Looking ahead to 2025!
Happy New Year fellow Camdeners!
We hope you had a wonderful festive season and the bump into regular life this week didn’t hit you too hard (it was difficult to get out of bed yesterday – we are not shy to admit!)
We have a number of things to look forward to in 2025, including the CRA’s annual AGM on January 27th and our second Progressive Supper on March 1st (posts to follow).
Firstly, we want to make sure that the community is aware of the upcoming meetings to discuss the Liveable Neighbourhood organised by Walcot councillors Oli Henman and John Leach. The full text of the announcement is below (cut & pasted from the email from John Leach a few days ago).
In a nutshell, there will be four open meetings in January (7th and 9th) and February (3rd and 10th) for residents to participate in discussions about the council’s plans for a Liveable Neighbourhood for Walcot. (Details on how to book your place below)
The CRA is not involved in organising these meetings (and nor are we being consulted about the design of the LN) but we feel strongly that every resident in Camden should have an opportunity to have their views heard by the appropriate people – these meetings are a great chance to do that! So we want to spread the word.
Judging from responses to LNs in other neighbourhoods in Bath, changes like these can be contentious and there tend to be a number of differing views. This is natural and an indicator that we live in a place where people feel confident to express their opinions. We have heard already from a few of you about the proposed scheme and while we LOVE to hear from residents (keep those emails coming!), we want to make sure that everyone is aware that the CRA has no official role to play in the design of the scheme and therefore no way to pass on your views.
For now, we think the best thing to do is to 1) attend one of the Councillor’s meetings (or send a friend as your proxy) and 2) when the council publish their official online feedback form, to make sure you fill that in as well (NB we assume this will happen as this was the process for the other LNs in Bath but no link has been published yet).
We hope to see you all on January 27th for our AGM where we will be recapping our successful 2024 and discussing plans for 2025! This year we will be gathering at the Claremont and it should be a lovely evening! Come along!!
Until then,
Happy New Year and all the best from us on the CRA Committee
COUNCILLORS ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW:
Walcot Liveable Neighbourhood
Book your place at one of the Open Meetings being set up by Walcot’s councillors to discuss this important initiative.
For several years now, one of the biggest issues that keeps coming up on the doorstep is high volumes of through-traffic in our area. As you may have seen, B&NES was awarded funding in September 2024 to proceed with the design of a Liveable Neighbourhood (LN) for Walcot. The principal goal of this LN is to deal with the rush-hour through-traffic that cuts through Camden Road and Eastbourne Avenue and makes our whole area increasingly polluted and dangerous for pedestrians and local residents. It aims to benefit a large number of residents living in the Camden Road, Eastbourne Avenue, Snow Hill and Fairfield Park neighbourhoods.
With the funding secured, the design process has now started and is expected to run until at least the end of February 2025. The design will most likely be based on a ‘bus gate’ somewhere along the Camden Road / Eastbourne Avenue stretch of road that will block rush-hour through-traffic and push it back onto the main roads, such as London Road, that were designed to carry it. The bus gate will be supported by a variety of other interventions (no turn signs, no entry signs, one-way signs, etc.) that will prevent the through-traffic finding an easy alternative residential route that circumvents the bus gate. We do not want simply to move the problem from one set of unsuitable residential roads to another.
In the first stage of the design process, now underway, potential locations for the bus gate will be identified and the details of how the gate might work (the hours of restriction; the supporting interventions needed; etc.) will be compiled. Each viable location will be assessed for its impact on local traffic and how it would affect local residents getting to local community centres such as the GP surgery, schools and shops. The design process will end with one location being selected and the design being fleshed out in full.
We, as Walcot’s councillors, have been given assurances by Kevin Guy, the Leader of the Council, that we will be able to provide input into the design process as it progresses.
It is imperative that this process comes up with a design that not only addresses the through-traffic problem but does so with the minimum of disruption to local traffic. To this end, we will be holding four open “Town Hall” meetings for Walcot residents. The aim is to ensure that everyone in those areas affected directly by this LN can get to see and discuss the main design options being considered.
We will present the history of this LN initiative, the goal of this LN, the constraints it has to fit within and the design options in play as we understand them. This will be followed by open discussion and Q&A that will allow each resident to work out how the designs might impact them. Residents will be able to tell us their views and we will feed our compilation of those views into the design process. We will also ensure residents know how to provide their input into the formal consultation that will follow further on down the line.
We have seen a lot of interest in the plans for this LN and a growing amount of misinformation about the design and design process, so we expect these open meetings to be well attended. To accommodate everyone who might want to come, we will hold the meetings at the Main Stage in Burdall’s Yard. As each meeting will have limited seating capacity, the meetings will be ticketed to ensure everyone can get in. They will be free to attend.
The meetings are:
18:30 – 20:30 at Burdall’s Yard on:
Tuesday 7th January 2025,
Thursday 9th January 2025,
Monday 3rd February 2025, and
Monday 10th February 2025.
Each meeting will be the same so interested residents need come to only one of them.
Please go to:
or
to book a ticket for the date you prefer.
At the time of writing, there are still a small number of tickets available for the January meetings. The February meetings are new dates and this is the first announcement for those.
Thank you for your interest in this important initiative. Please share this announcement with your neighbours as we want to make sure as many Walcot residents as might be interested hear about these meetings and have a chance to attend.
Your local councillors
John Leach and Oli Henman
B&NES councillors for the ward of Walcot
Dear Johanna and Camden Residents Association
Thank you for sending through this information – it’s so important that we get a say in what the Council propose to do. I live in Camden Crescent and am against this LTN – any plan that removes traffic from one area and shoves it into ever more congested neighbouring roads – is madness and nonsense. An LTN is not largely popular, viable, necessary or wanted. It. will effectively divide Larkhall and Camden and this will be a disaster for local Larkhall shops and a nightmare for those of us who live here and will be forced to take ever more circuitous routes to get from A to B. It is already very difficult to get trades to come and do work here – and when they do they face punitive fines – if we add in an LTN – Camden will be a no-go area for trades. Until the arrival of clean / hydrogen vehicles or the day we all learn to fly, we need to allow traffic movement – not make it static – and these traffic calming measures won’t reduce traffic or pollution – they will just move it elsewhere. People can’t effectively cycle on Bath’s hills, especially older people and our roads are too narrow for cars and bike lanes. We manage to live very well around the Georgian demographics we inherited and our city still can do this – but LTN and road closures are not the solution. Our beautiful city is now full of ugly bollards and street furniture and we now live in a very over-regulated city. We no longer have any useful industry in Bath and so we rely on tourism and that industry could be killed off by the traffic jams and no-go zones. Finally, I would like to highlight the difficulties that any LTN will cause our wonderful Fairfield Park Health Centre. Dr Lashbrook has tried hard to highlight the nonsense and problems an LTN will cause his patients, but it is unlikely anyone is listening.
I hope my thoughts resonate with some of you. Best wishes for a more ‘sensible’ New Year….