This week 10, 20, 30 years ago

10 Years Ago

 A multimillion-pound leisure centre in the heart of Elephant and Castle edged a step closer.

Construction firm Balfour Beatty was awarded the £18.5million contract to build the leisure centre, which included a 25 metre swimming pool and a learning pool.

It meant that those living around the Elephant had access to a local swimming pool for the first time since the 1990s when the old centre was closed down.

Police said they had a promising lead after airing a fresh appeal for help in tracing racist thugs who killed Stephen Lawrence.

Officers said they were hunting for up to four more people who they believed were part of a gang that killed the 18-year-old as he waited for a bus in April 1993.

A 20th anniversary appeal featured on a BBC 1 Crimewatch programme.

Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll said: “It’s very encouraging.

We have had many phone calls but two in particular are, I would say, very significant.”

A town hall faced mounting opposition to its “short sighted” policy of selling off short life properties as more families were due to be evicted.

Lambeth council pressed ahead with plans to sell off its remaining short life properties, one long-standing family had already been evicted and another faced eviction.

The short life homes which were often dilapidated, were maintained by co-operatives for a fixed term but many people stayed much longer.

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20 Years Ago

A man spoke to South London Press reporters from his hospital bed in King’s College Hospital where he was in quarantine after being diagnosed with the deadly Sars virus.

The 33-year-old from West Norwood contracted the virus – a flu mutation that experts predicted would morph into a world-wide pandemic, killing millions of people, during a trip to South Africa to visit his family after his brother died.

At the funeral he came into contact with a friend who had arrived from Hong Kong, where the virus was thought to have originated. He said the disease felt like a mild case of the flu.

A cricket mad four-year-old hoped to realise his ambition of becoming a world-class player by joining a club in Jamaica, thousands of miles from home.

Brandon Markland’s could not work out who he wanted to play for, England or the West Indies.

Dad Dave said his son needed to be a member of a cricket club in his native Jamaica in order to be in the running for a place on the team.

He was going to sign up to play for Kingston, Cricket Club on the family’s next visit to the Jamaican capital.

Traders said they were being forced to shut up shop for good by shoppers trying to avoid paying the new London Congestion Charge.

Members of the Kennington, Oval and Vauxhall Forum said the £5-a-day charge was creating rat-runs and turning the roads into “racetracks” for people skirting the zone.

The group called for Red Route restrictions to be lifted at the weekend to allow shoppers to park near their businesses.

But Transport for London said there was no evidence there was any extra traffic along roads just outside the charging zone.

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30 Years Ago

Tenants who failed to pay up when the Fire Brigade had to break down their doors after locking themselves out of their homes were told they would face court action to recover the cost of a call out.

The brigade announced the plan after the amount owed to them had soared to £97,000 after firefighters started charging two years earlier.

The £111 charge was brought in amid concerns that a steep rise in the number of feckless people calling the fire brigade in would start to impact on call outs to serious fires.

After the charge was brought in, calls from residents across the capital fell from 29,000 a year to 15,500 a year.

No charge was made to the sick, the disabled or the elderly.

Police announced a major crackdown on drugs being sold in pubs.
The raids on boozers in Peckham followed surveillance by undercover cops.

Two arrests were made by officers who stormed one pub, which was followed by a raid on a second pub nearby days later, which resulted in a further two men being arrested.

Four people were arrested in a third raid the same day.

And officers said they were not ruling out the possibility of more raids in the area. They said the drug-dealing was putting off law-abiding punters.

Drivers with smoke-spewing vehicles were warned they could face fines as part of Southwark council’s anti-pollution policy.

An infrared monitor designed to take photographs of number plates of the offending drivers was set up by.

The drivers could then be contacted and ordered to clean up their act or face being fined.

The borough was applying for £500,000 from the EU to fund an expansion of the project so that it could become a model for tackling pollution in built-up areas around the world.

 

Picture:Pixabay/webandi