• RESIDENTS in despair about Essential Living’s 100 Avenue Road development have reason for some cheer following an opportunity – Engagement drop-in: Swiss Cottage Open Space licence request – to let Camden Council’s parks department hear the views of local people who will be most adversely affected if EL’s vehicles are allowed to commandeer a significant part of the Open Space outside the developers’ boundary: one of the most serious consequences of which would be to bring even more harmful pollution directly and unnecessarily right alongside the area where children play and adults congregate.

But what is even more fortuitous for local residents is that Cllr Adam Harrison, cabinet member for improving Camden’s environment, who called the meeting, and who will be collating the public’s responses towards the council’s decision on behalf of all of us, took a firm stand against air pollution in an article he wrote in the New Journal, (Adam Harrison: We must widen our mission for clean air, February 8).

In this article he made clear that Camden Council now adopts WHO standards on air pollution and that he personally want to galvanise a campaign to drive particulate matter and NO2 (the very stuff of EL’s vehicle movements) levels “right down”.

What better opportunity for Camden to “do their bit” to “shift traffic away from where young people are gathering” and for users of the Open Space not to have to “taste the pollution” in the three to five or more years it will take to complete EL’s proposed build – than to follow Cllr Harrison’s lead and at the least not allow EL to break the existing covenant that prevents them from using even more of the Open Space that, in effect, works to keep these heavy, noisy and polluting vehicles that much further away from the general public?

Join us and request “No lorries through the Open Space” by emailing: parks@camdengov.uk – Ref: SCL/001.

EDIE RAFF
Chair Cresta House Residents’ Association