Rookery Road on Clapham Common: the re-surfacing job that time forgot...

Rookery Road cuts across the north-east corner of Clapham
Common. It gets very heavy traffic (as you can see) and yet it has
not been resurfaced in decades. Unlike all the other roads
around here. Why not?

Both Lambeth and Wandsworth Councils have shown exemplary enthusiasm when it comes to re-paving certain troubled areas of their boroughs.

Soon after the 2011 riots, the whole of the Clapham Junction area broke out into a pleasing arrangement of tastefully-variegated pastel-shaded paving blocks: the old dark grey filth-stained pitted tarmac and granite gave way to soothing garden centre chic.

Seven years on this lovely new work is already showing serious signs of decay; no material known to humankind can cope with the daily downpour of spat-out chewing gum, nor the vile stains of McDonald's toxic shakes as they dribble out from discarded polystyrene buckets.

Let alone the pollution from tens of thousands of combustion-engined vehicles passing through the junction every day.

Meanwhile, Lambeth labours away to make little bits of nice street furnishings: Clapham Old Town; Windrush Square; Stockwell Cross. Weeks and months of disruption to locals and passing traffic as gangs of workers rip up the old and carefully lay the new.

All jolly good - we suppose; if we are charitably-minded. What a splendid way to use our council tax quids.

Pity they totally fucked up the traffic flow in Clapham Old Town in the process - giving even more rat-runs to the mumsnet SUVs and off-white-van drivers, confusing cyclists with a ridiculous cycle-lane layout and sending pedestrians all round the houses to find safe crossings. Trouble with those rat-runs is drivers tend to speed up when sneaking into them, hoping they won't be spotted.

And - AND - above ALL! - what about Rookery Road? Yes that little but very important bit of road between Clapham Southside - the main A3 trunk route - and the left turn turn down to the Northside one-way system.

The deeply pot-holed surface of Rookery Road: enough to throw you off
your bike and under the wheels of a speeding SUV.or whatever.
Who will take responsibility for this death-trap?

This couple of hundred metres of road sees very heavy traffic. It is called Rookery Road because it passes under the great plane trees that still accommodate  some truly fine murders of big black bastard carrion crows.

But the surface of this road is also MURDEROUS! It's bad enough in a small car - but approach on a pushbike at any speed and you are dead. Especially if you are trying to position yourself centre road to take the north-flowing lane towards Old Town and Larkhall Rise.

Does this bit of road not fall into one or other borough's care? Who is responsible for this? Most of the other roads around there have been re-surfaced two or three times since even one bit of gravel has been replaced here.

Why?

Maybe Lambeth and Wandsworth think the crows should do it.

The death of another cyclist, this time on Lavender Hill, hits home like nothing before

A young woman cyclist has been killed near this terrible junction where Lavender Hill meets Elspeth Road: three lanes into one as drivers ignore the left and right filters and use it like a drag-race grid to be first at the next set of lights. Re-design
this junction, tame the traffic, ban the six-axle lorries, police it!

Ever 15 minutes or so on Monday, BBC Radio London's traffic news warned drivers to steer clear of the Battersea-Clapham area because of a serious accident, and that part of Lavender Hill had been closed by police for investigations.

Later that day the accident moved from traffic to mainstream news: it became clear that a cyclist had been involved in an incident with a large truck, and that the cyclist had died at the scene.

A bit later the news websites changed the word "cyclist" to "woman".

A woman had died - been killed - in an accident on Lavender Hill involving a truck leased by a company known as British Gypsum, a big supplier of plasterboard and related building products.

Early reports included quotes from a witness who'd seen the truck with a bike stuck under the front wheels, driving along, with the driver apparently not realising anything had happened, until waved down by pedestrians. According to the Evening Standard the lorry eventually pulled up about 150 yards on from the point of impact, which was close to Battersea Police Station.

So why am I writing about this horrific incident? Because I have become so aware of the danger of huge trucks being driven so fast along these roads in recent years, I have just been dreading something like this happening.

-  Because I live less than a half a mile from where this accident happened.

-  Because I am a cyclist and have cycled up and down Lavender Hill most days over the past 35 years.

