Ken Offers to Save Ally Pally

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Permalink Reply by matt on April 17, 2008 at 13:54

Not sure. Seeing that the Crystal Palace park rescue proposal involves selling off part of their park for housing makes handing over Ally Pally to the GLA a risky option. But obviously something needs to be done because this borough's best asset is so under utilized.

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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on April 17, 2008 at 15:00

Agree that something needs to be done. The Council and the campaign group 'Save Ally Pally' agree on that point if not a great deal else. Agree also that AP is this Borough's greatest asset and that it is severely under used. But, that something should be done doesn't mean that anything should be done.

The Firoka bid, which looks even further out of the picture, was a shockingly bad deal for the Charity's beneficiaries - that's us, the public. No wonder the whole deal was done under extreme, obsessive secrecy.

Also, this building should never have been put in the hands of a single, skint Borough. We have had 27 years of wasted opportunity. AP has been a modest, mediocre success but nothing like what it should have been. It should never have been seen as solely a Borough asset and still less, treated as a Council asset: this isn't just the most important building in Haringey, due to its being the birthplace of television, it is the Bletchley Park of London.

The face-saving measure of Ken's announcement opens a whole range of questions; I personally don't see a GLA solution as being ideal for a whole raft of reasons - including the possibility of sale later on by the GLA to a private developer, just as Haringey tried to do. The ideal solution, IMHO, is taking it out of all political control and passing it to expert independent Trustees as the necessary first step to a bright future.

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