1. Westway 08The Trust at work

2. Who we are
Westway Development Trust
Registered Charity number 1123127
Registered Company number 6475436
Westway Development Trust was set up to develop
for community benefit the 23 acres of land left
derelict after the construction of the Westway
flyover. We are involved in regeneration, sports and
fitness, education and the arts, with a focus on
access for those most in need.
We run two sports and fitness facilities on a not for
profit basis, fund other local charities and community
groups and give education grants to local people
pursuing courses leading to employment.
As a community-based regeneration organisation we
work in partnership with the local voluntary, public
and private sectors. Run as a social enterprise, we
are primarily funded by the rent we earn from the
commercial properties we have developed.
Our Goals
To develop the challenging environment under the
motorway in a sustainable fashion:
with regeneration that provides benefit to the local
community, both through its use and by providing
the income stream required to maintain the
facilities that the Trust provides and to finance the
programmes we deliver.
To improve the health and wellbeing of local
people:
by providing sports and fitness opportunities and
facilities, and by delivering programmes to as wide
a community base as we can reach, both within our
centres and through our outreach programmes.
To increase access to training and offer new
educational opportunities:
by assisting adults and schoolchildren through a
range of initiatives: from providing small grants to
directly delivering and supporting programmes,
with the emphasis on energy, imagination and
matching local needs.
To support local community groups and voluntary
organisations which have compatible goals:
by providing premises and a support network,
grants, advice and practical assistance.
To promote access to the arts:
by supporting artistic programmes and ensuring
many different forms of the arts have an
opportunity to flourish across our estate and in the
local community.
To be efficient:
at managing and delivering our programmes, at
managing the assets and resources that make
them possible, and in aiming to be as efficient as
any commercial organisation.
Our Structure
Our shareholders are our Trustees and ‘member
organisations’ – which are various local community
groups, third sector organisations and other local
bodies who are interested in what the Trust can
achieve for the local community.
We have fifteen Trustees. Seven are nominated by
the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, seven
are elected annually by our member organisations
and the fifteenth is an independent chair, who is a
local resident elected by the other 14 Trustees.
The operations of the Trust are managed by a full
time executive team and over 100 employees.
Where to find us:
Westway Development
Trust
1 Thorpe Close
Portobello
London
W10 5XL
E info@westway.org
T 020 8962 5720
Westway Sports Centre
1 Crowthorne Road
London
W10 6RP
E sport@westway.org
T 020 8969 0992
Portobello Green Fitness
Club
3-5 Thorpe Close
Portobello
London
W10 5XL
E info@pgfc.org.uk
T 020 8960 2221
www.westway.org
As a community-based regeneration
organisation we work in partnership
with the local voluntary, public and
private sectors
2

3. How we got here
Developing Community Assets
In the late 1960s the Westway A40 elevated flyover
was bulldozed through the heart of North
Kensington. Streets were cut in half, 600 houses
demolished and 1,000 local people moved away. A
mile-long strip of land was left waste beneath the
huge concrete stilts of the motorway. Four years of
determined local campaigning led to the Trust
being set up in 1971 to develop those 23 acres of
land for the benefit of the community.
Over the years, that derelict land has been turned
into the Trust’s major asset. Most has been
developed for community facilities, including two
multi-sports leisure facilities, twenty five
subsidised premises for voluntary organisations,
landscaped gardens and meeting and music
venues. The rest has been developed commercially
to provide a long-term income stream to underpin
the costs of the Trust and its community activities.
Our developments include workspace for designer-
makers and the creative industries, shops,
restaurants, light industrial units, offices and a
slice of Portobello Market. Hundreds of people are
now in jobs on Trust land, where 35 years ago there
were just empty bays.
As both a charity and a landowner, the Trust was
able to develop its facilities through a mixture of
capital grants (from charitable trusts and both local
and national grant programmes) and with
commercial loans.
The 125 year lease which it holds on its land has
enabled the Trust to take a long term evolutionary
approach to some of its major developments. The
once-derelict space beneath the aerial roundabout
at White City is an example of this approach. It has
been developed in phases over a thirty year period
as the Westway Sports Centre, which is now a
major regional facility.
Nearer to Ladbroke Grove Portobello Green Fitness
Club has been developed out of the empty
motorway bays in Thorpe Close, to offer a range of
inclusive fitness programmes for all ages.
Managing these two facilities is now a significant
part of what the Trust does.
In recent years our income has grown and this
enables us to deliver more support to the local
community, often in association with other
charitable organisations, some of which we fund
directly. But our regeneration activity has become
more difficult as capital grants which we can use
for this purpose have dried up.
Read on to find out what is happening under the
flyover today and what we plan for the future.
The Trust was set up in 1971 to
develop 23 acres of derelict land
for the benefit of the community
3

