This week 10, 20, 30 years ago

10 Years Ago

A hardcore of demonstrators braved torrential downpours to stage a protest against plans that had proposed to carve up services at Lewisham Hospital.

More than 800 supporters of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign group linked hands around the outside of the hospital, which was set to lose its A&E and high risk maternity services.

The rally came in a week when the hospital’s top brass said a dramatic drop in the number of patients needing to return to hospital within 30 days of being treated in A&E, had been down to ties forged between the A&E and other community medical centres.

A roller coaster at Battersea Power Station was a plan ditched 24 years ago – but a design for it won an architectural award.

A team from France, with a reputation for flamboyance, submitted their bold entry into a competition to design a museum of architecture.

The result was an incredible reimagining of the theme park plans from the mid-1980s by a consortium that included Alton Towers, which won permission but was not built. Parisian company Atelier Zundel Cristea’s design won first prize in the ArchTriumph Competition.

February saw home valuations hit a 12-month peak, as first-time buyer numbers had risen to their highest level for four years, according to a report by Connells Survey & Valuation.

The numbers of residential valuations conducted by Connells in February showed a monthly increase of 27 per cent. On an annual basis, total valuations activity had grown by 23 per cent, the fifth month in a row of annual growth.

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20 Years Ago

Anti-war campaigners staged a “die in” outside the Foreign Secretary’s South London home.

The idea was to bring the horrors of war to the attention of Jack Straw, but following ugly scenes and clashes with police, several protestors had to be led off in handcuffs.

Protestors staged the protest outside Mr Straw’s home in Oval, with banners reading “Wake up Straw The reality of war”.

Others carried five gravestones, representing the 500,000 they said would die thanks to the UK’s overseas campaigns.

Twenty of the protestors lay on the ground in bandages as the MP left his house an hour after the protest began.

Hundreds of ravers held a 24-hour party on an empty piece of land belonging to a supermarket.

About 600 partygoers took over an empty tower block owned by Tesco in Kennington. Residents complained of thumping music shaking their homes until a court order was issued to make the revellers move on.

The residents had called the police, but officers said they were powerless to break up the rave as so many people had squeezed through a gap in a fence to get to the party.

Tesco had to apply to the High Court to get the eviction order as some of the party organisers claimed squatters’ rights.

First-time buyers hoping to get their hands on homes built for armed forces personnel camped out in its grounds to try to net a bargain.

Hopefuls came to try to get their names on the list for one of the flats on the Ministry of Defence-owned building off Gunner Lane, Woolwich after a mail-shot was sent out asking potential buyers to make an appointment to view homes, which were being sold off cheap.

All of the people who came to camp on the site had to register with agents Annington, which had been instructed to sell the homes.

They were each given a number in the queue.

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30 Years Ago

A Conservation scheme aimed at restoring a Victorian cemetery came too late to save some of its architectural treasures.

Lambeth council announced plans to carry out restoration work at West Norwood cemetery in Norwood High Street after it was declared a conservation site in 1978.

The Friends of West Norwood Cemetery said rare monuments erected on the site had passed the point where restoration was possible.

The cemetery’s 42 acres contained 44 listed monuments dating back to the 19th century.

A team of doctors claimed to have made a major medical breakthrough at St George’s Hospital in Tooting.

Boffins at the hospital became the first in the world to develop a way of viewing human nerves in 3D, giving surgeons a “road map” to help them avoid leaving patients with crippling nerve damage which was common in life-saving emergency surgery.

The breakthrough was discovered using the hospital’s £2.5million magnetic resonance scanner, which was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in January 1993.

A donor answered the appeal from a boy who had his bike stolen just hours after his dad lost his job.

James Wilkinson’s mountain bike was stolen a day after his sister’s 18th birthday party was ruined by the news of his father’s redundancy.

Following his appeal through the South London Press for witnesses to the theft a donor, who asked to remain anonymous offered to stump up the £114 for the 14-year-old youngster to buy a new bike.

The bike was pinched from outside Kelsey Park School in Beckenham.

 

Picture: Former foreign secretary Jack Straw. Picture: PA Images