| Topic: | Re:Ealing's '20-minute neighbourhood' - the truth | |
| Posted by: | Simon Hayes | |
| Date/Time: | 01/03/25 14:23:00 |
| Oh Dominik, you have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Read the council document and it all seems lovely. Indeed, most areas had those things locally accessible. Well used, too. And yet…. ….what is the council doing? Not building affordable homes, for a start. Encouraging overdevelopment of very expensive and often unoccupied apartment blocks. Closing children’s centres with little consultation. Creating supposed shopping areas that are ghost towns (Dickens Yard) or destroying long-established and thriving hubs with insane planning decisions (West Ealing) or exorbitant rates and rents (Ealing Broadway) Ripping up well used public parks for vanity projects such as those at Gunnersbury and Lammas. The model, and it is just that, assumes that people live slap bang in the middle of these wondrous neighbourhoods, when most clearly do not. And if you think that most businesses can be sustained by local custom alone, you are gravely mistaken. Clearly not the case. Pop into any business and they’ll tell you that passing trade is just as important. And then you get the things the council can’t control, including GP recruitment and retention, the impact of Westminster policies on business and simple personal reference of the individual. And cycling shouldn’t even be included in this. Walking should be the metric for personal mobility. You might want to ask your Polish relatives if centralised planning was a huge success during the Soviet era. |