Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Stop Haringey Council’s nature-wrecking bridge design on the Parkland Walk-please sign and share petition!!
Tags for Forum Posts: parkland walk, trees
- Attachments:
-
-
STANHOPEROADFEB.pdf, 651 KB -
dsc05879.jpg, 72 KB
-
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Elizabeth M on
-
That's OK I know the Parkland Walk extremely well and the Bugaloo entrance is right the Highgate end of the Walk. Even so even if it wasn't frankly a few trees should not be dictating whether disabled people get frequent access and egress points to the Walk. To rebuild the bridge without providing that access would be a disgrace. If there was a viable other ramp design no doubt your organisation and the FOPW will have prepared costed detailed plans to share to avoid the additional cost to the Council.
-
Permalink Reply by Giovanna iozzi on
-
Unfortunately we are unable to provide a costed alternative as we don’t have the expertise or the money to put that together. We are asking the council to do that - and believe they should have done that in the first place as they should have been trying harder to minimize loss of habitat and trees. They do have a difficult balance to strike, but the contractor they hired to design the bridge was not a conservation specialist and as such the plans are not as sympathetic to the fact it’s a nature reserve as they deserve to be. We also believe the bridge design itself could be far more ecologically friendly and incorporate measures to enhance biodiversity, which at present it doesn’t do at all.
-
Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
-
I’ve been reading the comments both here and submitted to the planning application. Parkland Walk is a wonderful asset for people living in Haringey but my feeling is that it should be an asset that all can enjoy. Many of the comments demand that ramped access is provided elsewhere but that simply won’t happen. The renewal of the bridge is probably the only chance of getting some kind of equal access.
-
-
Not equal for the trees! Stanhope is really not a major access route for the PW, it's served by one small hopper bus and is a narrow road. I don't think everyone will be crowding to get on the PW there. We just want a better design that keeps the trees, that should be possible.
There are at least 3 other much less destructive places to build a ramp. It is really not the only chance to get equal access....Haringey want to rebuild many of the bridges. This is a policy of creeping urbanisation of a nature reserve honestly, the PW will end up looking very different in a few years time...the climate crisis is really the biggest thing we face but if we continue to chop trees down at the rate Haringey is doing..since 2008 they've felled almost 3000 mature street trees, this is not a green council by any stretch of the imagination.
But I realise we can't persuade everyone.
-
-
I accept everything you say about the importance of Parkland Walk but the question remains - who is it for. If it isn’t for everyone the only sure way to preserve it is to close it off and allow it to rewiild. It feels like a lot of the comments are “it’s fine for me so that’s ok”
-
-
Of course I agree the parkland walk is for everyone. I have never thought differently and not sure where this idea has come from. I cycle, my fellow campaigner's dad is an amputee and uses a wheelchair, we are well aware of the inclusivity the PW should represent.
But I would also say that trees also need rights as well as humans and some of the trees at Stanhope are decades older than me - and a more sympathetic (smaller) ramp design could be drawn up, that is entirely conceivable. There is a cottage right by this ramp which will now be overlooked and badly affected by the new design - there will be walls and bollards and tons of concrete, it will not look like the entrance to a nature reserve at all anymore. Stanhope is already a busy road, although narrow, it will be even busier now they're raising the height.
The climate crisis should be making councils and central government really change the way they approach structures and nature, but sadly most of the time structures win. And that ultimately will not be good for any of us.
-
-
Why would it be busier just because the bridge is higher? It’s not a route that I can imagine any high sided vehicle taking by choice and there are no restrictions on HGVs under the height limit (which the great majority are) anyway.
As for where I got the idea that some people don’t care about giving access - it came from reading some of the comments on the planning application. As someone else said on this thread, if improved access doesn’t happened during the course of the bridge works it simply will not happen elsewhere.
Finally many properties are already overlooked from Parkland Walk.
-
-
Its not a major access point because of the rubbish access! And after living here for decades I know that proper access has only ever come with building projects and I don't see why people should wait for another bridge to reach the point of no return.
-
Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
-
Could you point me to where the headroom of the new bridge is to be found?
-
-
Dick, "The bridge clearance will be 5.7m in accordance with the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB) for footbridges" - Page 12 of the Design and Access Statement [link here]. Same principle as the new Wightman Rd bridge capable of carrying 44 tonnes though the road remains a 7.5 t limit.
[From observation when using the northbound Blackwall Tunnel (height limit 4.0m vs 4.49m at Stanhope Road), plenty of HGVs will already fit under the current bridge, so it's a bit of a sideshow in my view]. There's no weight limit on Stanhope Road.
The very narrow junction with Hornsey Lane mentioned by Don below is more of an effective restriction on large vehicles - even the tiddler W5 bus has problems.
-
-
Thank you Gordon. That saved me a lot of time. I quite agree that few HGVs would be prevented by the present headroom of 4.49m - indeed, I think TFL double deck buses would pass under this bridge (although uncomfortably close). In any event, the heaviest vehicles are not usually particularly tall. Increasing the headroom to 5.7m (that's an increase of four feet in old money) would have an undesirable consequence for the path over the bridge as this too would have to be raised by a similar amount. Presumably this means a long ramp on either side carrying the footpath up and over Stanhope Road. This seems a pretty good reason for opposing the increase in headroom. I can't see a good reason for this bridge to have to comply with this aspect of the "Design Manual".
Your reference to the Wightman Road bridge is pertinent for the same reason. When I asked at the time why that bridge had to be capable of bearing vehicles up to 44 tonnes (actually I think it was 40 at that time) some official trotted out the answer that EU law required it. This was, as usual, incorrect. EU law simply said that any road that the UK government decided should be part of the UK's primary Route Network (ie mainly the motorways and some trunk roads) should be capable of carrying vehicles up that maximum weight. There was never any possibility that Wightman Road would be so named and, if it was, not only the bridges would need to comply but every other part of it. The bridge wouldn't be the problem but the feeble carrying capacity of the carriageway certainly would be. I dare say that Stanhope Road would suffer immensely if really heavy vehicles used it often and if that started to happen, it would have to be stopped in short order before all the sewers collapsed.
-
-
Giovanna — Is the intention really to allow HGVs along the road? Stanhope is very narrow and steep at the southern end, as is Hornsey Lane, and turning the corner from the former to the latter is also likely to be very difficult; the Shepherds Hill junction is almost as bad. Traffic on Stanhope will no doubt increase a lot once Northwood is closed to vehicles, but the bridge there is so narrow and low it already couldn’t be an HGV route. I’m not suggesting this invalidates your comments, just curious as to why there might be a plan to give HGVs access.
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- Next ›
© 2024 Created by Hugh.
Powered by
