Croydon Council tackles anti-social behaviour with outdoor gyms
Scott Roche, Croydon cabinet minister for streets and environment, said: "If a park gym is being used properly, you're not going to have people smoking weed there."We think outdoor gyms are a more strategic and inclusive use for a park. They're cheaper to introduce than new playgrounds, and they help tackle anti-social behaviour."However, he admits that change is slower than he would like, and says money is the greatest challenge.Croydon currently has 10 outdoor gyms, spread across the borough's 127 parks and green spaces.
The news comes as Mr Roche and mayor Jason Perry opened a newly resurfaced path in Norbury Park.The area remains affected by e-bike misuse and rough sleeping, and speed bumps have been promised to deter cut-through riding.However, Mr Roche said "we are restricted because it is a public space".Jenni Rodgers, leader of Friends of Norbury Park, said the path marked progress, but that the park still "needs something here that people want to see".A flood alleviation scheme for the area, which would protect 340 homes from flooding and boost biodiversity, has stalled since the pandemic.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
14 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Richard Rusbridger obituary
My brother, Richard Rusbridger, who has died aged 75 from brain cancer, was a leading British psychoanalyst in the tradition of Melanie Klein. He taught, wrote and lectured, in the UK and abroad, as well as training many future analysts. But it was his clinical work over the course of 40 years or more that gave him the greatest satisfaction. Richard started formal training as what was sometimes called a 'post-Kleinian' in the late 1980s. His training analyst was Elizabeth Spillius, who had also been an anthropologist and who was herself one of the foremost Klein scholars. (Richard was later to co-edit her papers.) Once established in private practice, he saw patients in his north London home. When his death was announced, several of his patients took to social media to say what a profound effect their time with him had had. One wrote: 'He completely changed my life, my relationship with myself and with my family.' Another said: 'Richard was my life witness. It's a sad and scary world without him in his chair behind my head, occasionally saying 'quite'.' Richard was born in Lusaka, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, where our father, GH Rusbridger, was deputy director of education and our mother, Barbara (nee Wickham), was a nurse. Our parents returned to the UK from Africa; they had no permanent home here, and another brother, Guy, who had been born with severe disabilities, needed intensive nursing care. So when Richard was only eight, he was packed off to board at a prep school in Taunton in Somerset. Once the family was settled, in Guildford, Surrey, and after Guy's death, Richard returned to live at home. He was a chorister at Guildford Cathedral under the redoubtable Barry Rose, and sang at the building's consecration in 1961. He progressed to become a music scholar at Cranleigh. One of Richard's near contemporaries, James Harpur, wrote a fine volume of poems about the school they both knew, which included the stanza: 'Each night I prayed / for protection / from arrest and sadism / each day believing in / my random luck.' They were lines that would have spoken to Richard. At Magdalene College, Cambridge, he struggled to choose between his two loves, music and literature. One close friend at the time recalled: 'He did incredibly little work, but he was fascinated by other people and the contrast between what we pretend to be and what we are.' After a brief period of teaching he began his long immersion in the world of professionally helping others: as a social worker, as a child psychotherapist and then a child analyst and training analyst. He was, his colleagues said, a skilled clinician, with a combination of sharp clinical perception and sympathetic humanity. He was also a popular supervisor, an inspiring trainer of future analysts, and was appointed honorary reader at University College London. His interest in music and literature surfaced in a number of papers exploring artistic works through the lens of psychoanalysis, including studies of Mozart's Don Giovanni, on narcissism in King Lear, and comparing Shakepeare's Othello and Verdi's Otello. In 1982, he married Gill Philpott, a psychotherapist; they had two children, Charlie and Alice. They all survive him.
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
tiktok-days-from-hell-trend-things-everyone-hates
Do we agree what a bad day looks like? TikTokers have been describing their low-key 'days from hell' – and it has made me wonder. Mine would involve getting up before 5am after a sleepless night to find a 'morning person' house guest already in the kitchen, drinking the last of the coffee from my special mug and wanting to talk politics. Trying to work, I'd face a soundscape of nearby pneumatic drilling and Capital FM, and be regularly interrupted by spam calls from 'HMRC'. After an afternoon at the dentist, dinner would be plain farfalle (the worst pasta). I'd have to go out in the evening by car and parallel park, then get home to realise I'd lost my keys. Would that bother anyone else? Or is the small stuff people sweat – and it is small, truly the definition of first world problems – entirely personal? Conducting a survey (that is, watching many TikToks of dewy young people pointing to bullet-pointed lists in their notes apps) revealed a few commonalities. A very high proportion of their annoying days start with waking up in someone else's house, hungover, which does, I agree, sound suboptimal. The TikTokers also really hate being hot, which is probably a function of when this trend is emerging (ask them in January and I suspect you'd get a different answer), but relatable. Forgotten or unwelcome social plans that can't be cancelled without guilt, technological snafus and exercise classes too expensive to skip also recurred regularly. After that, the consensus crumbles. Everyone has their own loathed chores, modes of transport or parts of town: there's a beautiful specificity to the likes of getting into platform 16 at Leeds station, a Hinge date booking 'Caffè Concerto in Piccadilly Circus' or 'shopping for a present for a six-year-old boy in Westfield Stratford'. But one thing seems to unite TikTok and, I suspect, everyone beyond: that there is no mild discomfort like a mobile phone with less than 10% juice and no charger.