4. What we do
Our Property
Development for community benefit
We own and manage a wide spectrum of property,
largely located under the Westway flyover:
- Our own facilities such as Westway Sports Centre,
Portobello Green Fitness Club and our offices.
- Property leased to tenants, comprising shops,
offices, workspace units for creative businesses,
small industrial premises, bars, restaurants
and clubs, as well as school and nursery
premises, children’s play centres and even a
skateboard park.
- Development sites, either committed to
particular regeneration schemes, or for which we
are seeking development partners. Most of the property we rent out is let commercially
to provide us with income to fund our charitable
programmes, but we reserve some buildings for
use by other charities at subsidised rents.
And it isn’t just buildings which we rent out. We
also make a profit by renting out some unique and
sometimes challenging urban spaces. Under our
iconic market ‘tent’ on Portobello Road, and either
side of it, we licence a flourishing part of the world
famous Portobello market – which brings in more
than 10% of our total rental income. This market
has been developed over the last twenty years by
the Trust and its market operator and has helped to
reinvigorate the areas around it during this time.
While we’re keen to deliver a good return on our
commercial dealings, much of our land is in fact
used for free, because the Trust is committed to
providing distinctive parks and gardens for public
use along with safe and well-maintained pedestrian
areas which can help re-link the areas of the
Borough which the Westway flyover literally tore
apart. These are all maintained by the Trust’s own
dedicated team of gardeners and maintenance staff.
The Westway and its legacy have created a difficult
environment in which to build and maintain
property and that is why it takes an organisation
like a development trust to make positive things
happen. Its no exaggeration to suggest that
otherwise developments under the road would be
likely to drag the area down rather than make
things better. So that is why we’re here, and why
the way in which we manage our developments
and property matters.
4

5. Our work in the Arts
The Trust’s work in the arts falls into three broad
categories:
- our arts in education programme in local primary
schools ‘Everyday Magic’
- our work to support local artists though offering
spaces for them to work
- and our efforts to involve the arts in our physical
development and regeneration work.
The Arts in Regeneration
On the physical side we are committed to involving
the arts in our future developments and to looking
for new opportunities to use our existing buildings
and public spaces as a place for the arts to be seen
and experienced.
We have a number of ongoing partnerships, with
the council, local public artists ‘Urban Eye (formerly
known as ‘The Westway Project’) and with funders
committed to environmental improvements such as
WREF – the Western Riverside Environmental Fund.
Recently these have brought about lighting
projects in Portobello Green park and local art
works such as the Spanish Civil War Memorial
Mosaic at 281 Portobello Road. The latest example
is work to improve the Portobello area beneath the
Westway with new lighting and paint treatments.
Space for artists to work
Work or studio spaces for artists and theatre
groups are offered in our creative workspace
buildings on commercial terms including space on
shorter more flexible terms at very cheap rates
during vacant periods, or while spaces are waiting
to undergo refurbishment.
Probably the most significant example of
workspace for artists, however, is one of our
venues The Inn On The Green, located above
Portobello Green Fitness Club. This hosts an
extensive artistic programme ranging from theatre
and comedy to residencies by local hero Mick
Jones, formerly of The Clash and now Carbon
Silicon. The venue is run commercially but has
proved its worth as a community arts centre.
Supporting the arts in schools
Everyday Magic has now been running for several
years with enthusiastic support from the local
schools which make a small financial contribution
to the programme’s costs. We engage a network of
freelance artists, who work in 10 local primary
schools, bringing storytelling, song, music dance,
drama and the visual arts. Fortnightly sessions
with the artists often build toward the creation of
performances, displays and installations. The aim
is to make creative learning both satisfying and
fun, and to give children the confidence to use their
imagination and to develop skills in self-expression.
Over 1,000 children aged between 5 and 11 are
involved in the programme.
We are committed to involving
the arts in our future
developments
5

