Joan, that's my understanding too.If you want a balanced view of Hounslow's relation with Friends groups, I think you would get an entirely different response from the Friends of Watermans Park and St Paul's Rec.Like everyone else, I hold Linda Massey and her colleagues in high regard. They have taken a large burden of running a precious park, especially through the days when the parks' admin was outsourced originally to John Laing and later Carillion.What has happened in Boston Manor is that we have escaped from external profit-making partners like Carillion and brought that under our control via GreenSpace, and won a large sum of money from the lottery to improve and extend its value to the people who live locally. If you've been to BM recently you will see the improvements now beginning to show (take a look on Saturday afternoon with our resident Park Manager Vanessa details here https://www.facebook.com/events/1273111290174836?ref=newsfeed Because the lottery are significant investors in the park - chosen because Brentford has significant deprivation and because our excellent Park team worked very hard on an application - they reasonably have become a stakeholder in how things are taken forward, and they are very keen on a cafe with opening times that meet all visitors needs. They want (and the council want) longer serving times than we have been used to, and they spent a lot of money rebuilding the cafe premises to make its future secure. Not surprising the Friends had some reservations about that, as well as other things about how the park works. From my perspective (and the parks staff) we tried our best to have a solution that works for every party, but in the cafe arrangements we ultimately failed. We are determined to have an economical (for customers) cafe. It will not be run by a large company or a household name. Ideally, the Friends having chosen not to continue, our preference is to find a community provider to run it. Whether they pay some of the salaries of workers out of takings to make it viable to deliver the service is not something we would refuse, nor would we be against a local provider run it an a commercial basis, but it would have to meet our requirements to provide economically priced good quality products for park users. We will know how this plays out in the next couple of months.
Guy Lambert ● 497d