Newsletter – October 2011

Welcome to the first official Chatsworth Road newsletter.  As a member of CRTRA, you will receive a newsletter from us every few months to update you on what has been happening on Chatsworth Road and across the wider neighbourhood. This being the first newsletter there’s a lot to say!

The association
Back in April a new executive committee was voted in at the AGM.  Since then there have been a few changes to the committee and you can find an updated list of who’s involved on our website.

The committee meets monthly and the first 30 minutes of the meeting is open to anyone in the community (you must have confirmed your attendance and submitted an agenda item beforehand).  We try and get the minutes of all these meetings on the website asap (we haven’t been very good at doing this lately).  If you’d like to come to one of the meetings the next ones are planned for Thursday 13 October and Thursday 10 November at 645pm. We’ll post a reminder on Facebook nearer the time – but remember, you need to email us first to add your points to the agenda.

Things that are going on:

Chatsworth Road Market

The market has been running weekly since 12 June.  We have added over 20 new stalls over the summer months which we hope has made the market more enjoyable to visit.

The market is currently open to all potential traders with no restrictions on what they can sell, providing Hackney Council’s terms and conditions are met. We relaxed our original commodity criteria to ensure we built the critical mass that the market needs to function economically – we will bring this back in and work on diversifying it further later in the year. If you know of someone who would like a stall, particularly if they are offering something different, direct them to the information sheet on our website.

We have recently set-up a small working group to manage and run the market. This currently consists of market traders and committee members, but is open to anyone in the community who would like to get involved. The first meeting of this group was in July and there will be another one tomorrow – Wednesday 12 October (7pm) at Chats Palace. If you’d would like to be part of this group and help grow the market get in touch.

Thems Please
Hopefully most of you saw the wonderful exhibition at the vacant AE Barrows shop (aka: ‘the Wrigley’s Shop’). This was put together by Measure with support from us and Yeahhackney.com.  It was our first attempt at facilitating meanwhile uses of vacant shops on Chatsworth Road – something we will look to develop further. The exhibition was a huge success, if you didn’t see it there are photos here

Brooksby’s Walk Toilets
Over the last few months Clapton Improvement Society (CIS) (with help from CRTRA) has been working to ensure that the toilets at the end of Chatsworth Road remain a community building and are open to the community on market days. CIS are in the process of signing a 26 year lease in exchange for operating the toilets on market days.  In order to fund this, half of the toilets will be turned into an event space called ‘Events in The Gents’.  If you have any ideas about events which could take place there get in touch with them at claptonimprovementsociety@gmail.com.

The People’s Supermarket
Last month The Peoples Supermarket (TPS) confirmed they are coming to Hackney. They have a unit close to Homerton Station and have been at the market over the last few weeks to hear about what you would like the unit to be used for – it may not be a supermarket!

The consultation is almost finished (you have until Thursday to compete the survey) and there will be a meeting about the results on Tuesday 25 October at Chats Palace – the sessions start at 4pm and 6pm and you can find out more here.

To learn more about TPS’s plans for the Homerton space, visit their dedicated Hackney website.

Cake shop
Cakey Muto is a new cake shop that is about to open at 25 Chatsworth Road. You can find out more about the shop and its’ owner on her blog here or the shop’s Facebook page here. Their location towards the south of Chatsworth Road will hopefully bring more people to this end of the street.

New hairdressers
Last month a new hairdressers opened at 75 Chatsworth Road.  It’s called Johnny’s Hair Shop and is run by Johnny.  You can find out more about him at www.johnnyshairshop.com, or just pop in – we’ve already heard some good reviews.

Homerton Library
Homerton Library faced cuts in its staff and the services it provides in favour of the larger libraries. CRTRA wrote to the council in support of Homerton Library and against the proposed cuts which we felt would have a detrimental effect on the local area.  This letter was presented to the council when the union had the opportunity to lobby at the town hall. Their lobby was successful and the council agreed not to go ahead with the cuts.

No. 33 Chatsworth Road
We’ve welcomed the new owner of No.33 to the street and he’s agreed to host a pop-up exhibition of the photos of Guilherme Zauith of Chatsworth Road and the surrounding area.  It will be open from the 20-23 October initially. This is the first time we’ll be seeing this shop open in years!

Things we’re working on:

Membership
We’re looking to develop a more formal membership structure for the association. This will help raise money and make the association more sustainable in the long run.  We’ll be in touch in the next few months with more information.

Neighbourhood Plan
For those that don’t know, in January this year we started working on the Chatsworth Road Neighbourhood Plan. Over the last six months we’ve been collecting information about the neighbourhood and the community and we’re now bringing all the research together to identify a number of aspirations for the area to help us develop some projects and policies to influence how things are changing. In case you haven’t come across this you can watch a video about it here. (There should be a first draft of this piece of work ready to circulate to everyone towards the end of the year.)

Cash machine
Lots of people have been asking us to get a fee-free cash point on the street.  We’ve been busy working on this and things are looking promising.  Now all we need is to identify the best location for it and letters are going out to all traders this week. Once that’s done we’ll let you know the date it will be in.

Filling vacant shops
As part of our remit of improving the area, we’ve been working on getting occupiers for the vacant shops on Chatsworth Road.  We’ve been making good progress with this and have been putting a number of potential occupiers that have approached us in touch with the owners of vacant properties.

We’re looking to develop this side of things to try and help businesses that might end up being priced out too – if anyone is interested in getting involved get in touch.

Shop security
We have been working with shop traders to increase security for them as a number have been burgled over the last year.  We are working to implement a radio security system that connects them all together so if any has any trouble they can easily call on their neighbours. We are currently speaking with the council about how this would work.

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Get involved
We always need help, both regular (as committee members) and ad hoc (on market day or helping with mailing lists etc.). Here are roles that are vacant at the moment. All are voluntary.

Vacant committee roles:

Secretary – tasks include taking the minutes (monthly), updating committee matters on the CRTRA website and helping to prepare the agenda and any other papers for CRTRA.

Business member – a shop trader or market trader on Chatsworth Road

Resident member – a local resident (non business) who lives nearby or shops on Chatsworth Road

All committee members attend a monthly meeting (evenings around 7-9pm) and are called upon to comment on ongoing projects via email inbetween. Time commitment is around 4-5 hours per month.

Ad hoc help:

We need people to help on market day – overseeing the set-up of stalls (no need to physically set-up equipment), manning CRTRA’s information stall – and beyond, for example taking market flyers around shops, getting feedback from businesses about matters on the street, updating the website and updating our mailing list. Time commitment can be from one hour now and again to one day once a month, it’s whatever you have available.

Please get in touch to volunteer.

So that’s all the news for now. We hope you found this interesting and if you have any suggestions let us know.

If you’d like more frequent updates on what’s going on in the area ‘Like’ us on our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.  We also have a notice board outside the Book Box, where we post more general information.