Residents Fight Congestion Blight

I attended the first anniversary Annual General Meeting of the Cambridge Grove and Leamore Street Residents Association last Saturday morning. Neighbours came together to form this association last year after H&F Council’s planning committee granted a highly controversial planning permission to a property developer in Cambridge Grove.

One problem that they have been trying to get their Council to resolve is the on-going congestion caused by wide vehicles regularly getting stuck in their narrow streets. This problem is set to get worse as H&F Council’s traffic officials have admitted that there will be an extra 44 lorries servicing the NCP Armadillo once it is built at the bottom of Hammersmith Grove. There will clearly be many more lorries entering the neighbourhood than that while the building is being constructed. But, if you also add in the addition increase of wide vehicles coming in to service the building of the new Town Hall offices in King Street, then add the extra lorries servicing the possible building of over 70 apartments on Glenthorne Road, plus the extra lorries supplying the proposed new Notting Hill Housing Trust office building (also on Hammersmith Grove), then the traffic situation looks like it will become chaotic.

During the meeting, residents told me that many lorries currently become stuck in their narrow streets with a regular frequency - as depicted in the photos. This causes traffic to jam up King Street and onto the Hammersmith Broadway roundabout, producing a much wider detrimental effect down the Fulham Palace Road and across the Hammersmith area. I have contacted a senior official with the expectation that H&F Council is obliged to do something about this. I will let you know what they do.

Meanwhile, the residents battle on. They’re also addressing issues around another major property development in their area, trying to get H&F Council to maintain the Cambridge Grove historic wall and railing (despite the £1,633,000.00 cut to the Council’s highways budget) and are negotiating with a local nightclub to change the ugly building colour.