6. Our Education Programmes
Our Education department focuses on advancing
educational attainment where there is most need,
on filling gaps in provision and on working with our
diverse local communities, in order to enable all
members to participate more fully in society.
This is why our programmes range across adult and
family learning, supplementary schools, and English
classes for members of migrant communities.
We also aim to develop a strong tradition of
volunteering, involving children, young people and
adults. One way that this is expressed is through
our work to support supplementary schools.
Supplementary schools
Supplementary schools are self-help organisations,
formed by parents and local people to help support
learning in their communities. They are often but
not always based around ethnic or religious
groups, this is not least because these may be the
best organised and resourced unifying points in
many recent migrant communities.
The supplementary schools run at weekends and
on weekday evenings. They support and
complement learning in mainstream schools, as
well as offering additional subjects such as
community languages.
In families where the last three generations may
have wildly differing cultural and life experiences,
this can help the older generations to better support
the younger generation’s learning.
We chair and run the Partnership for Supplementary
Schools in Kensington and Chelsea, and our
Education Director Val Patterson acts as
Supplementary Schools Co-ordinator for the
Borough. The Partnership helps to support the
quality of the schools’ provision and works jointly
to develop the skills and capacity of the managers,
volunteers and tutors. It develops long-term
partnerships with mainstream schools, colleges
and the local authority as well as running special
projects across the schools such as preparatory
classes for University entry and exam revision.
We aim to develop a strong
tradition of volunteering, involving
children, young people and adults
6

7. Adult Education programmes
We offer Adult Education courses in English, IT and
other subjects crucial to obtaining work. These are
accredited through the Open College Network. The
classes provide for learners who might not normally
access formal classes in schools and colleges, and
those who do not have resources at home.
We help them to learn more independently and
effectively and prepare them for further study,
responding to the needs and interests of learners
and community groups.
Most courses can lead to accreditation and
qualifications in a flexible way but this is not an end
in itself. The end is to enable people to participate
fully in society, to support their families and, where
relevant, their children’s educational attainment.
Education grants for individuals
We also offer a small number of grants to local
adults who are unemployed and undertaking
courses leading to employment. We do this
through a small grants programme which aims to
offer funding where other grants do not. These can
be used for books, travel, childcare, etc and
applications are based on an assessment of need.
We offer Adult Education
courses in English, IT and
other subjects crucial to
obtaining work
7

8. Our Grants Programmes and work with other
charities
Supporting Community Organisations and
innovation
The Trust initiates and supports the setting up of
new projects and charities to meet local needs. To
achieve this we provide both core grants and small
project grants to local charities and voluntary
organisations. We also let 20 subsidised charity
offices at one-third of market rents to provide such
organisations with space to work and establish
themselves.
As an organisation with its own asset base (our
land and properties), we are around for the long
term. So we can take an open ended, evolutionary
approach to community development which is
constructive for many of the projects we support.
These are largely dependent on volunteers time
and are at the mercy of factors which are not
always predictable, even with the best business
plan in place.
Our aspiration is to create projects which will have
the strength to deliver and to survive, so our
support is about fostering independence, not
creating dependence.
We also provide a range of support to existing local
projects, through offering starter grants, core
grants, meeting space, subsidised charity offices
and links with other Trust projects. And we can offer
the assistance of qualified and experienced staff
on our team – specialists in finance, HR, marketing,
property, sports and fitness and even gardening.
This offers such smaller organisations a level of
expertise which they would normally be unable to
access except through support from volunteers.
Through these initiatives we aim to:
- Create a range of fresh opportunities for people
of all ages and across communities, ensuring
they are affordable to those on low incomes
- Make a positive difference to the lives of local
people
- Contribute to the liveliness, inclusiveness and
conviviality of our local neighbourhoods.
Our Community Grants Programmes
We have a number of grants programmes, to support
other local charities and give education grants to
support local people seeking training for work.
In addition we spend £20,000 per year on support
for around 20 different small community and
voluntary groups, whom we give grants, usually of
up to £500, for events, trips and support for their
local projects.
Which organisations can apply grants?
If you run a local charity and want to find out
whether the Trust can help you email
info@westway.org call 020 8962 5721 or see
www.westway.org/community
New Horizons, a pioneering new activity centre for older people
on a Guinness Trust estate in SW3, opened in summer 2007. The
project drew on the Trust’s experience of working up development
proposals, fundraising capital projects and overseeing construction.
New Horizons is run by a consortium led by Trust charitable
tenants Open Age and Sixty Plus and helps 500 older people a
week to stay fit and active and develop new skills and interests.
We supported the New Horizons consortium over a four-year
period from concept through fundraising to construction and on
to opening.
We also let 20 subsidised charity
offices at one-third of market rents
8

