Please find formal notification of Twinkle Park Trust’s Annual General Meeting, taking place on:
Thursday May 5th, 7pm
at Armada Hall, McMillan Street, Deptford.
AGENDA
1. Chair’s welcome and introduction
3. Minutes and Matters Arising 21.02.2015
4. Finances: acceptance of accounts, reappointment of Simpson Wreford
5. Registration / resignation of Trust members
6. Election of Executive Committee
7. Election of Chair, Treasurer and Secretary
8. Progress report
Members of the public are welcome.
Easter Monday is here, the clocks have changed, and 2 out of the past 7 days haven’t been incredibly dreary, so it seems that spring is on the way.
As is customary, a tidy-up at the park is taking place, and everyone is welcome to join in with some light litter picking — perhaps rounding off with a little game of petanque (the piste is due its own little clean up this week to deal with the grass sprouting through — unless anyone would prefer that we had a lawn bowls court, in which case we could cultivate it…).
Details as follows:
Charlotte Turner Gardens (meet at the school entrance on Benbow Street)
Saturday, 9th April 2016
1:30pm
All help will be greatly appreciated!
refugee-childrens-clothes-appeal-final (QR)
A group of mums and local businesses based in south east London are currently raising funds to get winter coats, warm shoes and boots, and baby carriers and slings to refugee children in Europe. If you can donate good quality winter clothes your children have grown out of, please take them to one of their drop-off points: The Hoy Kitchen (Mon-Fri), Deli X or Deptford Salvation Army (14 November only).
For more information on how to help this great cause, join their Facebook group.
Among the various duties of the Twinkle Park Trust — fundraising, liaising with the council, and the like — some of the more pleasurable activities are those where we get to spend time in the parks, and making an immediate difference. From donning waders and skimming duckweed off the pond, to the supreme challenge of dexterity that is picking cider bottles from bushes using a telescopic grabber, it’s good to occasionally get out your comfy old clothes and do a bit of cleaning.
A couple of weekends back, a few members of the Trust spent the afternoon in Twinkle Park, giving the place a little bit of attention. Sweeping up leaves at this time of year might be a Sisyphean task, but along with chopping back some of the ivy around the benches and giving the pagoda a scrub, the park looked better and more welcoming at the end of the afternoon than it did at the beginning.
What’s more, it was nice to get the opportunity to speak to passers-by and neighbours (one of whom very kindly brought out tea and biscuits to help us along the way) and hear what they think about the parks.
These sessions usually last around 2-3 hours, and volunteers are welcome to come and go as they please. The work isn’t too strenuous, so as much as anything it’s a good opportunity to spend a little time outside, whiling away part of the afternoon chatting.
If you would like to join in with some of these activities in the future, sign up to our newsletter for alerts of when they will be taking place.
twinklepark.org.uk/about-us/our-friends
It’s festival season — but forget Glastonbury (it’s all corporate sponsor, expensive wellies and landfill indie music these days anyway), the Twinkle Park Trust Summer Festival is just a few weeks away!
Sunday, 12th July 2015
2pm – 6pm
Charlotte Turner Gardens
As ever, the good people at the Royal Borough of Greenwich council are supporting a number of events in some of the great parks around the local area (check out the Parksfest website to find full details of what’s happening), and the Twinkle Park Trust has organised its annual celebration of all that is good and great about nice weather and outdoor spaces!
The festival has moved this year to the larger of the two parks to make for what should be a really enjoyable day for the whole community. We have some familiar musical acts performing, as well as a range of activities, food and drink. The larger space means that we will now have a BOUNCY CASTLE and other children’s entertainments, a mural painting stall, where everyone will be able to contribute to a big, collaborative piece of art, and a very hands-on creative workshop run by local art mob Extra Bones.
Through the day we will also make use of some of the newer additions to the park, with a lot of ping pong, petanque, food and refreshments.
Bring your family/friends/dog or come on your own! Everyone is welcome and we look forward to seeing you.
It’s sunny, if not warm yet, but good enough to get out and getting the park ready for better days ahead.
On Saturday, 21st March at 11am, the Twinkle Park Trust will be undertaking a spring clean around Twinkle Park & Charlotte Turner Gardens.
If you would like to come and help, please come along for as long or as little time as you can spare. All tools and equipment will be provided.
See you there!
As we all know, one of our closest neighbours: Charlotte Turner Primary School, was sadly closed five years ago, and since that time the building has been largely empty, except for sparing use by several community groups (including Twinkle Park Trust!). However, a recent announcement may see that change, with Blackheath’s Invicta Primary School detailing its plans to expand to the Deptford site, proposing an opening in September 2015. The proposal has the backing of Greenwich Council, which has committed £1 million to the refurbishment of the Charlotte Turner school building.
Invicta has opened a consultation on the plans, inviting comments via a form available on their website:
http://www.invictaprimaryschool.org.uk/Deptford/
From the Invicta Primary School website:
If you live in Deptford & would like to attend a parents briefing about applying to Invicta Deptford, please email: admin@invicta.greenwich.sch.uk to register your interest. We look forward to hearing from you! There is also important information in the 2015 Primary Admissions Booklet
You can also follow us on Twitter for information & updates:
Invicta Deptford @invictaprimary
Initial dates for prospective parents’ meetings will be announced soon. We look forward to future news.
