Loughborough Junction public space improvements - consultation begins
- Thread starter Leo Chesterton
- Start date
xsunnysuex
Life is a horizontal fall.
Nope. It's way too large. Says 20hrs. It's 1002.3 MB
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Really?
I cycle down it nearly every morning and it was jammed packed with vehicles in mornings from junction of Brixton road and Fiveways until the road closures.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
Never met him - and from his reputation I would expect him to be thinking about refugee issues primarily right now.
What you (and I) need are connections in the upper echelons to answer such questions. I can remember a time when the Brixton Society boasted one member who worked for the Privy Council, and one for the House of Lords (back in the 1980s).
Andrew McGrgegor (presenter of record review on Radio 3) lives locally - but he is a Tube user, so not much chance there!
bimble
floofy
20 hours you'd all still be in there. What about.. one of these voice recognition things that phones can do . or maybe you/ someone who has time could just listen and type up the key bits.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Yes it was. At end I felt I had to say something as no one else was going to stick up for cyclists. The guy from Motor Cycle Action Group annoyed me. Was that Opik? Annoying twat.
Raucous in sense of unlike here where there has been a debate there was little in way of debate. It was borderline mob rule.
Unlike teuchter thought that Cllr Parr did a good job.
xsunnysuex
Life is a horizontal fall.
I've got it on my laptop now. But still having problems. I'm the only one here I'm afraid. And I type with one finger lol. This is so frustrating.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
(2) I suggest if you meet him again you pop the question.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
Give you a like for supporting your local councillor and minus a like for zapping Lembit Opik = nul point!
What did he say that annoyed you? - he must have wanted to say it if he was waving his hand for ages.
P.S. I wasn't there - had arranged to go to an educational thing with a friend so felt obliged to keep the arrangement.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
I know as much or as little as you do about him. He is described as Lord Lester of Herne Hill in the Borough of Southwark, which suggests if he is local or locally connected it is round Half Moon Lane/Sunray Avenue etc.
Some years ago the Guardian was careful to stress that Lord Lester was a Jenkinsite co-founder of the SDP and "a Labour Man" (although a Lib Dem peer).
So there is a slight difference between him and Lord Avebury (the other half of Lindsay Avebury). Eric Lubbock/Lord Avebury is 87 and does live in Myatts Fields. He is concerned with Freedom for Tibet and Voluntary Euthansia, whereas Lindsay seems to deal with local issues.
I did meet Lord Avebury once - he used to run a computer dealership in Vauxhall and was a very ebulient salesman at the time (1992 - don't think Windows had been invented back then).
Lord Lester is 79 (as they say in the Daily Mail)
snowy_again
Slush
Erm, no - he's a lib dem peer - left labour to set up lib dems etc. In the 80s - so you can infer his local influence. Peerage is rep for Southwark, Edit: as ever ch1 beat me to it!
bimble
floofy
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
My computer is dying. So limited access.
Sad not to meet teuchter met Beasley and another poster here.
Depressing meeting. Democracy by who shouts loudest. Where I sometimes find the idea of community a bit scary. Someone at meeting said good thing about the road closure debacle is that it had brought the community together. Not for me. Problem with idea of communities is that you are either in or out.
No way one could as teuchter and me think to wait for a while to see and then come to an opinion. Thats now becoming untenable option.
I got to meeting a bit late so sat at back. Unlike the other LJ Neighbourhood Planning meetings this one was well attended. Unfortunately all people wanted to talk about was the road closures. Big row about agenda at start.
Whilst Council officers and Stockwell Partnership tried to explain what they were going to do no one wanted to listen. All they wanted to know was when the closures would end.
As I was at back and could not hear everything at front but I could hear the ongoing comments around me. A lot of which I could sympathise with. Those around me said that the road closures were about gentrifying the area - they used the word gentrifying.
They also saw the Farm as part of that. "What do we need a farm for"...
So it was not just about road closures. It was a whole load of issues of which road closures is the focus/ final straw.
Sad not to meet teuchter met Beasley and another poster here.
Depressing meeting. Democracy by who shouts loudest. Where I sometimes find the idea of community a bit scary. Someone at meeting said good thing about the road closure debacle is that it had brought the community together. Not for me. Problem with idea of communities is that you are either in or out.
