Good news on pavements

Great news for residents of Belsize Park Gardens - the pavements have now been almost completely redone. This was so overdue. We'd been calling for repair work for more than a year. I know of one elderly woman who couldn't go out in her wheelchair because the pavements were so cracked up. The one person that would push her to the shops could no longer navigate the holes. The photo on the left should remind you just how bad it was.

Then there's the tremendous victory won against the company whose armoured van used to drive on to the pavement outside the HSBC in Belsize Grove. The vehicle was so heavy that it regularly broke up the paving stones and Camden council tax payers were left with the bill.
A Highways Dept officer and I went to see the manager of the HSBC to remonstrate. He gave us various contact details so we could fire off warning letters. But the real breakthrough came when someone from the Council caught the armoured van on camera and was then able to send a bill for the repair work. The same Council employee also installed some posts and a bench to prevent vehicles accessing the pavement again. All in all an impressive piece of work.

Going Underground

The things I do for my electorate! That's me (fourth from the left) preparing to go into the newly built tunnels under Kings Cross. This particular tunnel is for the Thameslink trains which will in future go right under St Pancras making it easier to change on to the Eurostar and other domestic services. The tour also took in St Pancras and gave me a much better of sense of what the site will look like after the construction is finished. It will be amazing, and a definite improvement on what was there before, but I still think a lot more could have been done, and could still be done, to make the site more environmentally friendly. Just one more challenge for the next four years!

We need to send more children to school by bike

I strongly believe we should be sending more children to school by bicycle, both for the environmental and health benefits. We should also be promoting responsible cycling as we do responsible driving or responsible drinking. Well trained cyclists are perfectly able to cycle slowly when the occasion demands. That's why I took part in a protest of school teachers, parents, children and Councillors to publicise the fact that it is virtually impossible to cycle across Hampstead Heath and those that try are liable to be fined. This is not about displacing pedestrians - it's about sharing some paths for the benefit of all, but especially it's about getting more schoolchildren to school on bikes rather than by car. This autumn there will be a major consultation on how we use the Heath and I certainly hope we'll find a way to share the footpaths between pedestrians and cyclists better than we do today.