-  Because I must have past the point where the 32-year old Lucia Ciccioli was killed on Monday, literally thousands of times. I passed there twice today, which is when I took these photos. 

And because on one occasion, I avoided being hit by a lorry by such a small margin that I know I will never forget that sensation of a brush with death.

It was 8 years ago, at a point just after the crossroads with Elspeth Road. In fact, within a few metres from where this poor young woman died. I was cycling west towards Clapham Junction. I pulled away from the junction, where three lanes of traffic suddenly become one. Traffic at this point is competing for position in the queues that always build up on Lavender Hill.

As I crossed the junction a big refuse truck from the company that does the bins for Wandsworth Council stormed up behind me. It wasn't merely close to me, the flange of its white painted front wheel arch touched my right arm. If I had continued on my course I would have been hit by the front wheel of that lorry.

Instead I made myself fall to the left, into a set of railings that have now, I think been removed. At the same time I rammed on the brakes, and sort of collapsed into the railings, without  any serious injury, but bruised and shaking like hell. The truck surged off into the distance, at what seemed like a speed well above the 30mph limit, and the driver clearly hadn't noticed me. I was so freaked out that I started to shout out obscenities at the top of my voice, but no cars or trucks stopped. A couple of pedestrians asked if I was OK and I realised that I was OK.

I was so lucky. A few years later I was knocled off my bike by a car in the same road, near the Queenstown Road junction, broke some bones but I survivied. I am so lucky.

No-one can really help the family and friends of this young woman, killed on her way to work at a new job on a cold south London morning. It is heart-breaking, as is every death on our hopelessly congested roads. But this one, it just got to me, and to many others, it seems.

The only thing we can try to do is to try to convert this tragedy into an energy to change things, to make such tragedies less frequent in future.

And yet, even now, after 10 years or more of efforts to make these gigantic trucks safer for other road users in heavily populated, mixed-traffic areas, these hideous incidents keep on occurring. What can we do, what can those with power do? Well, here are some ideas:

• Look at the size of these trucks, measure their speeds.
•  Check out the drivers' delivery schedules and  how they are paid. They have to get through dreadful traffic on congested streets in unreasonably short spaces of time. 
• Crack down on the firms - and they are often suppliers to the construction industries - who impose these schedules and penalties.
• Re-route heavy trucks - a vehicle this size shouldn't be on this road. And certainly not at 7.54am rush-hour time. It's absurd. What's the point of the Mayor and those powers if he never uses them?

Today (Thursday), Evening Standard journalist Rosamund Irwin writes about this tragic incident, as a fellow cyclist who also uses this street on her way to work. She's compassionate and, when it comes to trying to stop this carnage, she makes some very sensible suggestions. The Mayor Sadiq Khan's proposals to ban the most dangerous lorries from London streets is fine - but it will takes several years to implement. She wonders if this could be speeded up, perhaps by incentivising haulage companies, perhaps offering a discount on the congestion charge if they modify their trucks.

I understand her point - but it is coming form the wrong direction.  These companies are making huge profits from supplying the vast numbers of building and regeneration and transport projects in central London. We need a much tougher stance to protect the interests of all road users from these thundering, murderous vehicles. I say this as a car driver (and road-tax payer) as well as a pedestrian, cyclist and local resident, sick of the stink and the damage caused by this relentless procession of huge lorries.

What is  such a huge truck allowed on Lavender Hill anyway? Surely the parallel route along the north side of Clapham Common would allow more space and less congestion? But no, strangely, this road - the one you might think would be the logical trunk route towards the A3 at Wandsworth - is the one with traffic calming measures. Is that to do with all those grand houses and posh private schools
that line the edges of the common? There you have the space to widen a road; maybe build a bridge for pedestrians. Get these speeding monstrosities off Lavender Hill!

With a little help from Saint Boris, Battersea Park recovers slowly from its encounter with FormulaE

We have a new name for one of these huge concrete blocks, used as crash barriers at Battersea Park for the formula E races, but also good as anti-suicide bomber-truck barriers and so on. Maybe we should call all such blocks "Boris" from now on.

