It really seems like the local council have something against the Portobello area, it turns out that they have been trying to have the Portobello court estate knocked down so they can build a shopping area in its place despite the estate being a quiet, mainly trouble free one (chosen for demolition because the council say the estate 'isn't in keeping with the look of the area'). The council have been accused of trying to get the plans pushed through without proper public consultation because they know that they would be universally opposed.
Its funny how people see an area famous because of what it is, want to tap into it, then buy it up and change it, why? why destroy an area when that is what attracted them to it in the first place?
Just where they would hope to home the hundreds of families and lone people young and old who live in Portobello court isn't stated, i can also imagine the estate being knocked down and left a waste ground for years much like the huge Edgware road site because during this recession and for some time after no one is going to have the money to open a shop or even shop there anyway, even if a building firm had the money to build a shopping centre there.
This isn't the first time the local council has acted in such a seemingly underhanded way towards the area and the people within it, up until a few years ago the council didn't want to know the Portobello area and ignored it, they hadn't had much to do with it since the Rackman scandal in the sixties yet in the last few years they have come on the attack more than once in an attempt to try and turn the area into a west London version of Covent garden (a stated aim) , and I'm sure the fact that plans that the council had for the building of fast foods chain stores such as McDonalds along Portobello were thrown out by local demand at heated residents meetings didn't help either.
The council have not only ridden roughshod over the residents they have also had goes at the traders on the market and surrounding shops, once the people from the 'council office' (who supervise the market and give spaces to part time traders) went on a petty crusade to harass any stall holder who took up any space outside of their designated box that had just helpfully been painted on the floor, the people from the market office even went around with a tape measure to see if the traders stalls were outside the regulated size, zealously threatening them with fines if they were even a few inches outside, then there was the charges the stall holders had to pay the council to trade which seemed to keep going up all the time, recently the council had to pay back many tens of thousands of pounds to traders (£750.000 actually) because of illegal charges that were levied on them. Then we had the resurfacing of Portobello road three times in nine months as a way to spend surplus council funds which disrupted the market and lost traders money, we had the closing of all public toilets in the Portobello area (facilities for about thirty men and women at a time) and the opening of just one pay as you go toilet for the whole market area in their place, this created 'piss corners' where people (still) go regularly and made the use of telephone box's as ad-hoc toilets the norm, then there is the amount of small independent shops that have had to move away because they could no longer afford to trade in the area despite being long established, and some even world famous, regardless of the money the traders brought into the area the council did what seems like nothing to help them unlike some other councils who helped their traders after the ground rents were pushed up by the government of the time, and the council has also done little to help the area area despite the damage the idiotic congestion charge has caused and the strain on the local roads as a result.
Sadly the list goes on, and on.
But things haven't been all bad for the area, the one remaining public toilet and the traffic island on which it sits near all the antique shops along Westbourne grove has been granted 'village' status (honestly!).
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