West End enters Walpole Park. On Wednesday, the council will say whether the park is still a park

Walpole Park is familiar to anyone who has ever walked down from Ealing Broadway towards Pitzhanger. A bench, a lawn, a festival in July, a stroller in the afternoon, a dog in the evening. On Wednesday, September 9, the same patch of greenery will be given a different future: a temporary theater with over one thousand two hundred seats. Not for the weekend. For three and a half years. The operator's name is Troubadour Theaters - the one behind the Wembley Park and Canary Wharf stages. The company finances, builds and runs the facility itself. The council writes that it will not spend a single pound on construction or bills. The Troubadour is to pay a fixed lease. How much is not specified in the documents. If Cabinet says yes, teams could arrive in January 2027. The theater would open in April. Play until March 2030. Then three months for demolition and - as the office promises - the land returned to the park. There will be no summer shelter inside. There will be a cash register, bar, shop, catering, facilities, toilets, offices, generators, air conditioning and a garbage zone. Eight shows a week or more. On other stages, the Troubadour took audiences to things like War Horse, Starlight Express and The Hunger Games. This is not an amateur night at school. This is a machine that is supposed to attract people from outside the commune and leave them at tables on Broadway. Council leader Peter Mason says it plainly. The attraction is expected to revitalize cafes and shops in West Ealing and Ealing Broadway. It also has - and this sentence is worth reading twice - seeing whether Ealing can sustain a theater of this scale while protecting Walpole Park for future generations. Lauren Wall promises world-class productions closer to home and Ealing as west London's cultural destination. Sounds smooth. However, the park is not an empty plot of land for testing. This is Metropolitan Open Land, greenery next to the historic Pitzhanger, a daily respite for people who will not buy a ticket to the big premiere. The council report itself lists what the brochure does not: difficult planning, conservation status, heritage, consultations and a calendar that is already tight. Wednesday's decision does not lay the foundations yet. It gives consent in principle and a green light for the lease. Then only the application, the mayor of London, and formal comments from the residents. It's easier to stop the idea before the "yes" than after it, when the contract and the date of the crane's arrival are already on the table. There is another price that is talked about as a trifle. Ealing Summer Festivals - jazz, blues, all that summer that has been held here for years - are set to expand to other venues across the seven towns. The council is selling it as justice: not just Broadway, the entire borough. However, it does not provide an address, date or budget. “We will move” is not a schedule yet. This is the hope recorded in the report. And just beyond the trees, on Mattock Lane, stands Questors. Permanent stage. Local. All year round. The council remembers her like a neighbor who wasn't invited for a photo would be remembered. No one explained what a twelve hundred-seat commercial venue would do with volunteers and tickets from a theater that was here before anyone uttered the word Troubadour. Mason reiterates that it's just a test. That after 2030 the grass will return. That if the test is successful, the permanent theater will be built somewhere else, not here. Maybe it will be so. Maybe in three seasons the park will only be Pitzhanger and a picnic again. But a test that takes up a piece of common space for twelve hundred chairs, generators, and a queue for merch is not a test in a laboratory. It is a decision about what the center of Ealing should be: a garden from which one overlooks the city - or a foyer into which the city enters from the outside. Before you say "yes" on Wednesday, it's worth hearing a few things out loud. How many meters of the park extends under the building, facilities and fence, and for how many months of the year. Where exactly and in what week do the festivals land? What is this unstated rental fee. What about Questors. And what the park looks like in winter, when there is no spectacle, only a fence and mud after construction. Without that, "temporary West End" is a nice phrase. The park is specific. It can be measured in steps from the gate to the bench. On Tuesday, September 15, at 6 p.m. at Perceval House, the council asks residents what Ealing should look like in twenty years. The theater, which is to last three seasons, is just such a twenty-year decision - only disguised as "temporarily". If you go to this park with a stroller, with a dog, with a blanket or with a ticket, please tell us where. The voice of someone from Mattock Lane is different from that of someone from Northolt who comes once for a big premiere. Both count. Both will disappear if there is only a folder in the room on Wednesday.