Thames Water and the Liberal history of the Ham Lands

Over to the Save Ham Lands and River site:

Thames Water has outlined a scheme that would involve digging a tunnel to convey treated sewage from Mogden Sewage Works, via Twickenham, in a line that will lie under Ham Lands to the discharge location on the Surrey side of the River in the North Kingston/Ham part of Ham Lands and associated local nature conservation area.

Up to six construction sites each requiring an area of size of half a football pitch will be required for tunnel shafts. A total area of 3 to 4 acres.

And here is Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond and North Kingston, taking up the cause in Westminster Hall this week:

I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for securing this extremely important debate. She mentioned Ham Lands, which is in my constituency of Richmond Park. 

It is a local nature reserve that the local community has spent decades trying to protect. It has a unique ecology; it is home to many rare plants, lichen and fungi. 

Yet incredibly Thames Water proposes to build up to six major construction sites on Ham Lands, each one half the size of a football pitch. The plans include the permanent - I emphasise permanent - destruction of five acres of vital wildlife habitat. In total, 24,000 people have signed a petition against the scheme. 

Does she agree that the community has made its views very clear and that the Government must now listen?

And Munira Wilson, who had called the debate on water resources proposals for Teddington, did agree.

Ham Lands is a nature reserve in Richmond upon Thames, between the river and the villages of Ham and Petersham.

Early in the 20th century there were gravel pits there. These were worked out by the time of the second world war and they were later used as a dump for rubble from London's bombsites.

This is a reminder that what are dismissed as brownfield sites can often be more valuable for conservation and recreation than your average piece of farmland. The rubble that came to the Ham Lands, for instance, brought with it soils and seeds from across London, leading to a particularly rich local flora.

I know a bit about the Ham Lands because I lived in Richmond for a while in the early 1980s, by which time they had become a political issue in the borough.

At some point the council had bought land there with the intention of using it for housing. Later, as the Ham Lands came to be valued as a local amenity, parts were sold off to private developers.

By 1983 there was a vocal campaign to protect the Ham Lands from further development. This was achieved when the Liberal-SDP Alliance took control of the council in the autumn of 1983.

I remember Alan Watson, the Liberal PPC for Richmond and a man not without a sense of his own importance, arriving at a meeting of the constituency party to find the new council leader, David Williams, passing round photographs of Ham Lands wildlife so we could all see what had been saved.

Watson had to wait until we'd all finished admiring them before he could tell us how he was going to be in the Alliance cabinet after the next general election.