No way one could as teuchter and me think to wait for a while to see and then come to an opinion. Thats now becoming untenable option.
I got to meeting a bit late so sat at back. Unlike the other LJ Neighbourhood Planning meetings this one was well attended. Unfortunately all people wanted to talk about was the road closures. Big row about agenda at start.
Whilst Council officers and Stockwell Partnership tried to explain what they were going to do no one wanted to listen. All they wanted to know was when the closures would end.
As I was at back and could not hear everything at front but I could hear the ongoing comments around me. A lot of which I could sympathise with. Those around me said that the road closures were about gentrifying the area - they used the word gentrifying.
They also saw the Farm as part of that. "What do we need a farm for"...
So it was not just about road closures. It was a whole load of issues of which road closures is the focus/ final straw.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
If there is a way of getting the audio of the whole meeting up, then that would be good. Then people can judge for themselves the quality of discussion that was possible and/or took place.
For what it's worth here is my account of things, in a general sense. editor if you want to quote this in a Buzz article feel free to do so. NB that I had to leave the meeting about an hour in so don't know what happened after that.
I've not been to one of these neighbourhood planning forum meetings before, so am not sure what they are normally like. I know that Gramsci and others have.
My expectations (based partly on what I'd read on here and elsewhere) was that there would be some kind of LJAG mafia plus their favoured councillors facing the inevitably hostile audience.
In fact, sat at the table were:
- Clr Matt Parr (chairing). He is the one who "called in" the scheme previously, and made it clear during the meeting that he was not in favour of the scheme.
- Clr Rachel Heywood. Also openly anti the scheme.
- Woman representing LJroadmadness group. Did not get her name. As far as I understood, she is also chair/secretary(?) of the Loughborough Estate Tenants Group.
- Anthea Masey from LJAG. While I was there she didn't comment either way on the road closure scheme. She was taking minutes.
There was also a guy representing Lambeth on the transport front (didn't get his name either) who was not at the table but was asked up at various points to present/answer questions. George Wright not there because he was on annual leave, apparently organised some time ago. If I understood correctly, the transport guy seemed to say that leadership of the project was being taken over to some extent by someone more senior anyway.
Clr Brathwaite (Lambeth cabinet member ultimately in charge of the scheme) was not there. There was some anger in the audience that she wasn't (perhaps fair enough). No-one was able to give a specific reason why she could not attend.
So, of those sat at the table, 75% were openly anti the scheme.
Nonetheless I felt the atmosphere was that the audience were largely hostile to anyone that spoke. From the very beginning people were interupting everything with questions, depsite the LJroadmadness woman's request that people obey the "house rules" and put their hand up to speak. A fair bit of time was wasted at the beginning with a chaotic argument about whether the closures should be discussed first or last, and whether the 45 minutes allocated to that subject were adequate (the road scheme was not the only item on the agenda). LJroadmadness woman suggested the discussion be moved to the end so that questions could go on afterwards for as long as necessary. Clr Parr reluctantly agreed to this, but then on a show of hands the auduence rejected that too, so back to plan A. Quite a lot of time wasted already which I feel might have been avoided with a more assertive chairman (he kept asking people to wait until after the presentations before asking questions, but then repeatedly engaged with whoever shouted their points the loudest).
The transport chap was trying to put forward the argument that the decision about whether the closures should continue should be based on an assessment of the best evidence available (which of course I agree with). To his credit he was pretty patient with the barrage of shouting thrown at him and was firm in his assertion that the people in the room didn't necessarily represent the majority view in the area. He did reference the initial consultation results which supposedly showed a majority in favour, this predictably was met with a certainamount of jeering. There were some questions from the audience asking about what the actual point of the closures were anyway, and his reply was that these had been restated in a letter sent out shortly after the scheme commenced, and also detailed on the Lambeth website. I think that was a fair point really, because while I've no doubt many will claim they never got that letter, the fact is that for anyone interested it's not that difficult to read the stated aims. And yet a suggestion from the audience seemed to be that the aims were opaque and had never been explained to anyone.
Here is the thing: I am happy to admit that I would like this scheme to succeed, because I believe in the general principles behind it. Having said that, I'm also completely prepared to listen to anyone with legitimate concerns about it, and if there are major problems with it that can't be resolved then I would accept that maybe it has to be abandoned. However, I think it's important that all these concerns are not just listened to but that someone goes out to check whether the problems are real, and if they are, tries to find a way to resolve them with modifications rather than simply abandoning the whole scheme.
