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The privatisation of a piece of Shoreditch gets Trevor Parsons into a bake
On my usual cut-through to the Brick Lane beigel shop one peckish night, I encountered a huge steel gate closing off Union Walk under the old railway viaduct (A-Z page 142, 1E). Ah, I thought, a temporary closure while they're doing some work for the East London Line Extension.
Three months later, it's still there, so I phone Hackney Council's Traffic Section. "That's right", our top road planner tells me, "it made no sense to the network, and the landowner asked for the closure, so we put up notices, had no objections, and issued the order. It's final."
It's not the end of the world, but for a developer's convenience, we lose another small piece of public space and access. We need a cityscape that's permeable for walking and cycling, not one that's progressively more and more canalised. If it made no sense, why did the Victorian railway builders spend money on the arch when they built the viaduct?
Seems I keep missing these famous planning notices, or maybe they just keep blowing away. I'd prefer to be able to browse them on the Council's website, really, but for the moment I'll be reading every one I pass.
Too bad about the permanent (?) detour in my beigel run.
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Robert Ket speaks out on land enclosure
The present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable and slavish, holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and pleasure of the lord. For as soon as any man offend any of these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust from all his goods. How long shall we suffer so great oppression to go unrevenged? The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away. The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out. Shall they, as they have brought hedges about common pastures, enclose with their intolerable lusts also all the commodities and pleasures of this life, which Nature, the parent of us all, would have common, and bringeth forth every day, for us, as well as for them? We see that things have now come to extremities, and we will prove the extremity. We will rend down hedges, fill up ditches, and make a way for every man into the common pasture. Finally, we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. Robert Ket was the leader of the Norfolk Rising of 1549. Read all about it at The Land Is Ours website. |