9. 9

10. Healthy Active Communities
Our community sports and fitness work
One of the reasons the Trust was first set up was to
provide opportunities for local people to play sport
and to improve their health and fitness through
living a healthy and active lifestyle.
Back in the 1970’s local people campaigned for
more parks and for better sports facilities and the
Trust created both. We still maintain several acres
of public greenspace for public use including the
Portobello Green park.
But there are now three main aspects to this part of
our work:
1. We run two high quality sport and fitness
facilities, Portobello Green Fitness Club and
Westway Sports Centre
2. At these facilities we run a range of programmes;
we have a normal ‘full’ price which is competitive
with other such facilities and we run subsidised
programmes aimed at those who cannot afford a
full price or who might not use such a facility
without a dedicated programme to suit their needs.
These vary from programmes for children and
young people to GP-referred fitness schemes run in
conjunction with local doctors and programmes for
the over 60’s. Staff also work with local schools
and run sports coaching sessions for kids in tennis,
climbing, handball, football, etc. The Westway
Sports Centre offers both open-access kids
programmes for all abilities and a system of squads
and academies for those young people keen to
take their sporting interests further.
3. We run a separate community sports outreach
programme, which, in a nutshell is about taking the
sport to the people, instead of taking the people to
the sports centre. The outreach team run sessions
in schools, community centres and other venues;
they make use of our facilities when this makes
sense but also run programmes in other venues
and in partnership with organisations like the
Primary Care Trust, the School Sports Partnership
and the Greenhouse Schools Project. In addition to
funding from the Trust this programme is also
supported by some external funding from Sport
England and other funders, reflecting our long
track record in such work. However external grant
funding, while very valuable to particular
programmes, such as dedicated work on women
and girls fitness, makes up less than 25% of the
£250,000 cost of delivering this area of our work.
Staff work with local schools and run
sports coaching sessions for kids
10

11. 11

12. Westway Sports Centre
Under the White City roundabout, just a few
hundred metres from the site of London’s first
Olympic Stadium, the trust has built:
- England’s largest indoor climbing centre
expanded in 2007 with a new bouldering room
- 12 tennis courts, 8 indoor acrylic-surfaced courts
and 4 outdoor clay courts
- 6 football pitches including a full-size pitch
- 4 handball, or ‘Eton Fives’, courts
- Basketball court and practise area
- Netball court
- 20 station Gym (available for group hire and
including disabled accessible equipment)
- Frutina Swim Centre with Flopools
Westway Sports Centre operates as a ‘social
enterprise’. This means that we aim to set
ourselves the managerial standards of a private
business with an emphasis on creative and
entrepreneurial approaches, but as we don’t have
to return profits to shareholders we invest these for
community benefit, in improving our facilities and
in running subsidised programmes.
Westway’s main subsidised programmes are aimed
at offering local young people access to our top
quality sports facilities and providing them with
coached programmes which allow them to pursue
their sporting interests as far as their ability and
enthusiasm will take them.
As a result we are a Lawn Tennis Association Junior
High Performance Tennis Centre coaching both
nationally and internationally ranked junior players;
a centre of excellence for climbing, with several of
our juniors in the national team in each of the last
three years; and we run a talent identification
centre in football in partnership with local Premier
League team Fulham FC as well as working with our
local Championship Club Queens Park Rangers;
while our handball fives programme has taken
local players to national tournament success.
But it isn’t all about finding talent, hidden or
otherwise. Programmes like this start from great
staff running subsidised open-access sports
sessions after school and at weekends, and the
by-word at Westway is participation. Sport for fun,
fitness and wellbeing, in the broadest sense. So
Westway also runs community sessions aimed at
older people and community and charitable groups
from Kensington & Chelsea are offered preferential
terms at the Centre.
In addition we coach in local schools and offer free
facilities during school hours to schools from the
Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
A range of subsidies are also available to schools
from surrounding boroughs too, in line with our
charitable aims and in recognition of the Centre’s
proximity to Hammersmith & Fulham, Brent,
Westminster and Wandsworth.
We are a Lawn Tennis
Association Junior High
Performance Tennis Centre
12

