Blackheath station car park declared a community asset

The car park behind Blackheath station now belongs, in one legal sense, to the people who use it. Lewisham Council has listed the 158-space site as an asset of community value, after an application by the Battle for Blackheath campaign group, which is fighting Acorn Property Group's plan to build 45 homes on it.

The listing stops nothing. What it does is give the community a six-month window to put a bid together if the site is ever offered for sale, and make itself a consideration the planning committee has to weigh when it decides. After a year of this argument, that is a good deal more than the campaign had last month.

Acorn wants 20 terraced houses and 25 flats in two blocks, with parking cut from 158 spaces to 17 and 40 pitches set aside for Blackheath Farmers' Market. Eight of the 45 homes would go to Lewisham's housing waiting list at London Affordable Rent.

Planning officers recommended approval ahead of the January meeting, and their case was not a weak one: Lewisham is delivering homes at 32% of its target, which under national policy tips the scales towards yes. The committee deferred anyway, after a four-hour hearing and a record 1,202 objections against 30 comments in support. Members wanted better evidence on parking, on what losing the car park would do to the Village's shops, and on whether the farmers' market would survive the building of a housing estate around it.

Some of that has since arrived: an economic impact assessment in May, an operating plan for the market in July. The Royal Borough of Greenwich, consulted from the other side of the heath, said this month it had no objection.

The market's operator has been careful rather than hostile. "As a company, we couldn't support the plans if they put the market at risk," Mark Handley of London Farmers' Markets said in January. The actors Jude Law and Dominic Cooper, both former pupils of John Ball Primary up the hill, have lent their names to the campaign against it.

Then came May's elections, won in Lewisham by the Greens. The planning committee has been reconstituted, and the new members must take the application from the beginning — no inherited arguments, no half-made decision to tidy up.

An asset of community value is not a veto. It is a flag planted in the ground, and the questions underneath it are still the ones councillors asked in January: where the cars go, whether a market can trade through years of construction, and whether 45 homes — eight of them genuinely affordable — are worth the loss of the Village's biggest piece of open tarmac. No hearing date has been set. When one is, a Green administration will have to say out loud whether it backs its own officers or the 1,202 people who wrote in against them.