Precious represents the interests of people who use Tooting Common regularly and oppose Wandsworth Council's proposal to develop part of the Triangle area of the Common into a commercial complex of artificial, floodlit five-a-side football pitches.
We have no political agenda - our case is simply that we do not want to see a single square metre of Tooting Common lost or built on, nor do we want to see its intrinsically calm, peaceful nature lost. The Triangle as it is, is a visually pleasing and very special haven in a sea of suburban sprawl. The Common has been gifted to all of us, wherever we live, by a more enlightened and farsighted generation. We believe this scheme will cause so much opposition and wasted energy that it should be dropped now.
And just to be clear, we don't oppose more sporting facilities for the local community - far from it. Many Precious supporters are heavily involved in local sport - either as players, parents of players or coaches of players. We just don't believe that it's right to erode any public open space for commercial gain nor do we believe that a commercially-driven facility will adequately serve the needs of the local community. Right now the Common is free and available to all and, as anyone who regularly uses it will know, most weekends it is almost entirely given over to football (the old-fashioned kind - played by 22 players on grass) already.
Why Precious? Precious simply because the open green spaces which create such oases of calm in our frantic, urban lives are so precious to those who use them regularly wherever they live.
And because it's an acronym that represents growing national concern at the insidious erosion of green spaces for commercial gain in our cities, Protecting the Environment in our Cities and In Our Urban Spaces.
We're a group of ordinary people working in our spare time and using our own resources to campaign (if you're able to contribute to our fighting fund please do - however small it will help).