In what may be a first for Vauxhall, Transport for London officials have met members of a local community group who are unhappy with TfL’s proposals to build – yet not pay for – an extension of the Northern Line from Kennington to Nine Elms and Battersea. The group, VNEB DATA (for Development and Transport Action Group), has its origins in dissatisfaction with statements made by Lambeth officials at the Vauxhall Society’s AGM in October. Lambeth, it appeared, would...
The Viva Vauxhall community group holds a general meeting on Thursday 23 February, one point on the agenda being whether VV should oppose the Northern Line Extension to Wandsworth as ‘swallowing up the lion’s share of planning gain generated by developments in Vauxhall’. There’ll be presentation by VNEB Development And Transport Action (DATA), followed by a discussion and vote. It’s at 8pm at St Anne’s Settlement Hall, Vauxhall Grove.
Eager hands throughout Vauxhall will be reaching for the Mayor’s London Plan after the hands’ owners read in the 13-26 January issue of Private Eye (‘Regeneration Game’, p.14) that Boris Johnson has asked a developer to withdraw an unpopular plan for riverside ‘regeneration’, a plan approved by the local authority. No, not Lambeth, and not the Vauxhall, Nine Elms & Battersea ‘Opportunity Area’, still less its accompanying Northern Line Extension – likely to be a big local factor in...
You might think that Lambeth Council would be very careful about promising vast sums of your money to fund the VNEB’s Northern Line Extension scheme now NLE’s cheer-leader Treasury Holdings has gone bust. As if. Lambeth’s ‘Cabinet’ has whole-heartedly signed up to NLE, ‘target cost’ £955 million, thus committing millions that otherwise would have gone on schools, hospitals and other good stuff that will be needed along the Vauxhall riverside. Of course, the money for those goodies will still...
The Northern Line Extension project has been shunted into a siding, where it now blocks developers’ drive to canyonise the Battersea-Vauxhall riverside (VNEB) with skyscraper apartment blocks. Banks have repossessed the key Battersea Power Station site (and NLE terminus) from REO/Transport Holdings. This Irish development consortium was the cheerleader for NLE and said that the whole VNEB development hinged upon the new Tube line’s being built. Now Richard De Cani, TfL’s Director for Strategy and Development, has called...
Community groups are coming together to question Lambeth’s apparently-unquestioning commitment to NLE. The widespread discontent expressed at TVS’s AGM, the group has led to the formation of TAG, or Transport Action group, which will also question developers’ interpretations of the studies upon which NLE is based, and highlight the alternatives. Meanwhile, on Monday 12 August Lloyds Bank and an Irish government agency, NAMA, go to court to secure control of the Battersea Power Station site, the terminus of NLE....
A study prepared for The Vauxhall Society The claim that 90% of local people support the Northern Line Extension is misleading. According to the consultation paper produced for the scheme’s backers, this claim is based on fewer than 1600 opinions (in a Lambeth population of more than 272,000) and even these few votes are not for NLE as the best choice compared to other transport options but in answer to a different question entirely. Meanwhile, Lambeth proposes to spend...
Don’t believe the report in the Evening Standard Homes & Property section (2 November), which says that the ‘planning permission has been given for an extension of the Northern Line’. It hasn’t. The Vauxhall Society called the NLE developer, Treasury Holdings, to check. ‘I have no idea where the journalist got his story from. He certainly never spoke to me,’ said Tony Whitehead, TH’s Northern Line Extension Project Director. The NLE website says a formal planning application ‘could be’...
A newspaper report says that Caroline Pidgeon, Leader of the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group, has branded the public consultation on the Northern Line extension as “misleading and flawed.” has has accused TfL of deliberately misleading the public. “This latest consultation is fundamentally flawed,” she is quoted as saying. “Two of the possible routes have already been completely ruled out, so it is just misleading to include them in the latest consultation. TfL has already declared that option...
Community discussion on the Northern Line proposalsDate: Thursday 16 June 2011Time: 8pmVenue: Ashmole Community Centre, Meadow Road, London SW8 1QT Your local representatives, including all three of your local Councillors and your Assembly Member Val Shawcross, have organised a community led discussion to pull together a community response to the Northern Line consultation. More information on the proposals we will be discussing can be found here: www.northernlineextension.com