13. Portobello Green Fitness Club
Tucked under the Westway flyover close to
Ladbroke Grove, the Trust has created a
community gym and health club, including:
- Spacious cardio and resistance gym
- Separate free weights gym
- 2 dance & fitness class studios
- Saunas and steam rooms
- 2 squash courts
Partnerships & franchises on site:
- 3 treatment rooms offering a range of therapies
- Heart & Soul Personal Training Service
Delivering more through fairer trade fitness
Like our Sports Centre, our gym is run as a social
enterprise. At Portobello Green Fitness Club this is
underlined by our membership of the London Fitness
Network, which allows us to offer a London-wide
membership with access to around a hundred
other ‘not-for-profit’ facilities across the capital.
The Club has around a thousand ‘full price’
members and around 600 people on a range of
subsidised schemes. Portobello Green pioneered
GP-referred fitness schemes and ran these for over
a decade before such ideas started to get health
service and government funding.
We also run specialised programmes for teenagers,
for the over-sixties and for local social housing
tenants in partnership with three housing
associations, Kensington Housing Trust, Octavia
Housing & Care and Notting Hill Housing Association.
We are now a member of a national programme
called the Inclusive Fitness Initiative for people
with disabilities. As part of this we received some
funding to buy accessible equipment and to train
our staff. This means that we now offer a personally
tailored service for all those with disabilities, in
addition to the friendly and non-discriminatory
approach which has always been at the core of the
Club’s ethos.
Our full price members contribute to this, because
they allow us to run a facility to which the Trust can
then offer subsidised access. We do this
particularly at off-peak times, such as during the
working day, when fewer of our full-price members
are likely to use the facilities, so that we make the
most effective use of our resources.
13

14. How we finance our work
The core of our business model is that we use the
income from renting out the properties the Trust
has developed under the Westway flyover to
provide a range of community benefits and to offer
subsidised services for local people.
We do, of course, still charge for many of our
services. Some charges are designed to recover
most of the costs of delivering the service and
others are more heavily subsidised for the benefit
of those who could not afford to be charged the
‘full cost’.
As a result we earn income from three main areas:
from running sports and fitness facilities; from
renting out property; and from the contributions
we receive from some of those who use our
subsidised services – for example when a school
pays a partial contribution toward the cost of our
delivering an arts programme for their pupils, or
when someone who is on a subsidised fitness
programme pays a small amount each time they
attend the gym; we also receive a small amount of
grant funding for delivering such services.
We endeavour to meet the costs of the two sport
and fitness centres from full-price membership
income so that we can direct our subsidy in a more
targeted fashion towards individual programmes
and users.
Our property portfolio is our self-made long term
investment, and the rent paid to us funds our
community and sports projects, and the costs of
running the Trust.
Those costs include quite a large sum spent on
managing our 23acre estate, not least because it
includes large areas of walkways, public space and
parks, which the Trust maintains for the public to
use free of charge.
And of course we still have to keep investing in our
buildings in order to preserve and grow the income
we need to fund our community services.
This is the challenge we face every day – if we
manage our assets badly, we will have less to
spend on our charitable projects. If we spend too
much, or make too little, then our community
outputs – the reason we exist – suffer and decline.
This is what makes development trusts different, we
run as social enterprises. We deliver regeneration,
facilities and services to our local community
largely from our own resources. We don’t have our
running costs met by grants and donations so we
have to make sure that we manage our resources
well and run our businesses efficiently.
14