BBC News
6 hours ago
- BBC News
Survivors share experiences of Jesus Army cult for BBC series
A small Christian commune that aspired to create heaven on Earth grew to become a cult in which sexual and physical abuse was perpetuated in plain Jesus Army church recruited thousands of people to live in close-knit, puritanical communities in Northamptonshire, London and the of the UK's most abusive cults, it is now the subject of a new BBC documentary and trace the story from its hippy origins as the Jesus Fellowship, through the high-profile launch of the Jesus Army in the late 1980s, to its shocking collapse in the 2000s when the truth about life inside the church started to survivors have been sharing their experiences. 'It was just horrible' For John Everett, it started as a dream of community life."I always had these yearnings for a lifestyle that was different to the materialistic lifestyle," he explains."This feeling that striving for wealth didn't equate to happiness, and I didn't feel attached to material property in the way that a lot of my friends seemed to be."In 1976, aged 18, John was told that in the village of Bugbrooke, near Northampton, a Christian preacher called Noel Stanton had created a "communal lifestyle" that had attracted hundreds of young saving some money, John travelled from his home in Kent to experience it for himself and soon saw the attraction."I remember a guy called Andy out in the garden. He was doing some weeding and I remember him singing away to himself while he was doing it. "And so that was the first thing that really struck me, just how happy everybody looked. I could feel myself melting."For that life, though, sacrifices needed to be made because "any kind of entertainment was wrong," John says."So no more cinema, no more television. And from now on, I would have to stop listening to any music." Details of help and support with child sexual abuse and sexual abuse or violence are available in the UK at BBC Action Line But after some time he began to have doubts, including how children were says children were disciplined with birch sticks, which "was meant to be a loving form of correction".John says: "A young child was taken away from the dining room table to be disciplined, and we could all hear."His screams as he was hit, and on that occasion, he was hit at least six times and it was just horrible. It was... humiliating for the child. It was humiliating for everybody. Horrible."John began documenting what he had seen and heard during his time in the Jesus eventually left but was branded a "traitor" and no-one from the group was allowed to contact him. 'You're told you are sinful as a woman' The Jesus Army's headquarters was at New Creation Hall, the Grade II-listed farmhouse in Bugbrooke where Noel Stanton began visiting it with her family as a child before they moved to the village permanently in 1986, "a couple of doors down" from Stanton."You could feel his influence, actually," she says. "He didn't need to be there."Many teenagers, including her older brother, were separated from their families and housed was all part of Stanton's belief that the family of God was more important than one's biological family. Philippa says when she was 12 and 13, she became aware that a friend of about the same age was being sexually says: "You're constantly being told that you are sinful as a woman. That you're distracting men from God."You're called a Jezebel. You're belittled at every opportunity by Noel. So who's gonna believe that, you know, a man, an elder, has done those things to somebody?"But eventually, while still a teenager, she testified in court against an elder who became the first member of the group to be convicted of sexually assaulting a young said she was shunned by the leadership and fled the group before eventually founding the Jesus Fellowship Survivors the Jesus Army disbanded following Stanton's death in 2009, allegations against him of numerous sexual assaults on boys Jesus Fellowship Church ultimately disbanded in 2019 following a series of historical cases of sexual abuse. A report by the Jesus Fellowship Community Trust (JFCT), a group tasked with winding up the church's affairs, found one in six children involved with it was estimated to have been sexually abused by the is still thought that some of those accused, including 162 former leaders, may have taken up roles in different churches and Northamptonshire Police is liaising with relevant local authorities to see if any safeguarding action is required. the JFCT said it was sorry for 'the severely detrimental impact' on people's lives, and hoped the conclusion of the redress scheme would 'provide an opportunity to look to the future' for all those affected during a 50-year date, about 12 former members of the Jesus Fellowship Church have been convicted for indecent assaults and other offences. Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army is available on BBC one and two of the podcast, In Detail: The Jesus Army Cult are on BBC Sounds. Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
