Woolwich temple fears paid parking will drive away its volunteers
Worshippers and volunteers at one of Woolwich’s best-known Hindu temples say the arrival of paid parking on their street could hollow out the community that keeps the temple running.
The Shree Kutch Satsang Swaminarayan Temple on St Margaret’s Grove has been fighting Greenwich Council’s parking plans for months, warning that replacing free parking with pay-and-display bays will hit the elderly, families with young children and the unpaid volunteers the temple depends on.
The temple is at the sharp end of the council’s Sustainable Streets programme, which is rolling out controlled parking zones across large parts of the Royal Borough — including Woolwich, Shooters Hill, Charlton, Blackheath, Kidbrooke, Plumstead and West Thamesmead. St Margaret’s Grove, the temple’s street, is included in the Woolwich zone, where parking is set to become pay and display.
A petition and a consultation
The temple community has not been quiet. Leaders presented the council with a petition carrying more than 800 signatures objecting to the changes, and hundreds of members of the congregation lodged objections during the public consultation.
The council ran a statutory consultation on its Woolwich proposals over 21 days. Of the 252 submissions it received, 168 were clear objections, 74 raised concerns and just 10 were positive — though the consultation covered the wider Woolwich scheme rather than St Margaret’s Grove alone. The decision has been made and the scheme is going ahead.
Why the temple says it matters
The temple’s case rests on seva — the Hindu principle of selfless service. The building runs on members of its community giving their time freely: teaching classes, working in the kitchen, carrying out maintenance and upkeep, all unpaid. It has operated that way for around four decades.
Temple leaders argue that charging volunteers to park amounts to putting a price on that generosity. Their fear is straightforward: add a daily cost to turning up, and fewer people will turn up. Classes, community meals and the upkeep of the building itself could all suffer.
They are equally worried about who stops coming through the doors. Elderly worshippers who drive to the temple because the bus is not a realistic option, and parents juggling young children — including the temple’s nursery families — face the same arithmetic. For some, parking further away and finishing the journey on public transport simply is not feasible, and the temple says it risks losing the very people who make it a community rather than just a building.
A borough-wide argument
The temple is far from alone in its objections. The Sustainable Streets programme has drawn fierce opposition across Greenwich, with residents branding the proposals a stealth tax on motorists and staging protests outside Woolwich Town Hall. Campaigners point to a projected £45.1 million budget gap and argue the scheme is about revenue rather than cleaner air, while petitions against zones in Shooters Hill and elsewhere have gathered thousands of signatures.
The council’s position is that controlled zones manage scarce kerb space, cut congestion and make streets safer — and that without them, commuter and visitor parking simply overwhelms residential roads. With more than half of Greenwich households owning a car, the argument is not going away.
For the streets around St Margaret’s Grove, though, the debate is personal. The temple’s message to the town hall has been consistent from the start: do not put a barrier between the volunteers and the place they serve. Whether the council revisits the details around the temple as the zone beds in remains to be seen.
Parking rows are flaring up across the capital — a public consultation on parking and kerbside space is under way in Newham, while Barking and Dagenham has approved a parking strategy pairing a CCTV crackdown with more school streets. In Greenwich itself, a primary school recently tightened security after a pupil slipped away from breakfast club.