It might have been possible, if the meeting had been properly chaired, and if everyone in the audience respected the principle that those with the loudest voices shouldn't be allowed to dominate the discussion, for grievances to be aired in a way that they could be responded to and noted, and then investigated further. But there was no way that was going to happen in tonight's meeting. It was very clear that the majority (or at least the shoutiest portion of it) weren't interested in discussing anything - the scheme was to be abandoned right now, end of. There was a point where a couple of specific points were raised - increased traffic on St James Crescent, and a cut-through route via an estate car park - in a way that would allow them to be discussed. I listened to both of those points and felt that I woudl like to go and try and understand what was going on. There would be the potential to address them specifically and constructively - see if measures to prevent people using that cut-through, for example, could be taken. But the discussion soon returned to something approaching chaos.
I did feel that some audience comments reflected an atmosphere of conspiracy theory. Someone seemed to be saying cars were deliberately being directed into the estate to "kill us off". There was a complaint about the fact that there weren't enough copies of the agenda to go round the audience. The chair pointed out that it was simply a list of items to be discussed which he had read out at the beginning but the audience member seemed to feel there was a plot to supress information. The issue of class was explicitly mentioned, with the suggestion that the scheme was being foisted on the area because of the type of people living there. It might be unfair to describe such feelings as conspiracy theories because I do understand that there are legitimate reasons for people to be concerned about class-related issues in a broader sense. But the point is, the audience seemed dominated by a complete unwillingness to discuss or even listen to those trying to present to them an outline of the reasons behind the scheme or the ways in which an attempt was being made to take a vaguely representative sample of feeling in the area alongside more objective measures of its impact.
I don't know what's going to happen now. The people from Stockwell Partnership were faced with quite a lot of hostility despite not representing a position and I doubt they are looking forward to trying to carried out their consultative excercises in that atmosphere, especially as it's all now to be done in a hasty and rushed fashion before the time it was supposed to take place.
All I want is that we take the chance to try and make LJ a bit nicer for those who aren't just driving through, but if there'd have been a show of hands for those in favour of the scheme, or even in favour of completing the experiment and then making a decision on consideration of the results, I don't know if I'd have been brave enough to put up my hand. The atmosphere created by those so vociferouly opposed is why I refuse to accept that the angry mob necessarily represent a majority of local opinion.
It was quite a relief to leave the unpleasant atmosphere in the meeting room, and come out onto Loughborough Road, which to me seemed pleasingly peaceful, very few cars, you could hear people talking, and the occasional clatter of bike wheels and associated headlamps drifting by. But I live the other side of the tracks so can't assume that's what everyone likes.
For what it's worth here is my account of things, in a general sense. editor if you want to quote this in a Buzz article feel free to do so. NB that I had to leave the meeting about an hour in so don't know what happened after that.
I've not been to one of these neighbourhood planning forum meetings before, so am not sure what they are normally like. I know that Gramsci and others have.
My expectations (based partly on what I'd read on here and elsewhere) was that there would be some kind of LJAG mafia plus their favoured councillors facing the inevitably hostile audience.
In fact, sat at the table were:
- Clr Matt Parr (chairing). He is the one who "called in" the scheme previously, and made it clear during the meeting that he was not in favour of the scheme.
- Clr Rachel Heywood. Also openly anti the scheme.
- Woman representing LJroadmadness group. Did not get her name. As far as I understood, she is also chair/secretary(?) of the Loughborough Estate Tenants Group.
- Anthea Masey from LJAG. While I was there she didn't comment either way on the road closure scheme. She was taking minutes.
There was also a guy representing Lambeth on the transport front (didn't get his name either) who was not at the table but was asked up at various points to present/answer questions. George Wright not there because he was on annual leave, apparently organised some time ago. If I understood correctly, the transport guy seemed to say that leadership of the project was being taken over to some extent by someone more senior anyway.
Clr Brathwaite (Lambeth cabinet member ultimately in charge of the scheme) was not there. There was some anger in the audience that she wasn't (perhaps fair enough). No-one was able to give a specific reason why she could not attend.
