pushing brooms in the drizzly Perivale rain. Most people there are working people from around Greenford, Ealing and around the world. People talk about life, about politics. Older geezers tell young guys from Poland how they arrived from Jamaica in the 1970s to work in industrial laundries in Acton or for Royal Mail. Gujarati ladies talk about the fact that the picking at the H&M warehouse in Wembley aggravates their arthritis and exchange experiences about natural remedies from Kenya. We discussed the situation of mining workers near the frontline in Ukraine with a Ukrainian forklift driver and his Bulgarian friend. We discussed the NHS being sold off and how much worse the situation is in America where one guy had lived for a while, that if you get sick there, you end up bankrupt.

We might disagree about putting too much mint-oil on the stove (not allowed!), but most of us agree on some basics: the politicians cannot be trusted, the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer and something has to been done. There are not many of these places for these types of conversations. Maybe you have to be in a semi-dark room for it, with a dozen of so half-naked sweating people? In any case, we have to create more of them and defend them: Ealing council has agreed to sell the leisure centre land to a real estate developer. The leisure centre will be closed and demolished in 2017. The real estate developer has promised to build a new one (together with unaffordable flats), but who knows if that will actually happen. We should defend the leisure centre as long as it exists!

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Leaflet:

GURNELL LEISURE CENTRE REDEVELOPMENT PLANS

Some of you may have already heard that the council is planning a massive redevelopment of Gurnell Leisure Centre. They want to hand over OUR public land to a private property developer so that they can build luxury flats to finance a state-of-the-art leisure centre. A new leisure centre sounds great. The bad news for us is that Gurnell will close in April 2017, be knocked down and not re-open (supposedly) until January 2019.

Ealing councillors say that the roof will cost £10 million to repair in the short-term, so it makes financial sense to knock it all down and start again. However we have the following concerns:

* The council has already sunk £1.34m into this Gurnell redevelopment project before even asking us what we think about it. This consultation process seems to have come quite late in the day which is why we need to get involved now to get the assurances we need that this development will benefit US, the local residents of Ealing, and not just greedy property developers.
* Ealing Council intends to allow developers to build luxury housing on the Gurnell Leisure Centre site in return for a contribution towards the cost of improving the swimming pool. This contribution is welcome, but it is wrong to allow development on public land which waives the usual requirement for at least 25% of new housing to be to be ‘affordable’/social stock, while we are so desperate for social and affordable housing in the area. This must no be allowed to happen.
* While a state of the art leisure centre sounds brilliant, we would like assurances that it will be accessible to local people. Admission prices should remain the same so it doesn’t just become a place for those that can afford it.

And where are we supposed to go in the meantime?!

The next public meetings where the Council will try and push ahead with this is are on:

9th June and 14th July
Where? Hathaway Primary School, Hathaway Gardens. Ealing. W13 0DH.
When? 6.30pm.

Let’s go and voice our concerns and press for some answers.

The final plans for the new facility will not be submitted to planning until September 2016 and the planning approval process will take approximately 6 months. So we still have time to make sure our voices are heard!

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