Safety would mean reducing visitors to sports centre

• SUE Vincent, Cabinet Member for Environment & Planning, in her letter about Dalby Street, (Safe and secure use of sports centre is priority, June 30) makes a brave attempt to address some of the concerns reported in your columns.

However, she must take into account these factors which cannot be reconciled:

• The new road, turning circle and junction at Prince of Wales Road cannot be made safe.

• The paramount objective, eloquently defined in the legal agreement, cannot be fulfilled. It reads: “The overriding objective underpinning this agreement (which both parties shall have regard to and give effect to carrying out and enforcing the obligations of this agreement and the plans/briefs incorporated herein) such objective being the absolute requirement to safeguard secure and guarantee public amenity and safe free marshaled properly maintained and commodious access for the public at large to and from the leisure centre (either in its current built form or in any later rebuilt form which has been granted planning permission) and specifically over the pedestrian access way and permanent access way”.

• The most that can be achieved is to reduce the dangers on the new road and junction. That means the maximum number of marshals and a reduction in the numbers visiting the sports centre. 

The first makes the flats unsellable. 

The second is hardly consistent with the paramount objective.

Something that needs serious thought now. 

If this seven-storey block of flats is built and the access requirements are then found to be unworkable or the flats unsellable or both, what happens? 

Anyone allowing it to be built at this point is behaving as if the council would and could require it to be demolished. That seems a trifle unlikely

The thanks Cllr Vincent gives to neighbours, who have kept the council informed about what she rightly describes as the shoddy approach of the building contractors, are well deserved but surely the council should not have to rely upon the big society to ensure safety. 

Alerted by local people, Camden officers ordered the contractors to stop work. 

Those officers then visited Dalby Street and looked on seemingly powerless as the contractors brazenly ignored them.

NICK HARDING
St Ann’s Gardens, NW5

No space!

• THE June 30 letter from Sue Vincent, Cabinet Member for Environment & Planning responds to some of the many letters you have received about the Dalby Street, Talacre development. 

While her aspirations sound fine, they are impossible to translate into practice. 

Two results are sought – safety and no loss of amenity. The problem to which there is no solution is that there is inadequate space and no way of making more space available. 

The junction of the new access road is 2.7metres from the Prince of Wales Road bridge. It is not possible to put the junction further from the bridge – that is where the block of flats sits. 

Likewise you can’t widen the road as it is squeezed between the flats and the fence which marks the eastern boundary of the site. 

There has to be a width restriction because large vehicles can’t pass each other. Furthermore, there is only one space at the sports centre building and that is only available to deliveries, scheduled in advance at half hourly intervals up to 2pm (no deliveries permitted later) and available to one minibus at a time from 2pm.

No amount of juggling or prayer can produce more space. 

It simply doesn’t exist. There isn’t even space for the marshals who are at the sports centre end of the road to have a chair, table, CCTV monitor and other facilities necessary to carry out their work. 

The council was asked two years ago about that and no reply was received. When asked again, after the developer had restarted work in April this year, the answer was that the developer had been asked and Camden was waiting to hear.

JESSICA THOMAS
Coleridge Road, N12 

Published: 14 July, 2011