They promised the park would be back to normal on July 2, but cycling back through from Chelsea Bridge earlier today I can tell you it's far from the pleasant ride it used to be.

Hitting the park off Chelsea Bridge  road, the first thing you encounter is a loads of guys in hi-vis jackets looking protective towards fleets of massive low-loader trucks, lined up all the way down the north side of the park.

These trucks are gradually taking away the big concrete crash barriers that lined both sides of the whole track during the electric car racing last weekend.

It seems they can only get about six blocks on each twelve-wheel low loader, so that's a hell of a lot of truck miles.

Passing the Millennium sports stadium area, I come across another low-loader which is bearing a special load: five of the blocks, plus a sixth block named "Mayor of London".

Ah, now I understand.  He that cycleth thru the valleys of the shadows of Yslyngton hath passed this way, and lo, we are blessed, we should kiss the ready-mix and prostrate ourselves upon the Virgin soils so liberally sprinkled across these fair fields.

Oh the horror! Roundabout succumbs to Nine Elms ravages

Watch out, Nine Elms Disease is coming your way.

It's spreading fast, its viral spores shunted around at speed by massive concrete mixer-trucks that rush up and down Silverthorne Road, spilling a little of their load as they go. If you're a cyclist, you are quite likely to get one of their little pebbles shot into your eye from under the fat tyre of a speeding car.

I'm astonished the council (Lambeth or Wandsworth?) hasn't stepped in to do something about the destruction of the road surfaces, particularly at the junction of Silverthorne and Wandsworth Road and down by the one-way junction of Silverthorne and Queenstown Roads.

This is where the trucks - which have just feasted on fresh ready-mixed concrete from the massive silos of McALpine's London Concrete Ltd - storm off in a cloud of dust to dump the material at some building site or other.

But the latest horror is the speed with which it has destroyed that perfectly harmless old floral roundabout hub at the south-east entrance to Battersea Park.

It's hard top cycle through any of this area at the moment because the air is so full of dust. When they were destroying the old MArco Polo House, it felt like sharp bits of marble were shredding the linings of your throat and lungs. Now it's the powdery cement dust sieved over everything by those speeding dumper-trucks and mixer-lorries.

God help us, residents of SW8, 4, and 11. God help us one and all.

RIP Beaufoy: property vultures kill another old favourite

It's becoming a sickeningly regular occurrence. Somewhere you'd always loved (but usually hadn't been to for ages, because you are a lazy slob) is suddenly no longer there.

Bookshops, cheap restaurants, music venues, they fall like leaves of London trees to the terribly sharp bladed axes of the speculators.

I realised some time ago that the Beaufoy Arms on Lavender Hill was going this way. Some time back it rebranded itself as the Beaufoy Bar, and it seemed to be thriving on DJ nights pulling in a much younger crowd. And then, suddenly (as it seemed to me) it was all boarded up. A month or so back the builders moved in, and now - where once there was this deliciously sleazy boozer, there is now the blandest of all empty commercial properties you could imagine.

Many loved the Beaufoy Arms back in the 1980s when it was quite a hot black music venue, with plenty of informal reggae nights and weekly live acts including the Afrobeat bandleader, ace sax player (and former Fekla Kuti sideman), Bukky Leo.

I remember the place with particular affection because it was one of the places I took my partner when she was not far off giving birth to our first child. She doesn't remember it I think but then I did drag her to some pretty odd places.

All the Beaufoy regulars of the time - they seemed to be mostly late middle-aged men from Trinidad or Jamaica, occasionally with wives or girlfriends or sons and daughters in tow - had something kind and encouraging to say, and the very loud music surely made some impression on the unborn son, who does still have a deep love for reggae.

The death of the Beaufoy sort of balances out the death of the reggae music shop at the other end of Lavender Hill two years back - the legendary Dub Vendor. These twin passings destroy the strange and pleasing cultural cocktail that the Hill once offered. Only BAC flies that old flag now, and it is looking desperately lonely. Yeah there are still plenty nice Portuguese and Sardinian and Vietnamese and Thai eating places, but the soul needs more than food and drink.