Further meeting on BSF

On Tuesday evening, we held a second meeting with the Building Schools for the Future team at City Hall to talk through the plans for St. George's and St. Augustine's.

Following the granting of planning permission for the works to go ahead last Tuesday, it is now crucial that the team take into account the impact on local residents around both schools. We all know that major building works will inevitably affect the local community and residents living particularly closely to the sites will be affected. The important thing is to ensure that Maida Vale and those residents are affected as little as is humanely possible.

The majority of our meeting on Tuesday was taken up discussing St. George's, where the local community on Carlton Vale, in Dibdin House and particularly on Lanark Road will be quite severely affected during the works. We spent a long time going through all of the works plans in detail and challenging many of the assumptions that had been made to ensure they were water-tight.

The plans envisage a site being constructed to the south of St. George's, close to Glasgow House. Thankfully, officers at the Council have already reduced the proposed size of the building site and tried to mitigate the effects on Glasgow House residents by moving the temporary office block out of sight from their balconies.

We remain concerned about the size of the office block and the length of time the site compound will be close to Glasgow House (March 2009 - early 2011). We have asked the BSF team to look again and they have agreed to do so. In particular, we are very concerned about the proposed traffic movements and want confirmation that the planning has been done on this. Around 10 parking spaces will have to be temporarily suspended for the duration of the works to allow the delivery lorries to turn into the site. We want confidence that the lorries can fit down Lanark Road (so no more parking spaces are taken off) and also that they are limited in the times when they can deliver (to avoid gridlock and lots of children being about).

The BSF team have agreed to come back to us on each of these points.

Jan