More about Beecholme


Beecholme is also the first postwar "mixed development" housing scheme in Hackney, with a mixture of houses and flats with the taller block having five storeys and containing one-bedroom and bedsit accommodation. It is featured in Volume 15 of Hackney History and was the site of Beecholme House, the family home of Maj. John André (d. 1780), who was executed as a British spy in the American War of Independence.

Sunday 23 May 2010

Object to Tesco Express moving into 144/146 Lwr Clapton Rd

Updated Mon 7th June

PHOTO & GRAPHICS: David White

 

Sunday 23rd May demonstration outside 144/146 Lower Clapton Road.
PHOTO: David White.






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The main point of resistance is the planning applications
  • 2010/1039 – application to change delivery hours
  • 2010/1041 – application to load and unload on the road to the front of the unit
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The main one to object to is 2010/1041
 Deadline 5th June
effectively extended to 23 June 
as the decision will not be made before then
(Stat cons exp date)   
  
NOTE: If you miss the deadline it is still worth filling in the online "comment" form (link below) as the planning dept is very good at considering residents views right up until the day the decision is made. This can be days or weeks (even months) after the official consultation period has ended (in this case 5th June). We will try and find out when the decision will be taken and let you know.

"Application dates, checks, meetings" etc at:
Details page for 2010/1041
  
Please send you objections to Caroline Ozor, the Planning Officer in charge, in one of the following ways:
  • By Email, to: caroline.ozor@hackney.gov.uk
  • By Post, to: Caroline Ozor, Planning Officer, Hackney Council Planning Permission Dept, 1 Hillman Street, E8 1DY
or the easiest way to object is online
  •  Hackney Council’s Website object/comment form (app 2010/1041) at this link



IMPORTANT: As with all planning application objections, objections will not be considered unless you give your name and contact details.
Petitions: will be treated as 1 objection if there is only signatures (without contact details). Whereas, a petition with 100 signatures, each with legible name and address or email address (ie contactable) will be treated as 100 objections.

Background
You can use this or parts of it (see Traffic Issues) for your objection

These small supermarkets operate with minimal (sometimes no) internal
storage faciilty. The storage necessary for a fast-moving consumer goods
facility such as a Tesco supermarket is instead provided by delivery
vehicles, commonly small articulated heavy goods vehicles. In order to
keep the requisite level of stock in the shop a number of vehicle
deliveries are made every day with these vehicles. This is simply to
allow more of the floor area of the premises to be allocated to
commercial (rather than storage) use and thus improve the yield per
square metre in order to make the enterprise commercially viable. The
costs of the vehicles and drivers are part of the financial offset
against the premises cost. The externalities of additional pollution,
vehicle emissions and congestion caused by these vehicles are all of
course completely ignored in such commercial calculations and are simply
imposed on the rest of society, a significant part of them being applied
to the local community.

Tesco has a very bad reputation for its lack of concern about the
imposition on the community local to its small supermarket operations
(e.g. Tesco Metro and Tesco Express) and, depending on the frequency of
delivery there can be an almost permanent presence of a parked heavy
goods vehicle outside the premises. Although actual permanent presence
is rare, there are extreme conflicts. Essex Road is routinely reduced in
capacity near to the junction with Upper Street because of the presence
of delivery vehicles parked outside the premises during morning peak
hours, thus effectively eliminating the bus lane which is vital for
reasonable performance of the local heavily-used public transport system
at that critical point. Vehicles regularly arrive early, before the
permitted hours and park waiting for the delivery to be made. These
vehicles may or may not attract fines for their behaviour, but the
financial pressure on the commercial space within the premises is
clearly greater than the cost of servicing those fines - if they are
actually applied at all. A similar point occurs with the Tesco Express
premises in Finsbury Park, where the early morning deliveries by heavy
goods vehicles reduce the busy road to a single lane. The clear absence
of regard for others might be rendered in practice by the driver of such
a vehicle and although it would I am sure be routinely met with an
appalled apology from a company such as Tesco, it actually indicates the
incipent attitude towards the community expressed by Tesco. I could cite
other similar examples, but two is enough for the present purpose.

