Save Wimbledon Park Rifle Club and its members allotments!

We support this petition to save the Wimbledon Park Rifle Club and its members allotments from development. Help us stop the demolition and destruction of this green recreational space.

UPDATE!!! We are now fighting the planning application from the owner/developer to demolish and develop the whole of Wimbledon Park Rifle Club, the ranges, and its members allotments.
Please help! If you live in the Borough of Wandsworth, you can register your comments. Here is the link to the planning website

https://planning2.wandsworth.gov.uk/planningcase/comments.aspx?case=2022/1429 

The allotments provide a wonderful sanctuary for the Club’s members to grow fruit and vegetable as well as providing a green buffer between adjoining houses and the club's ranges. The ranges themselves are also a natural green space over which bats are regularly seen feeding. The site is very significant for local residents, it is registered as an Asset of Community Value and local school children visit to learn about cultivation. It has been here since 1904 and and enable our local area to have more biodiversity. There are only 450 Council allotments in Wandsworth and a waiting list of over 1300 people and over 10 years, so we need to save the allotments we have.

Here's the background: The green space in Southfields to rear of Granville Road and between Pulborough Road and the railway embankment for the District Line is under threat. The owner of this land now wants to develop the land commercially. This would mean that the club and its allotments will disappear.

This has been a green field site since the early 1900s. Food growing skills are passed between the generations.  This is a small but extremely valuable resource for the local community. Allotments in Wandsworth are in very short supply – the average waiting time is around 10 years. This is a precious green space that our community needs to preserve: we are increasingly aware of the importance of nature for our mental and physical and health well-being, for wildlife and for the environment. The newly launched 2021 London Plan recognises that food growing is critical to ‘promote more active lifestyles and better diets, to improve social integration and community cohesion’; and Wandsworth Council’s Core Plan states: ‘The Council will protect and improve public and private open space and Green Infrastructure in the borough’.

Preserving this green space will safeguard its role as a green corridor for wildlife that includes bats, a rare moth and hives of honeybees.  All this will be lost if the land is developed and built on.

Green spaces are beneficial in the fight against climate change. Should this development go ahead local air pollution will worsen.  It will also lead to increased traffic congestion and parking difficulties in the already busy surrounding streets.

We believe that the loss of  the club and its allotments needs to be opposed.  We are calling on Wandsworth Borough Council and the Mayor of London to use their powers to permanently preserve this entire site as a green space for its current recreational use for current and future generations of Wandsworth residents.

Please sign and share this petition! Together, we can save precious green spaces.