The questions people ask most often about this estate, and the answers as the two papers give them. Where a number appears here it appears in one of the papers, and nothing is claimed that they do not.
What is Avery Hill Mansion and Winter Garden?
A Victorian mansion of 1890 and an 1889 conservatory, both in Avery Hill Park in Eltham. The Winter Garden is listed Grade II in its own right, roughly a hundred feet square under domed glass with a figure of Mercury on top. The Mansion's Main Hall is about 32 metres by 16, ten and a half metres to a coved ceiling, with twenty four high level windows and a gallery running round it. The Bexley Road gatehouse is separately listed again. The estate ran as Avery Hill Training College for around eighty years.
Why is it empty?
Because it is nobody's job to fix it. The Department for Education pays to hold an empty building. The University of Greenwich holds a listed liability it cannot discharge. The Council has a dereliction it has been asked about for six years without an adopted position. Nothing here requires anybody to act, so nobody has.
Can I get inside?
The Winter Garden is owned and managed by the University of Greenwich, supported by the Friends of Avery Hill Winter Garden. It opens for limited hours and one wing is shut. The Mansion is not open. Behind the boards there is a sculpture hall under a painted barrel ceiling, a minstrels' gallery in onyx and Italian marble, and a ballroom, and almost nobody living nearby has ever stood in any of them.
Who owns it?
The estate is less divided than it first appears. The Department for Education holds almost the whole of it, including the western land. The University of Greenwich holds the Winter Garden. The Royal Borough of Greenwich holds the road and the public car park between the two parcels, which is small in area and without which the estate does not function.
What is actually being asked for?
That the draft Local Plan carries an allocation for the Mansion site reflecting heritage led mixed use, rather than the single clause rejection of a residential nomination that stands in its place today. The Regulation 19 draft allocates two sites in the Eltham chapter and neither is this one.
Is this a housing scheme?
No. No housing scheme is proposed, and neither paper asks for one. Neither takes a position on the open ground, which is not ours to take. What both papers say is that the most likely future for a site like this, left alone, is that it is declared surplus, sold and brought forward as housing, because housing is what carries a land value.
Doesn't Metropolitan Open Land rule this out?
Every building on the estate sits inside Metropolitan Open Land, parcel MOL64, Avery Hill Park Area, 118.9 hectares. The plan carries an exception for the redevelopment of previously developed land, whether redundant or in continuing use. Reusing buildings that already stand is not the thing the designation exists to prevent.
What is the short-term ask?
One ground floor room in the Mansion, four days a year, with an agreed route for the tours. Tours in the afternoon run alongside the Friends, talks in the evening, and people staying afterwards. Four full days rather than twelve evenings, so the tours, the talks and everything after them share one set of stewards, one insurance notification and one set of fire precautions instead of paying that cost twelve times.
What is the long-term proposal?
That no single use can pay for three listed buildings, so the estate carries several at once: exhibitions and seasonal events, teaching and adult education, a cafe and a market, workspace let by the month, weddings and private hire, and training in the building services trades inside the rooms that need repairing. The site was adapted for teaching already, which is the use needing the least change of character.
What happens if nothing is decided?
The Department's review ends one of three ways and two of them close the door: retain, transfer within government, or declare it surplus and sell. A sale can happen before anybody has decided what the place is for.
Who is behind this?
Jamie Bykov-Brett, a Greenwich resident, acting personally. The long-term proposal is jointly authored with the Friends of Avery Hill Winter Garden. This is not a University of Greenwich, Department for Education or Royal Borough of Greenwich website.
How can I help?
Add your name in support of the Local Plan allocation. It takes a name, an email and the first part of your postcode, and you can be counted anonymously if you would rather. If something here is wrong, the contact button goes to Jamie and nowhere else.
What happens to my details?
Your email is never published and never passed on. Your full postcode is sent and kept, so the Council can see the support is genuinely local, but only the district is ever shown publicly, never the full postcode and never an address. Choosing anonymous keeps your name out of anything published or sent to the Council. The privacy page sets out the whole of it.