The aim of the scheme was to eliminate a longstanding gyratory system, cut back using personal motor autos, enhance air high quality and make the world extra nice for residents and customers. The next yr, a monitoring report by consultants Aecom stated there had certainly been reductions in visitors on Tottenham Court docket Street and streets to its east, a rise in biking and fewer fumes.
However have these successes had a draw back? There’s a view that taking personal motor autos out of Tottenham Court docket Street has merely diverted it on to some others. As Fitzrovia Information famous on the time of the Aecom report’s look, its examine space excluded Maple Avenue, a part of a patch to the west of Tottenham Court docket Street that one native individual wryly describes as having develop into a “excessive visitors neighbourhood”.
Then there may be the vacancy. Arguments for slicing visitors on streets with a retail operate, which Tottenham Court docket Street has lengthy had, sometimes preserve that decreasing the noise and emissions of motor automobiles ends in extra individuals being drawn to their retailers and cafés, the pavements bustling with better life than earlier than.
However what if as an alternative the area begins feeling, a minimum of at instances, a bit eerie? A bit abandoned? What if its new tranquility makes it extra conducive to pitching a tent and fashioning a makeshift house, maybe becoming a member of others already there and attracting extra, accumulating detritus and possessions?
Abruptly, you’ve got a pop-up settlement: a group of types, with a lifestyle, appetites and desires. It may represent a market, one which drug-dealers compete to serve. A few of its members are helpless and innocent. Others have interaction in panhandling, public nuisance and petty crime. Abruptly, that imaginative and prescient of al fresco vibrancy begins to be compromised by a sadder, bleaker, extra uneasy actuality.
As soon as a tent cluster is established, what ought to be finished about it? Camden realized the laborious method that sympathy for the plight of tough sleepers can punish those that transfer them on. A furore adopted the council’s involvement in clearing the road exterior UCLH, the place some had been residing for a lot of months. Social media footage unfold and heart-rending tales had been instructed. An request for forgiveness was extracted. Sadiq Khan declared himself “appalled“.
In Could, Camden was once more criticised for eradicating tough sleepers from the doorstep of its personal City Corridor. However might it actually be anticipated to do nothing? If not, what was the appropriate option to proceed? The council has reviewed its tough sleeper method and suggestions have been made, however this downside gained’t be simply solved, as Sunday night time’s incident confirmed. It presents troublesome dilemmas: do nothing on and round Tottenham Court docket Street and a “habitable” road superb begins resembling a forbidding precinct; tolerate and repair, and also you may nearly be founding a shanty city.
There are many opinion about Camden’s insurance policies for streets, usually clashing and firmly held. Some imagine there’s a causal hyperlink between the elimination of visitors from Tottenham Court docket Street and the perpetuation, maybe the acceleration, of a basic state of decline. The proposition is contested and troublesome to show. However as Metropolis Corridor places its thoughts to pedestrianising Oxford Avenue simply not far away, it shouldn’t be shortly dismissed.
