Cllr.Sally Littlejohn

LBWF and faith groups: a ‘gay friendly’ council does business with a church that thinks same sex relations are ‘immoral and sinful’, and guess what gives?

A recent post on this blog (see links), which broadly raised the question of how – if at all – LBWF should interact with faith groups that do not subscribe to its social cohesion and equity policies, brings to mind another troubling episode, which was briefly mentioned here in 2019, but in the light of events perhaps deserves a little more coverage. The bones of the story can be summarised t... »

Private Eye reports the Cann Hall mural fiasco

From Issue 1549, 11-24 June 2021 »

LBWF’s Cann Hall murals, Cllr. Sally Littlejohn, and £14,500 of public money that has disappeared down the drain, lost forever

As previously reported here, in the past few years, and encouraged by a £40,000 Town Hall grant, Cann Hall councillors have been intent on installing an artistic mural in the ward, but on two separate occasions, their plans have fallen through and been abandoned. That’s the bones of the story, but it can now be revealed that these failures have come at a cost.  For in both cases significant s... »

LBWF’s plan for a mural in Cann Hall ward threatens to descend into farce – for the second time running UPDATED

In late 2017, Cann Hall Labour councillor Sally Littlejohn led a LBWF initiative to install a £40,000 ‘artwork’ on the dilapidated side-wall of a shop in the centre of the ward – a shop that coincidentally happened to be owned by a prominent family of Labour supporters, the most eminent of whom is Dawn Butler MP, best known in the area for her belief that the public should fund her second home’s j... »

Solidarity with the Sandwell Skidder!

From today’s Daily Mail: ‘”Labour council with £2.8m hole in its finances ‘found £300,000 to silence blogger” Published: 02:15, 21 December 2020 | A penniless Labour council with a £2.8million hole in its budget set aside £300,000 to silence a blogger who was highly critical of its work. Sandwell council…had admitted to setting taxpayers’ money aside to pu... »

LBWF and fire hazards in its housing stock: residents in Cann Hall’s John Walsh and Fred Wigg towers left in danger, as Labour averts its eyes

John Walsh and Fred Wigg tower blocks in Cann Hall are 15 storey identical twins, built in the 1960s, and each containing 117 flats. It would be nice to state definitively how many people have lived there at any one time over the past decade, but nobody really seems to know, with (surprisingly) official estimates ranging from 230-ish to 700. In 2011, Fred Wigg residents suffered a terrible fire, w... »

The £40,000 Cann Hall side-wall ‘artwork’ is cancelled, artists Mathew Raw and Abigail Holsborough depart the scene, and LBWF scrambles for excuses – its a big victory for local residents

As the linked posts (below) describe in some detail, for the past few months, and as part of its Making Places programme, LBWF has been intent on putting an ‘artwork’ made of tiles and costing an extraordinary £40,000, on the dilapidated side-wall of a private property in Cann Hall Rd. – a private property that coincidentally happens to be owned by a prominent family of Labour supporte... »

‘Public realm and shop front improvements’ in South Leytonstone: dogs get their dinner, while the area’s real problems are forgotten

Recent posts have looked at LBWF’s plan to spend £40,000 turning the wall of a private property on Cann Hall Rd. into an alleged ‘artwork’, and the subsequent massive backlash. But as documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal, this is by no means the only extraordinary waste of public money that LBWF is foisting on the same area, broadly South Leytonstone’s Cann Hall and Catha... »

LBWF’s Making Places programme and the Cann Hall side-wall fiasco: good news and bad

As a previous post has described in detail, LBWF currently plans to spend a dizzying £40,000 on tiling the large side-wall of a private commercial property in Cann Hall ward, all in the name of producing a ‘joyous’ and ‘popular’ piece of public art, Matthew Raw and Abigail Holsborough’s Embedded Bread. The good news is that because of widespread local disquiet (and in parti... »

LBWF’s Making Places programme and the strange case of the Cann Hall side-wall: four residents speak and £40,000 of public money goes west UPDATED

In the summer of 2017, LBWF put out an open call to architects, artists, designers, and landscape artists, inviting them to take part in a programme called Making Places, which it was funding from its own resources to the tune of no less than £1m.. The objective was to commission ‘community arts’ projects for ‘unloved spaces’ in each of the borough’s 20 wards, thus generate ‘places which are brigh... »

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