15. Approx. 60% is income from
Westway Sports Centre and
Portobello Green Fitness Club
For full details of the Trust’s expenditure and finances please refer to our annual report and accounts.
This is available on our website at www.westway.org – printed copies are available by contacting our
head office on 020 8962 5720, or emailing info@westway.org
Approx. 30% is provided by the
Trust as a subsidy
Other income
How do we fund it?
Commercial property rentals £2.1m* Reinvested as programme subsidy £1.4m*
Transferred to reserves
Property and management costs
Where does that subsidy come from?
Where does that subsidy go?
44% on our community and
education programmes
25% on sports and fitness
development at our centres
17% on our outreach sport and
fitness programmes
14% on other smaller programmes
* Based on 12 months to 31.03.07
The amount we spend on our
charitable activities is approaching
£5 million* each year
15

16. Where are we going?
We want to develop new buildings without having
to rely on capital grants
The regeneration of our estate has been on hold for
several years. Our last big new building project was
the latest phase of Westway Sports Centre,
completed in 2001. Over the years since then
grants have become more difficult to find. Yet we
know that the benefits to be had from community-
based regeneration are as strong as ever. In fact as
time passes the imperative increases to replace our
ageing, out-moded or redundant buildings and
public spaces with new and better ones. It’s time
that we made new investments in our community.
Where we cannot find public funds we plan to
provide opportunities for private developers and
entrepreneurs to work with us in developing some
of the more commercial parts of our estate,
bringing finance and expertise in exchange for
some of the rental income which can be generated.
We recognise that we may have to wait for the right
economic conditions to realise this goal, but we
believe it is the way forward.
We want to become a key player in delivering
programmes to develop sporting opportunity in
Kensington & Chelsea
Because there is a generation of children growing
up for whom sport is something you watch on TV.
And for many, sport and fitness activities are no
longer everyday opportunities, or even attractive
options. Working from Westway Sports Centre and
Portobello Green we have built considerable
expertise in overcoming this. We now want to
involve more children, in more programmes, in
more sports. And we want to encourage them to
take up activities in their schools and local
community centres, as well as to pursue them
further at centres of excellence like ours and others
across West London. This will mean that we need
new partners and new approaches to build on what
our sports staff have created over many years.
The new bouldering extension at Westway Sports Centre opened
in November 2007. Constructed in a fabric-canopied extension to
our main climbing centre it has been hailed as the country’s best
new facility and cemented Westway’s reputation as the leading
indoor climbing centre.
16

17. We want to be more effective as a voluntary sector
presence
Not because we think we are doing badly now, but
because the needs of community groups and
individuals change as organisations evolve and as
areas like ours see new residents arrive.
The Trust has earned its place as a mature and
independent organisation with a permanent role
and we need to build on this strength in order to
support other newer organisations which lack such
strong foundations. But we must ensure that the
very longevity which is our key asset doesn’t blunt
our effectiveness. We have to keep looking
outward, seeking new projects, new issues and
new focuses – to ensure that we are always actively
assisting others in maximising their potential and
in meeting our community’s ever-changing needs.
We want to introduce more art into our buildings
and programmes
The Westway flyover provides an ideal location for
arts projects. The challenge is to find ways to
support sustainable initiatives and to foster ideas
which can overcome the flyovers inherent
bleakness while both contributing to and reflecting
the intensely creative area around and below it.
We want this to be a place where art flourishes and
the Trust intends to pursue every opportunity to
bring this about. We aim to encourage new talent
to join the constant stream of artists for whom the
Westway provides a unique source of inspiration –
from the Clash to Bloc Party via Margaret Drabble!
We will be consulting our local community on our
regeneration plans
During 2008 we will be consulting local groups and
their representatives about our plans for
developing and improving some of the more
run-down areas remaining under the Westway. We
will also be exploring whether facilities and
services currently provided elsewhere in the
Borough can be better located by moving to Trust
land, to drive regeneration here.
We want to deliver more
sporting opportunities to
more local kids
17

