Children create drama out of supersewer crisis

 
Playing for keeps: St Paul's School pupils hold up placards and posters calling for their park to be saved then queue to make their pleas to Phil Stride
10 April 2012

Children at an inner city primary school took to the stage to show a Thames Water boss how work on London's supersewer would rob them of a place to play.

Pupils at St Paul's School in Whitechapel performed a drama for Phil Stride, head of the Tideway Tunnel project, showing the devastating effect that "concreting over" King Edward VII Memorial Park would have on them.

There are 220 pupils at the school, most of whom live in flats with no outdoor space. St Paul's does not have playing fields so the children walk for 10 minutes to the riverside park to take part in sports and run around.

Thames Water plans to construct the £4.1 billion, 20-mile tunnel to collect sewage discharge triggered by rainfall.

It says 39 million tonnes of untreated sewage overflow into the river each year. But it means creating an access road at the park to allow cranes and lorries to access a foreshore shaft.

The SaveKEMP campaign group want the works relocated to a nearby "brownfield" site.
The children, aged five to 11, wrote the play with the help of headteacher Terry Bennett and his deputy Darren Rubin.

In the play, A Space for Me, the children enacted a scene from "ordinary life in Tower Hamlets" showing a family whose only escape from a "cramped" flat is to a nearby park.

But when the children get to the park they find a sign that tells them it is closed due to the sewer works.

After the performance, the children stood around Mr Stride and listed the reasons the park should be saved and handed over a 10,500-signature petition against the construction plan.

Mr Bennett said the children wanted the play to be their response to the Thames Water consultation.

He added: "We rely on the park to take classes out to do games and sports outside. We don't have grass area, just a tarmac playing ground and ornamental garden.

"If the park closed, we'd have to go to Victoria Park or Mile End, both of which are a bus or Tube ride away."

But Mr Stride was unmoved by the children's pleas. He said: "The children did an excellent job describing to me how important the park is.

"I explained that although I did not want to stop them using their park, we had to do something to tackle the storm relief sewer overflow underneath the park that annually discharges 784,000 tonnes a year of sewage into the Thames."

He added: "This is really important feedback that is very valuable in helping us understand the community's strength of feeling about our proposals."

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