Around 1,000 people took part in the Dulwich Alliance’s demonstration on Saturday 16 October, converging on to the main junction in the centre of Dulwich Village at 12 noon.
You can see coverage of the protest on this BBC London News item here and also in Southwark News. Clips of the speeches – including one by clean air campaigner David Smith, better known to his many Twitter followers as @LittleNinjaUK – will be uploaded here shortly.
The protest centred on Southwark Council’s refusal to remove the Dulwich LTNs, despite the fact that more than two out of three people living and working in Dulwich rejected them in the Council’s recent public consultation.
Protestors came from a wide area, as displacement traffic caused by the road closures has created traffic pollution and congestion as far afield as Lambeth in the West, Forest Hill and Sydenham to the south, Camberwell to the north and Peckham in the east. People of all ages took part, both young families and cyclists, as well as older people – including those with disabilities – who have been particularly badly affected by the road closures.
Banners called on Southwark to “Return our roads to residents and retailers” as well as “Start again. Get it right”, “Cyclists against 24/7 closures”, “Southwark LTNs Ideological insanity”, “Displacing pollution is not a solution”, and “Why doesn’t Southwark care about carers?”
The protest came a day after Southwark Council refused to call in the LTNs following a request by Liberal Democrat councillors on the Overview and Scrutiny Committee. The council have not yet published their reasons.
Speaking at the demonstration, Clive Rates, chair of the Dulwich Village, College Road and Woodyard Lane Residents’ Association, said: “These road closures have dislocated people’s lives and forced them to make longer journeys and generate ever more emissions. This makes climate change worse, not better. We are here to demand that Southwark remove these road closures and come up with something that actually works.
“We formed the Dulwich Alliance to support each other and unite against what has been done to us and to others. What we have in common, all of us protesting today, is that we care about more than what happens outside our front doors. We care about the wider community. They promised us ‘traffic evaporation’ – it never happened. The only thing that has evaporated around here is support for Southwark Council.”
The closures have devastated local trade. Richard Aldwinckle, who spoke on behalf of shops and businesses in the area, highlighted that over 95% of traders say the LTNs are threatening their future, with large numbers of former customers no longer coming to Dulwich. “Some shops have closed, several have had to make redundancies and cancel apprenticeships, passing trade has gone right down, fresh deliveries are held up, and essential services like medical supplies and food shops are badly affected,” Richard said. “More businesses will close soon unless the closures are removed.”
Marianne Kavanagh, a co-founder of One Dulwich, read out the stories of four local people and the impact the road closures have had on their lives. The first was from the mother of two young children living on East Dulwich Grove, a road where 3,000 schoolchildren go to school but which is now so congested that it’s dangerous for both pedestrians and cyclists.
She then spoke the words of an 83-year-old car-dependent widow with arthritis who struggles to reach her GP in West Dulwich and health clinic in Streatham because of the volume of traffic on Lordship Lane and the South Circular; a Dulwich resident who is the carer for her mother in Herne Hill and can’t visit her at key times of the day; and finally young parents on Croxted Road, now so full of displaced traffic that they can’t open their windows because of the effects of air pollution on their baby.
Also speaking at the event was clean air campaigner David Smith (@LittleNinjaUK), who explained the social and environmental injustice of pushing more traffic on to already congested main roads and how stop-start traffic creates more pollution and causes more deaths among the less well-off and BAME communities who live on them.