18. We have plans to provide a path and cycleway
across the Borough
Over the years, the Trust has been installing
sections of this ambitious project and the big
challenges left are in working with others to
provide the sections which are not on Trust land,
redeveloping the Maxilla section to provide a
permanent avenue and finding routes for it to link
into when it reaches the Borough boundaries. We
are working on all of these issues in order to try
and turn this dream into a reality.
We want to expand facilities at the Sports Centre
and we need a new approach to do this:
Given the shortage of sports facilities across West
London, it will be no surprise to anyone that we
already have unmet demand for courts and pitches.
We also have continual requests and suggestions
for new facilities. Our last remaining opportunity to
provide space for more courts and pitches at
Westway Sports Centre could be through
redeveloping the run-down Stable Way industrial
area adjacent to the Centre, when the current
leases expire. However, large capital sports grants
are expected to be hard to attract in the
competition for Olympic funding.
As a result we will need to look to new sources of
investment, not least to benefactors within our own
community and amongst the Centre’s wide user
base. Large sums will be required and 2008/09 will
see us bringing together friends of the Sports
Centre to create a strategy to achieve this.
We plan to bring cricket to W10
As well as looking at ways to create new sports
facilities, we will seek ways of developing new
sports opportunities in our existing facilities.
Following an upsurge in interest in the game, the
Cricket Foundation and the London Community
Cricket Association are now working with Westway
Sports Centre on the ‘Street Lights’ cricket project.
This aims to turn Westway into a hub for local
schools. If successful, this could allow us to
steadily grow our expertise in cricket.
We want to make more of our presence as an
employer locally
The Trust spends large sums in wages and on
services. As a development trust committed to
community-based regeneration, we want to work
harder to ensure that more of this goes into our
local community. So we intend to focus even harder
on local recruitment and, wherever possible, to
choose local organisations to provide our services
and to work alongside us.
We want to lower the barriers to participation for
those wishing to access our services and facilities
During 2008/09 we will be embarking on an
awareness programme to enable us to better
understand what factors act to exclude some users
or groups from taking up our services. We will then
find ways to dismantle these barriers, because, as
a community organisation, the Trust wishes to be
accessible to all members of the community.
18

19. As a community organisation, we
aim to stay accessible to all, by
reaching out, running sessions in
local community venues
19

20. Westway Development Trust was formed in 1971 to
develop for community benefit the 23 acres of
derelict land, between Westbourne Park and White
City, created by the construction of the A40
Westway flyover. The Trust has created the
Portobello Green area of creative businesses, shops
and public space, the Portobello Market Tent,
Westway Sports Centre, Portobello Green Fitness
Club, and an extensive portfolio of commercial
property and workspace for local charities.
We are involved in urban regeneration, education,
arts and sports development – with a focus on
access for those most in need. As a community-
based organisation we work in partnership with
the local voluntary sector and provide over
£270,000 a year in grants for other local
community organisations. We also offer education
and training grants to local unemployed people.
Want to find out more or keep in touch
with our plans?
see: www.westway.org
email: info@westway.org
Interested in jobs at the Trust?
Westway aim to recruit local staff where
possible; opportunities include:
• Roles in sports and fitness
• Property, maintenance and facility
management work
• Gardening, horticulture and grounds
maintenance
• Community and development work in a
number of project areas
• Administration and support roles
including Finance and Human Resources
For current job vacancies please email us
at jobs@westway.org
Find us:
Westway Sports Centre
1 Crowthorne Road
off Bramley Road
London W10 6RP
T 020 8969 0992
Portobello Green Fitness Club
3-5 Thorpe Close
London W10 5XL
T 020 8962 5753
Westway Development Trust
1 Thorpe Close,
London W10 5XL
T 020 8962 5720
Registered Charity number 1123127
Westway Development Trust is a company
limited by guarantee.
Registered number 6475436.
All photography by Philippa Gedge www.philippagedge.com – except page 3 Portobello market picture by Kat Davis
Illustration below of Westway Sports Centre by Tobias Till from the collection ‘As the Crow Flies’ exhibited in 2008 at Gallery 12. www.tobias-till.co.uk