Well done @rob @ForestHillStarman and the others from @foresthillsociety for all the work you put into making this happen. It looks great.
And thank you to everybody who donated to make this happen. It is wonderful what we can do together!
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Truly creditable.
The chosen solution to clean the mural up and apply protection to it has produced a remarkable piece of restoration work.
Well done to everyone involved.
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Kudos to Lewisham Council teams (maybe with assistance from councillors?) but there was a little fly in our beautiful mural ointment … while the painting team could clean and repaint the mural, there was an ugly tag on the wall next to it which they could not do anything about.
See here on the right:
I reported this on 21st May via the Love Clean Streets app, and today I received confirmation that it has been dealt with and removed, and have even returned a photo of the wall
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Ah that’s great - I also reported it on May 21st and got notification that the work was completed a day or two ago. I hadn’t had a chance to take a look yet, but it’s super that they acted so quickly! I was reminded of criminology’s broken windows thesis when I reported it, in that if little things like that get fixed in a timely way, it puts people off adding to them with more graffiti.
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Am I right in thinking that when the stretch funding was raised for the mural project that there was a plan to spend some money fixing the guttering above so dirty water runoff doesn’t spoil the new look?
I noticed when jogging past yesterday that there is already a build-up of detritus, and it would be amazing if that gutter could be cleared to prevent the mural from getting messed up too quickly.
I’d be happy to help try and organise something to fix it if there is no plan in train to sort it - just holler.
It proved to be VERY complicated, but happy to chat about it some time to see if you have ideas, but a bit too much for this site. Let’s just say that since the infrastructure belongs to Network Rail we can’t touch it (directly), and the pigeon netting also blocks access.
I would still love to do something if we can come up with a suitable solution (and contractor)
Ah, that all makes sense. What a shame. Presumably network rail’s maintenance team has been approached suggesting they sort it? Maybe they’d be amenable if not
Yes, but they said there is no money for this sort of work (and we’ve discovered how expensive anything is that is done through official contractors, so we couldn’t afford to fund it. We got a quote for just the cleaning of the wall that was more than the entire amount we had raised to clean, paint and protect the mural!!).
I’m still hoping we can find a solution one day, and we can use some of the remaining funds to clean the wall more regularly in the interim
That sounds like a good plan. The official contractor issue is such a big one, and explains perhaps a great deal of the high costs of doing anything in the public sector these days. A licence to print money for those doing the contracting, some might say. Will have a think if there’s any clever way we could sort it. The pigeon netting is the challenge, or I’d be happy to climb up a ladder and scoop the crud out myself…
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