*144-146 Lower Clapton Road - Traffic issues*
The proposed premises in Lower Clapton Road is close to a major bus
stop, which serves some 60 buses an hour. Whatever formal arrangements
might be put in place, or agreements about delivery behaviour might be
obtained from the company, there is no reason to suggest that the
attitude of Tesco would be any different in this case than it is in any
of the others. Therefore I would expect there to be a continuing
conflict between the deliveries for the Tesco premises and the bus stop
and its users. Because of the manoeuvring requirements of buses and the
need for precision parking in order to facilitate access to buses by
older and disabled people, considerable space is required for buses at
bus stops (space that is rarely allocated) in order for them to operate
properly. This would suggest that delivery vehicles would not be able to
park outside the premises but further along the Lower Clapton Road
(presumably outside the Hackney Council neighbourhood housing offices).
The likelihood of delivery drivers actually using that space, with the
inconvenience of having to carry the deliveries across the footway and
intermediate vehicle crossover instead of the more convenient bus stop
is so small that in considering the proposal the transport planners
should cnsider that such disruption would actually be the norm.

The proposal is to use the parking bay outside the Palm 2 shop. This is
insufficient for any but the smallest delivery vehicles - the bay is
11.1 metres long - physically shorter than the length of a standard
13.4m delivery vehicle and the shorter vehicle used for some of these
deliveries (which is 10.35m long) would have great difficulty in
entering the bay as this is only slightly longer, making manoeuvring
into the space very difficult indeed, thus causing much disruption to
buses and traffic while the parking manoeuvre is undertaken. The likely
practical outcome would be that the drivers would choose the easier
option of parking nearer to, or at, the bus stop, thus adversely
affecting the access to the bus stop for both buses and passengers
during the loading periods. As noted above, if Planning condition 13 is
waived, we can expect that there would be several deliveries each day at
all times of day and night - even though the reson gven for the request
is to allow deliveries on Bank Holidays.

Lower Clapton Road is a Red Route. Although Red Routes do not exclude
provisions for parking or deliveries, the formal space provision in red
route guidance relates to kerb length and does not take into account the
manoeuvres required to access the legal delivery/parking bays. As
explained above, this would be a serious problem in this case as the
manoeuvre to enter the bay in such a way as to ensure that the parked
vehicle would not disrupt the bus access to the kerbside stop at
Millfields Road would be complex and almost certainly requiring the use
of the bus stop space for part of the entry manoeuvre. The required
reversing manoeuvre to undertake this would put pedestrians, especially
children, at considerable risk.
It is disingenuous of the applicant to imply that access to this loading bay is without manoeuvring problems and it is quite clear that such access could only be obtained with the proposed vehicles with extensive negative impacts on the traffic on the A107.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Special Offer: 2 for the price of 2.
Tesco is moving into the empty premises following this strong but unsuccessful campaign. Before that, bookies had applied to move there, from just 2 doors up the road, but had been stopped by objections. It wouldn’t have meant an extra bookies in Hackney, just a move, as may also happen opposite the round chapel.
As a result, we will have both bookies and Tesco, with the clients of the latter being able to withdraw free cash from the former.
Wouldn’t you prefer having had bookies instead of both?
That’s what I asked and no, some people wouldn’t…

Cllr Ian Rathbone said...

Objections did not stop the bookies moving to 146 Lower Clapton. They chose not to and settled for where they are, partly persuaded by the fact that Tesco have been planning to move there for at least three years, hiding behind another company which was making leasing arrangements. We would have like to have seen the three original units at 146 Lower Clapton used as work spaces, but that did not happen partly because of the high rents. The bookies opposite the Round Chapel is unfortunately an addition. Cllr Ian Rathbone