MEET OWGRA

Osterley & Wyke Green Residents' Association

About OWGRA

Osterley & Wyke Green Residents’ Association (OWGRA) is your long-established local Residents Association, run by volunteers who are local residents like you. It was first set up over 30 years ago to oppose plans to construct a development on most of what people think of as Osterley Park. Our aim is to act as the voice for local residents and to protect and enhance the things we all like about the area.

You can see a map of the OWGRA area HERE

There are continual pressures on our area (developers seeking to build on open land, replacement of existing building by tall buildings, increasing crime not being addressed effectively, street and other infrastructure not being maintained, etc.). If an organisation such as OWGRA is not there to ensure residents’ views are properly heard, then these pressures continue unchecked.

What we do

To act as your voice requires a lot of hard work “behind the scenes” on our side. We attend regular meetings with the Council, the Police and other local bodies to ensure we are aware of what is happening. We respond on all sizable planning applications on the area. We provide support to OWGRA members on matters impacting the area and are continually pushing the relevant bodies to maintain the upkeep of the area. We publish e-newsletters sent to all our members every 2-3 weeks with the latest news about the area, publish this paper newsletter every 6 months and maintain our website (www.owgra.org.uk).

If you would like to get involved in helping us then please get in touch; there is always plenty of work and more than the current Committee can handle. Even if you can only spare an hour a month that would help us.

Current work underway

At our AGM in May 2019 we explained all the work we had carried out in our last year, as follows

Held 8 Committee Meetings.
Held 2 Public Meetings. The first was on Crime and ASB at Sky’s offices, and the second is this meeting.
Issued 2 newsletters delivered to some 5000 homes in the OWGRA area via our Street Reps and sent 24 e-newsletters to our e-mail list. Due to the introduction of GDPR data protection regulations, we are only able to send e-newsletters to OWGRA members.
The OWGRA website is continually updated with records of public meetings and committee meeting minutes, our newsletters and e-newsletters, and latest news items
In addition this year we have undertaken a major update of the website, covering the following areas
1. History of OWGRA
2. updated/new sections on Planning (details of the Planning Process, how to respond to application and significant developments and our response to them).
3. Our Area (with sections on Traffic and Transport (rail, bus, etc.), Local Facilities and Reporting Problems (details of all the sports clubs in our area and how to report problems), Charities and Support and Our Councillors, and
4. Local Neighbourhood Watch and Crime.
5. More details about OWGRA and how it operates.
We are active on Twitter and our tweets feed into our Facebook page.
We have 60 Street Reps covering the 90 streets in our area, so we need more Street Reps. We are very grateful to our diligent Street Reps for their work in delivering newsletters and recruiting members for OWGRA.
We had a membership of 448 in 2018/19. So far (as of 22 May), we have 380 members for the 2019/20 year of which 90 are new members. Payment is split equally between the 3 methods (118 cash, 150 cheque and 112 on-line).
We get about 100 e-mails into the OWGRA e-mail in-box every week and endeavour to answer within 24 hours.
Maintained regular contacts with other local Residents’ Associations, our Councillors and the Council.
Attended Council planning committee meetings, Isleworth & Brentford Area Forum, Residents’ Association Forum, Ward Panel, Hounslow Highways, etc. and held meetings with a number of other groups including Tesco and the National Trust at Osterley Park. This typically involves us attending over a dozen meetings each month.
Continue to work closely with the local Neighbourhood Watch to increase the numbers of streets in the OWGRA area with Neighbourhood Watches, and with the local police to prevent crime.
Planning applications continue to take up a sizable amount of our workload. We prepared detailed responses to the planning applications for Adini, Osterley Park Hotel’s application for a Shisha lounge, and worked with the Council and/or developers to amend proposals to achieve a much better outcome for residents on the Nishkam school netting right next to residents’ gardens, the redevelopment of Brentford FC Training Ground on Jersey Road and the Access Storage development at Syon Lane/Great West Road. In addition we have opposed several conversions of family houses into a number of small, low-quality flats.
As more people move into the area, and more jobs are created, traffic levels rise in response. Congestion increases along with more gridlocked roads and more parking problems. We have worked with local residents to address these issues in several areas, including the Red Route parking control scheme around the new Nishkam school, Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) in several areas and traffic jams at rush hour in some back streets. We have a good relationship with the Traffic & Transport Team at the Council, and work through our Councillors to deal with TfL.
We have started organizing Community Litter Picks to clear up litter from areas badly affected by people throwing rubbish on the street. So far we have targeted the undergrowth on Jersey Road and on Windmill Lane, yielding over 100 bags or litter.
In the last year we have increased our focus on Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour in the area through working closely with the local Neighbourhood Watch group. We regularly include topics in our e-newsletter about how to reduce the risk of being a victim of crime. We have a section on our website giving advice on how to report crime or suspicious activity and steps you can take to protect yourselves.

In the months since then we have held further litter picks, attended a number of council meetings and other meetings, and spoke at LB of Hounslow Planning Committee meetings against Applications. We have responded to several Planning Applications to try and ensure that any development respects and is sympathetic to the special character of our area.

We have met with Nishkam School management and are working with them to try and mitigate the traffic issues around the school in the mornings and afternoons. We have held several meetings with St. Edward, the developer for the Tesco and Homebase site, as part of what will be a dialogue over a prolonged period regarding their proposals for these sites.

We have continued to issue eNewsletters approximately every 3 weeks to our members, and have now revised the format due to the amount of information that needed to be included.

Our work has also been highlighted in the Oct-Nov 2018 edition of Out & About with an article about OWGRA on page 28. Here is the digital edition https://issuu.com/outaboutmagazine/docs/chiswick_o_a_oct-nov__18_edition_hi.

OWGRA MEMBERSHIP – ONLY £10 PER PERSON PER ANNUM

We are all volunteers, but to do all the above activities on your behalf involves some costs and we need your support. If you become a member you will benefit from the above support we provide, whilst also strengthening our voice, as the more members we have the greater our chance of being able to influence local developments. The money is used to for producing this newsletter, running a website and organising public meetings. Membership runs from April to March. There is a membership form on this website