Background

One Dulwich began as a group of residents living in the area most affected by Southwark Council’s “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich” consultation. Just 40 of us got together in April 2020. We were quickly joined by local traders and shopkeepers. There are now more than 1800 of us from roads across Dulwich, with new supporters joining daily.

As primary stakeholders, we support the Council’s objectives. We support initiatives to reduce pollution and traffic volumes, discourage through traffic on residential roads, make our streets safer and healthier, and encourage walking and cycling.

However, we do not agree with the solutions the Council has put forward so far.

One Dulwich campaigns for area-wide timed restrictions after consultation with the local community on hours of restriction, access, and location of entry/exit points. We believe this is a pragmatic, compromise solution that most people can support.

In the sections below, we summarise the timeline of events that led to the formation of One Dulwich; our interactions to date with the local council; our campaign for greater accountability and transparency from the Council; and our demand that the Council listens to the local community and finds a way forward that is inclusive, democratic, and fair to all sections of society.

How One Dulwich Began

The current experimental “Streetspace” closures were introduced in June 2020 in response to Government guidelines on social distancing and active travel. But they are very similar to proposals put forward by Southwark Council in Phase 3 of “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich” - just low-budget and more restrictive. The thinking is the same.

Phase 3 of “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich” was introduced at the end of January 2020. A complex set of interlinking proposals with different options and variables, some of which were modified during the consultation, it divided the community.

Take, for example, the 24/7 closure of Dulwich Village junction. This wasn’t a win-win for everybody. On the contrary, some children on some streets were obviously going to be exposed to greater levels of traffic and pollution than before. There would also be a negative impact on the most vulnerable members of the Dulwich community. In the absence of adequate public transport between East and West Dulwich, many of our elderly and less able neighbours (both young and old), who depend on their cars for basic mobility, were going to find daily travel much harder.

As the consultation continued, concerns were raised that criticism might lead to the Council abandoning the idea of reform altogether. This was not what we wanted – reform was long overdue, not least because the Council’s costly reconfiguration of Dulwich Village junction in 2017 was widely believed to have made local traffic problems much worse than before.

At the same time, we were genuinely worried that ideas that seemed on the surface to be radical and transformative were not the right way forward – that they might, in fact, set up new problems and behaviours that would make many of our streets across the area less, rather than more, healthy.

The Formation of One Dulwich

In April 2020, as Phase 3 of “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich” drew to a close, a group of residents got together, anxious to find answers to the many different questions that had come up during the consultation.

Was it really true that traffic through Dulwich Village junction had risen by 47%? Were there really 13,000 schoolchildren travelling through Dulwich Village every day? Who were the people in Phase 2 (‘What you have told us so far’) who had asked for the radical interventions in Phase 3? If cameras and timed restrictions were already being considered for either end of Townley Road, and the junction of Court Lane and Lordship Lane, why couldn’t they be used at other junctions, too?

By now, the UK was in lockdown. We thought it was possible that “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich” would be paused. But we were told that the process continued, following the timetable on the website. This meant that modelling of the Phase 3 proposals would happen in the summer of 2020 (Phase 4), with final proposals presented in the autumn of 2020 (Phase 5).

Meanwhile, our research into the statistics used during the Phase 3 consultation was turning up some very odd results. The 47% figure seemed to come from a comparison of traffic counts on Dulwich Village between September 2017 and September 2018. We thought back and remembered that September 2017 was when Dulwich Village junction was being reconfigured, creating traffic queues so long that most people were taking alternative routes. This meant that the low baseline figure from 2017 was an anomaly, a one-off result. If you compared the traffic counts in 2018 to 2015, or to 2016, the figures had, in fact, very slightly decreased.

As for the schoolchildren, the 13,000 figure came from adding up all the pupils at all the schools (including nursery schools) in an area stretching from Herne Hill to Crystal Palace.

It then turned out that the residents in Phase 2 were 217 respondents to an online survey who might have been locals, but the analysis of the data had never been done, and officers were now “too busy”. So it wasn’t really possible to say whether they were residents or not. Of the 217 total, an even smaller number - only 122 people - had voted for closures.

All of this contributed to an impression of a consultation built on flaky facts.

Luckily, we had been told several times that the ideas in Phase 3 were only draft proposals. So we felt there was still time, while we waited for the official results of the consultation, to ask whether the Council would consider an idea that seemed to have been dismissed too quickly during the public meetings in February and March – that is, timed restrictions to through traffic at peak hours rather than permanent closures.

We have since discovered that a completely separate group of more than 50 residents had put forward the idea of timed restrictions in February, but it was to be a few weeks before this piece of the jigsaw fell into place.

Talking to Southwark Council

On 27 April, we wrote to our councillors Margy Newens and Richard Leeming, copying in the cabinet member Richard Livingstone and our MP Helen Hayes, with a proposal signed by 40 residents from Area B (please refer to the Research Section of this website). Many of the original 40 signatories were members of residents’ associations. But there had been major divisions of opinion within RAs, so we stressed to everyone who contacted us that this was an initiative put forward by individual residents.

