For us, walking the dog will never be the same

Published: 2nd June, 2011

• I JUST received a leaflet through my door telling me that the road in which we park our car twice a day in order to get Choci, our disabled dog, to the nearest park (she cannot walk on hard surfaces) has been sold to a developer. 

It is no longer a public highway. 

It has been privatised!

Can you believe this? I couldn’t. 

And can you even begin to imagine what will happen when this narrow stretch of road becomes narrower still because a seven-storey block of flats is squatting on it?

All the traffic which currently uses Dalby Street to get to the sports centre – and this includes coaches full of children, delivery vans, etcetera – will be joined by the traffic created by the 55 new dwellings and a doctors’ surgery.

This chaos – dangerous to pedestrians and to the normal vehicular traffic in Prince of Wales Road – is to be policed by one or two “marshals” provided by the developer.

What a preposterous scheme. How dare Camden sell off a road that so many of us use? 

Did they, perhaps, think they could take a bite out of the park to make the scheme more viable?  

Is that why they were so against its becoming a Town Green?

But, to get back to my particular worry, what about our dog Choci?
Esther Whitby
Harmood Street, NW1