• YOUR correspondent Penny Gamez is quite right about the proposed multiple and complicated changes to the layout of Baynes Street being quite unnecessary, (Baynes Street scheme will worsen pollution, February 18).

I am also concerned about the consultation process and the premise on which this particular consultation has been undertaken.

It is noteworthy that, with any consultation, Camden Council does not advise council tax payers what the estimated cost is – this is important.

The council leafleted residents about the plans for Baynes Street sometime in January, when nationwide Covid-19 cases were at a peak and London was hit hardest. The consultation period was just two weeks, from January 19 to February 2.

I was in hospital for part of that period and, doubtless, a good number of residents of the flats that open into Baynes Street were similarly indisposed or away and unable to return home during lockdown. They would not see the leaflet.

Two weeks in a pandemic is no time for discussion among neighbours – a meeting in person is impossible and many of us do not have contact with many of our neighbours anyway.

I understand that there has been little response from the 62 flats in my estate, let alone the three other discrete estates with an interest in Baynes Street.

Camden Council cannot possibly claim that this has been a sensible or serious consultation and the proposals should be withdrawn on that score alone.

On the website about this “consultation” the opening statement reads: “The Covid-19 pandemic has changed how people in Camden live, travel and work. Since the start of the pandemic many of us have been spending more time closer to home, making our neighbourhoods more important than ever…”

This may be true and it is right that temporary changes to our streets and pavements have been made to encourage social distancing and so on.

The lifestyle changes seen this past year should not, however, be the premise for major, permanent, and costly, changes to our streets until such time as the “new normal” post-pandemic has had a chance to settle down.

That may be well over another year away. Who knows what will happen, how we will be living in London in 2022 and the remainder of the 2020s?

Whitehall has spent a huge amount of money during the pandemic and town hall budgets are really stretched too. Surely this is not a time to be spending on discretionary street schemes.

Of course, we all want safer streets. I have lived at the same address for nearly 38 years and no one, to my knowledge, has ever claimed Baynes Street to be unsafe.

Indeed the main danger in this one-way street is when cyclists use the street as two-way and, sometimes, cycle on the pavements too. Traffic tends not to travel fast in this short street.

The council claim that their plans will improve bus journey times. This is quite disingenuous when the 46 bus is frequently stuck in traffic in adjacent Royal College Street owing to the scheme designed by either Camden Council or Transport for London.

On some occasions it takes 20 minutes for the 46 bus to travel along this single-lane thoroughfare from the Crowndale Road end of Royal College Street to Camden Road station. Don’t be fooled, new road schemes don’t always improve bus journey times.

Indeed the plans for Baynes Street should not be seen in isolation from the changes made to Royal College Street about eight years ago and the changes made to the adjacent sections of St Pancras Way made only at the end of last year.

Changes to the layout of the junction of Baynes Street and St Pancras Way – under the railway bridges – seem to happen once a decade or more.

The plans for changes to Baynes Street must be shelved. The consultation was flawed, the timing inappropriate, the work itself unnecessary, and the cost too much at this time of emergency.

LESTER MAY
Reachview Close, NW1