It quickly became clear that our councillors weren’t keen on our proposal. Eventually on 14 May we had a virtual meeting with them, and they asked us to go away and research how an area-wide scheme of timed restrictions could work, and how much it would cost.

We did our homework and discovered that timed restrictions are quite a common way of controlling traffic, and are mentioned as an appropriate solution in TfL’s Liveable Neighbourhoods for exactly our kind of area, with residential streets and shops.

Our lack of technical knowledge held us back. We are not highways engineers, so had no expertise in cameras, ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition), or residents’ permits. But from what we read, the main component of many schemes (School Streets, city-centre restricted traffic zones, etc) is the use of signs, with spot checks to catch non-permit holders – so not necessarily an expensive proposition, and certainly easy to trial.

Meanwhile, the number of our supporters continued to rise.

On 26 May, we rang Clement Agyei-Frempong, the Southwark officer who was the lead designer of “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich”, and asked if we could have his advice on what we had researched so far to see whether our ideas were feasible.

Clement gave us some interesting news. He told us that all TfL projects, including “Our Healthy Streets Dulwich”, had been put on hold because of TfL’s financial problems. He said there was some funding from the Covid-19 Post Lockdown Highways Schemes, but that Southwark was looking only for quick, easy and cheap solutions to promote social distancing and active travel (walking and cycling).

Because we believed a trial of timed restrictions could be exactly that – quick, easy and cheap – we came up with an outline discussion document (see the Research Section of this website) and sent this to Clement, copying in our councillors, on 28 May.

We had no response to this document. This was completely understandable in times of crisis when Clement and his fellow officers were busy dealing with emergencies all over the borough. At the same time, it was odd that – even though there had been no further discussion about any of the possibilities – our councillors said that our ideas had problems and wouldn’t work.

Road Closures across Dulwich

On 5 June, we found that there was a proposal to close Dulwich Village junction, using an Experimental Traffic Order, under section 9 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, in the Post Covid-19 Highways Schemes.

At the same time, our councillors released just one statistic from the Phase 3 consultation, which was that 55% of respondents agreed with the closure of Dulwich Village junction and 37% disagreed. But, as before with Phase 2, they wouldn’t release any detail about this, specifically what proportion of that 55% were local residents from Area A, Area B and Area C. Because it was such a slim majority, we felt that level of detail was very important. (Later they said that 1,102 people supported the closure of the junction, of whom 705 were residents of Areas A, B and C, but didn’t provide a breakdown by area or age.)

One Dulwich wrote to Councillor Richard Livingstone – as many of you will have done, too – to point out the ways in which the aims of the experimental order would not be met by what was being proposed. Please see the text in full in the Research Section of this website.

At the end of June, both Dulwich Village junction and Melbourne Grove were closed.

Experimental Traffic Orders are temporary, and only last for a maximum of eighteen months. But from what we have read, it seems that, generally, Experimental Traffic Orders are only made for interventions that are likely to become permanent.

A meeting with Council officers

On 13 August, we finally had a meeting with Clement Agyei-Frempong, one of his Highways colleagues, and Dulwich Village ward councillor Margy Newens, to discuss our proposal for a trial of timed restrictions at Dulwich Village junction. We reiterated out long-held position that we believed the best solution would be area-wide timed restrictions across Dulwich - a holistic solution. Clement suggested a further meeting at some point in October (which didn’t take place).

Since then, the Phase 2 proposals have gone in, including further experimental closures in and around Melbourne Grove, and timed closures operated by cameras (with access only for buses, taxis and emergency vehicles) on several roads around Dulwich Village junction. Again, these measures are divisive rather than inclusive, and are causing considerable anxiety and distress.

One Dulwich continues to explore all ways of persuading the Council to consider a fairer way forward. We have met several times with the new cabinet decision-maker, Councillor Catherine Rose, and deputy cabinet member for Low Traffic Southwark, Councillor Radha Burgess. For more information, please see the ‘News’ section of our website. Registered supporters (www.onedulwich.uk/get-involved) receive regular updates, usually every week.

The Need for a Proper, Empirically Grounded, Consultation Process

None of the new “Streetspace” measures have been arrived at through due and proper consultation with the residents and shopkeepers most affected. None of the measures have been modelled. There has been some monitoring of traffic, but no monitoring of air quality, which makes it hard to understand how the effects of any of the Experimental Traffic Orders can be judged when the scheme is reviewed.

Although experimental, the measures are already having adverse affects on the lives of many local people at a time when the pandemic has placed severe strain on families’ health and economic security.

We need Southwark Council to listen to us. We are committed to healthier streets for all. But we want this objective to be achieved inclusively, transparently and democratically.