So, of those sat at the table, 75% were openly anti the scheme.
Nonetheless I felt the atmosphere was that the audience were largely hostile to anyone that spoke. From the very beginning people were interupting everything with questions, depsite the LJroadmadness woman's request that people obey the "house rules" and put their hand up to speak. A fair bit of time was wasted at the beginning with a chaotic argument about whether the closures should be discussed first or last, and whether the 45 minutes allocated to that subject were adequate (the road scheme was not the only item on the agenda). LJroadmadness woman suggested the discussion be moved to the end so that questions could go on afterwards for as long as necessary. Clr Parr reluctantly agreed to this, but then on a show of hands the auduence rejected that too, so back to plan A. Quite a lot of time wasted already which I feel might have been avoided with a more assertive chairman (he kept asking people to wait until after the presentations before asking questions, but then repeatedly engaged with whoever shouted their points the loudest).
The transport chap was trying to put forward the argument that the decision about whether the closures should continue should be based on an assessment of the best evidence available (which of course I agree with). To his credit he was pretty patient with the barrage of shouting thrown at him and was firm in his assertion that the people in the room didn't necessarily represent the majority view in the area. He did reference the initial consultation results which supposedly showed a majority in favour, this predictably was met with a certainamount of jeering. There were some questions from the audience asking about what the actual point of the closures were anyway, and his reply was that these had been restated in a letter sent out shortly after the scheme commenced, and also detailed on the Lambeth website. I think that was a fair point really, because while I've no doubt many will claim they never got that letter, the fact is that for anyone interested it's not that difficult to read the stated aims. And yet a suggestion from the audience seemed to be that the aims were opaque and had never been explained to anyone.
Here is the thing: I am happy to admit that I would like this scheme to succeed, because I believe in the general principles behind it. Having said that, I'm also completely prepared to listen to anyone with legitimate concerns about it, and if there are major problems with it that can't be resolved then I would accept that maybe it has to be abandoned. However, I think it's important that all these concerns are not just listened to but that someone goes out to check whether the problems are real, and if they are, tries to find a way to resolve them with modifications rather than simply abandoning the whole scheme.
It might have been possible, if the meeting had been properly chaired, and if everyone in the audience respected the principle that those with the loudest voices shouldn't be allowed to dominate the discussion, for grievances to be aired in a way that they could be responded to and noted, and then investigated further. But there was no way that was going to happen in tonight's meeting. It was very clear that the majority (or at least the shoutiest portion of it) weren't interested in discussing anything - the scheme was to be abandoned right now, end of. There was a point where a couple of specific points were raised - increased traffic on St James Crescent, and a cut-through route via an estate car park - in a way that would allow them to be discussed. I listened to both of those points and felt that I woudl like to go and try and understand what was going on. There would be the potential to address them specifically and constructively - see if measures to prevent people using that cut-through, for example, could be taken. But the discussion soon returned to something approaching chaos.
I did feel that some audience comments reflected an atmosphere of conspiracy theory. Someone seemed to be saying cars were deliberately being directed into the estate to "kill us off". There was a complaint about the fact that there weren't enough copies of the agenda to go round the audience. The chair pointed out that it was simply a list of items to be discussed which he had read out at the beginning but the audience member seemed to feel there was a plot to supress information. The issue of class was explicitly mentioned, with the suggestion that the scheme was being foisted on the area because of the type of people living there. It might be unfair to describe such feelings as conspiracy theories because I do understand that there are legitimate reasons for people to be concerned about class-related issues in a broader sense. But the point is, the audience seemed dominated by a complete unwillingness to discuss or even listen to those trying to present to them an outline of the reasons behind the scheme or the ways in which an attempt was being made to take a vaguely representative sample of feeling in the area alongside more objective measures of its impact.
I don't know what's going to happen now. The people from Stockwell Partnership were faced with quite a lot of hostility despite not representing a position and I doubt they are looking forward to trying to carried out their consultative excercises in that atmosphere, especially as it's all now to be done in a hasty and rushed fashion before the time it was supposed to take place.
All I want is that we take the chance to try and make LJ a bit nicer for those who aren't just driving through, but if there'd have been a show of hands for those in favour of the scheme, or even in favour of completing the experiment and then making a decision on consideration of the results, I don't know if I'd have been brave enough to put up my hand. The atmosphere created by those so vociferouly opposed is why I refuse to accept that the angry mob necessarily represent a majority of local opinion.
