Your polls wish-list

• IT’S not the job of Woodstock Road Association to advise you how to vote in the forthcoming general election. It’s not even up to us to suggest which box to put your cross in when it comes to the local elections on the same day. We’re not a party-political organisation so we’re not in the business of playing favourites.
What we are, though, is an association formed to help represent the interests of all residents in Woodstock Road, the immediately surrounding streets and in Stroud Green neighbourhood as a whole.
In that capacity, we recently conducted a widespread informal survey of folks living in these ’ere parts, asking them about their top five priorities. Before you decide how to vote on May 6, why not think about which candidates are likely to agree to what you’re about to read? Here are the results of our straw poll, and we think they’re pretty uncontroversial.
1. Install lifts at Finsbury Park Tube station to provide disabled access. In the not-so-far-away days of the Finsbury Park Partnership, £25million was granted to three boroughs, Haringey, Hackney and Islington, for just this kind of improvement. Why did tarting up the station façade at Station Place take precedence over helping to make ordinary people’s lives easier?
2. Establish a green space – a mini-park – at the north-eastern corner of Stroud Green Road and Upper Tollington Park, where there is now a slip road behind the southbound bus stop. A bit of grass, some park benches and a few trees, flowers and bushes would mean that Stroud Green would have a... er... Stroud Green. Funny that this idea was put forward, again under the Finsbury Park Partnership, and then withdrawn.
3. Give us back our community noticeboards. There were two of these, one opposite the post office (K Stores) and the other a bit further up Stroud Green Road, between Marquis and Lorne roads, by the phone box. When they were removed, we were told they’d be replaced. Promises, promises...
4. We haven’t got anywhere to meet as a community. We need a neighbourhood centre, or at least somewhere which has rooms that local groups can hire – at a reasonable cost – for meetings and functions.
5. Let’s have regular formal meetings between our councillors (with binding decision-making) on both sides of Stroud Green Road. We may be two boroughs, arbitrarily divided, but we’re one community. A good example of why this is so important was the closure of our Arthur Simpson Library, where people on the ‘wrong’ side of the road were excluded by Islington Council from the consultation process.
STEVE COOK
Woodstock Road Association
N4