You may recall that over the night of October 16th 2013 all the water in Twinkle Park’s pond disappeared . Everyone was aghast for that amount of water to disappear so rapidly needed either an earthquake or a large tanker siphoning the water away.
Over the following weeks the Trust asked as many professionals to give their opinion on how the water may have escaped. United House, British Gas, Thames Water, Rawell Environmental Ltd -manufacturers of the special liner the holds the water in, Royal Greenwich Parks department, Warwick Landscape Ltd.
We tried refilling the pond first from the top-up system being left to flow for 48 hours and then by United House emptying their rain water collection into the pond. That was a lot of water as it was a very wet winter. All to no avail.
Greenwich Parks department helped the Trust excavate one section of the pond to see if the liner had split apart, but it was intact.
Finally we employed a company called ‘Stratascan’ in July this year to undertake an GPR survey – Ground Penetrating Radar. This has indicated no great holes under the pond that might have caused the loss of water. It has identified two special ‘areas of interest’. We are now discussing how we will excavate these areas to see if they give us a clue as to the cause of the water disappearing. This will happen in October.
Once we have this information the Trust will undertake fundraising to pay for the reinstallation of the pond and hope this will be achieved as soon as possible.
At present the ‘pond’ is somewhat more of a meadow – boasting a beautiful crop of ‘Purple Loosestrife’, so at least it is hosting all sorts of life – but hopefully it will recover its watery qualities before too long.
We will let you know what happens next.
As the old song goes: if you want the rainbow, you must have the rain — and that’s certainly what we got. Hopefully everyone has dried off by now, following this year’s wetter-than-usual Twinkle Park Summer Festival, which was a lovely time, despite the less than perfect weather! The day started out bright, but the first sign of trouble came as the wind whipping through the canyon was a little too strong for one of our marquee tents, which, after many years faithful service has been consigned to the dust bin.
Fortunately, the rain held off for the day’s first official duties. As man of you know, we have lost two great friends and colleagues over the past year, so we were delighted to be joined by friends and family of Jim Murray and Richard Macvicar to unveil a commemorative plaque in their honour as we celebrate the completion of the master plan in Charlotte Turner Gardens. Both were long serving trustees, involved in the local area for many years, and who have contributed a great deal to the spirit of the park and gardens, so it is most fitting for them to be remembered in such a way.
The final part of the recent works in Charlotte Turner Gardens was then ceremonially completed, as the children’s playground was opened by former Twinkle Park Trustee, Councillor and Mayor of Greenwich, David Grant (cutting what was, admittedly, a somewhat improvised ribbon). We were also honoured by the attendance of the Mayor and Mayoress Cllr Mick Hayes & Gillian Hayes, and Davida Allen, on behalf of Veolia Environmental Trust, who provided the grant which enabled the playground project to be completed.
Back in Twinkle Park, activity levels rose to the sound of DJ Stormy, followed by the wonderfully vibrant
Heart of Steel orchestra. All of this was as ever, powered by the volunteers running the
Pimm’s o’Clock station and the cafe, as well as the much needed addition this year of a barbecue, which kept everyone well-fed.
One of the nice things about the summer festival over the past few years has been the relaxed atmosphere and being able to while away an afternoon, enjoying being outside and doing things. As the music played, there were several distinct games of football going on in the playground, alongside attempts at hula-hooping, whilst over towards the pond some more sedate activities were taking place. Trustee Marq had prepared some pond life-themed screen prints to pull, whilst Drew and Ross from
Assembly at the Old Tidemill School helped craft masks all afternoon.
The final attraction of the day was the latin jazz sound of Havana Good Time, and they did their best to play through the rain — even when the speakers started to buzz from the drips through the roof of the ‘waterproof’ marquee. The rain lasted for around an hour, and sadly brought about the early close of the festival, as we left the marquees to drip-dry inside the school and went home wet but happy, looking forward to next year.
Twinkle Park Trust would like to give great thanks to…
All at Greenwich Parksfest, Cllr Mick Hayes & Gillian Hayes (Mayor and Mayoress of the Royal Borough of Greenwich), David Grant & Ann Grant, Cllrs Aidan Smith & Matthew Pennycook, Jagir Sekhon, Ian & Sheila and all Mac’s family & friends, Jim Murray’s friends and several generations of family members!, Teddy Perry, Davida Allen and Veolia Environmental Trust, John Perry and Jackie for feeding everyone with the barbecue, Patrick Gardner (DJ Stormy), Heart of Steel Orchestra, Havana Good Time (who brought some sun through very heavy rain!), Annie Phipps & friends for running the games and starting several football matches, Ellie Phipps & friends for their face-painting, Ross & Drew from Assembly for the mask-making workshop, Faye & Marilyn who served up Pimms all day, our local police officers for supporting the community event, Lucy for taking all the photographs,Jo, Andrew, Vicky, Anthony, Elaine, Marq, Bridget and Carol for their work in organising everything, and everyone who came along!!!