It was quite a relief to leave the unpleasant atmosphere in the meeting room, and come out onto Loughborough Road, which to me seemed pleasingly peaceful, very few cars, you could hear people talking, and the occasional clatter of bike wheels and associated headlamps drifting by. But I live the other side of the tracks so can't assume that's what everyone likes.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
There was a guy sat right at the front with a clipboard who was constantly having his say and interrupting. Clr Parr pretty much told him to shut up at one point, saying something about wasn't he from Croydon anyway. not sure what that was all about.
Didn't notice Lembit Opik.
Didn't notice Lembit Opik.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
I just popped out for my evening constitutional and it occurred to me that the "cameras" on the poles at the junction do not flash - whereas I have seen cameras flash when people are speeding.
Are those cameras functional or are they like those mock burglar alarm thingees people have in gentrified areas as a deterrent?
Does anyone know if any fines have been issued? FOE coming on (assuming Mr Wright's office do not wish to answer a direct question)?
Are those cameras functional or are they like those mock burglar alarm thingees people have in gentrified areas as a deterrent?
Does anyone know if any fines have been issued? FOE coming on (assuming Mr Wright's office do not wish to answer a direct question)?
teuchter
je suis teuchter
There were a couple of calls for "direct action" to put an end to the "havoc" that this scheme is apparently causing.
My thoughts were that instead of spraying over the signs on Loughborough Rd, maybe people could take direct action to stop drivers cutting through estate car parks. Or intervene in the reported hour-long driver standoff on St James Crescent.
But it seems that folk don't see the legions of unecessary car journeys as the problem. Despite all the stuff about danger to children and air pollution and so on.
It's "the cyclists" or something who are causing the problems here
My thoughts were that instead of spraying over the signs on Loughborough Rd, maybe people could take direct action to stop drivers cutting through estate car parks. Or intervene in the reported hour-long driver standoff on St James Crescent.
But it seems that folk don't see the legions of unecessary car journeys as the problem. Despite all the stuff about danger to children and air pollution and so on.
It's "the cyclists" or something who are causing the problems here
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Why do you want to know?
The most efficient use of taxpayers' money may be via fake cameras that don't cost much but put a decent number of people off.
They don't work if it's stated that they are fake. The we have to pay someone to sit in a CCTV car. And then everyone can come up with conspiracy theories about that being no more than a revenue drive by Lambeth.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
I guess I'm just suspicious that this would be further evidence of a "bodge job". The streetscape looking down Loughborough Road is a joke. Can you imagine that in Sutton or Surbiton, never mind Hampstead or Westminster?
I am in favour of clear lines. If you break the rules you WILL be fined. Not you may be if our cameras are not fake.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Then we'd better have police officers installed on every single street corner so that we can say with certainty that if you assault someone in the street you WILL be held to justice. Not that you may be if there happen to be sufficient witnesses willing to give evidence in court.
Sounds expensive.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
Thank you for a comprehensive report - you give the flavour of things in detail.
I do still come back to question why it is such a surprise if people's lives are quite dramatically changed in some cases they might get upset.
Surely in this case the problem should be for those who want to make the change to carry the people with them. That is a democratic process.
Simply changing people's access and expecting them to like it or lump it is condescending and reminiscent of the traditional British approach IMHO
Last edited:
SpamMisery
Pretty comfortable here right under your skin
Fake cameras are known to deter crime. They're just useless at proving crime, particularly once criminals know they're fake. Their was a study which showed displaying a set of human eyes on an anti-bike theft poster on the wall by a bike stand had a noticeable effect on the number of bikes stolen.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Opik turned up late and was at back.
Still think Cllr Parr did a good job. It was more of a protest than a meeting.
Anthea did speak. Must have been after you left. She basically said LJAG supported experiment. If it didnt work then think again. She also put in support for what is in fact Lambeth Labour policy of putting pedestrians etc first.
She was only LJAG person I saw there tonight. Unlike other meetings they seemed thin on the ground tonight.
I think the guy from Croydon may have been the one someone posted up here about who is known campaigner for the motorist.
CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
Reductio ad absurdum
Similar threads
