Stonecot Hill in Sutton can look forward to a brighter and more colourful summer after volunteers from Sutton Living Streets gave the street planters a seasonal makeover.

Bright purple lavender plants and pink geraniums now shine alongside the more muted trees and shrubs, which themselves have had a timely trim.

The planting is part of Sutton Council’s Take Part Take Pride week, which encourages residents to organise events in their neighbourhoods to bring people together socially and to improve the places where they live.

Campaigner and keen gardener Charlotte Gilhooly said,

The planters have been dull for a long time and we wanted to do something about it now that summer’s here. We were really pleased when we heard about Take Part Take Pride and asked if we could use the opportunity to brighten up our neighbourhood. We’re delighted with the results and looking forward to keeping the planters in shape.

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Sutton has a strong vision for the local area. The ‘Take Pride, Take Part’ theme is effective and there is strong emphasis on the environment. The Phoenix Centre is an excellent example of bringing services into the heart of a deprived community. The youth service, particularly the radio station which provides young people with skills in broadcasting and sound engineering, was really impressive. The Bee Hive café, which is run as a social enterprise, was inspirational.

Council leader Sean Brennan said:

This award is a tribute to the park rangers, the street teams, the conservationists and to our partners in the police service and in Smarter Travel Sutton – they have all worked together to ensure Sutton residents can enjoy clean streets, award-winning parks, top-notch recycling services, green travel opportunities and low crime rates.

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From the consultation document:

Transport for London (TfL) is holding a consultation exercise to receive residents and key Stakeholders’ comments regarding pedestrian improvements at Windsor Castle Junction. As part of our work to promote walking by delivering better conditions for pedestrians in London we are planning to upgrade facilities for pedestrians at the junction. There are a number of schools in the area and the current amenities do not allow pedestrians to cross safely on all arms of the junction. It is anticipated that by providing safer crossings we can encourage more people to use alternatives to their cars.

Download the full consultation document and reply form here:
A232 Windsor Castle Junction pedestrian improvements consultation (PDF, 5.6 MB)

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This is easier than hunting through the council’s website as that information is not grouped by locality, so you have to hunt through the entire borough’s applications to find ones near you.

Planning Alerts works for many boroughs, currently including Sutton and Croydon, but not Merton.

If you use an RSS reader, this information is also available as an RSS feed.

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Following last week’s serious accident in which a three-year-old girl was knocked down on a traffic island, Living Streets Sutton members are calling for improvements to Stonecot Hill’s crossings.

What needs to be fixed?

1. Upgrade the islands to zebra or pelican crossings

Traffic flow is often very heavy as Stonecot Hill is part of the A24 Red Route into London. This video shows the traffic on a typical Saturday.

The crossings need to be upgraded to give pedestrians priority over motor traffic and an opportunity to cross the road safely regardless of how much traffic there is.

2. A new crossing nearer the James O’Riordan Medical Centre

An extra crossing is needed near to the doctors’ surgery, particularly as there is no safe, direct route between the surgery and the bus stop on the other side of the road near the Ash Road junction. Taking a safe route to the surgery means walking an extra 100 metres in the other direction to the nearest traffic island - something pedestrians will very rarely do.

3. Improve visibility - an end to the “camouflaged crossings”

Both of the current island crossings are obscured by large concrete planters and parked cars parallel to the edge of the road. This clutter needs to be removed so that drivers and pedestrians can see each other well enough to ensure that cars have time to stop when someone starts to cross the road.

4. Longer and wider crossings

The island crossings need to be made longer to accommodate a larger group of people waiting in the island and wider so that people feel safer and aren’t so close to the passing traffic. Currently it’s very hard to fit a family onto the islands and there needs to be more space for pushchairs and wheelchairs.

Our campaign is being backed by Paul Burstow MP and Councillor Tony Brett Young and has received coverage in the Sutton Guardian. We hope to be able to bring news of our progress soon.

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Sutton Living Streets members have our own experience of clean-ups and our advice is this: little and often. Spring cleaning the neighbourhood is about as worthwhile as spring cleaning your home if you only do it once a year. That’s not to say that you should never do a big clean, just that regular little ones are needed to keep a place mostly pleasant most of the time. So a big clean, especially if it’s the first one, should be an opportunity to get people enthusiastic and signed up for a regular stint. A couple of hours once a month is probably enough.

The need to stop the rot by keeping on top of relatively minor problems brings us to the sociologists Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

In the abstract, the theory comes in two parts:

1. Small problems that are left unfixed will lead to many similar small problems.
2. The accumulation of many small problems will lead to different, more serious problems.

The first of these is demonstrably true; the second is considerably more doubtful.

Having spent a lot of time painting out graffiti, I’ve noticed that a wall can stay totally clean for weeks afterwards, but once it attracts its first piece of graffiti, many others follow rapidly. The explanation for this seems to be that few people have the nerve to vandalise a pristine wall, but once it’s already vandalised many more feel comfortable to follow suit. The lesson for those that want to keep walls clean is to remove every piece of graffiti as soon as it occurs. It’ll save you a much bigger job later on.

Litter is a problem of a different order. Many people seem much less inhibited about dropping litter, whether they’re the first to do so on a newly-swept street or whether their neighbourhood is just one big bin. Litter doesn’t cause permanent damage and for many people, dropping litter has a social acceptability that I hope and expect that writing graffiti will never have. The No Real Damage Done attitude probably correlates with Public Space Belongs to the Council and Someone Will Get Paid to Clean It Up (the unrelated economic broken window fallacy).

But does litter lead to graffiti, graffiti lead to broken windows, broken windows lead to arson, robbery, rape, murder, rebellion and the Overthrow of Everything We Hold Dear?

It doesn’t look like it. Places with major violent crime will probably have their fair share of litter and graffiti too, but you can find plenty of dismal urban environments that are relatively safe. Sewing a few crisp packets and lolly sticks is not the same as planting the seeds of a drug gang turf war. Just because a place looks like South Central Los Angeles doesn’t mean that it is. The drivers of serious and violent crime are more complex and thankfully more rare than just a seemingly disorderly environment where it appears that anything goes. A neighbourhood that clearly says, “You can get away with graffiti here” doesn’t translate as, “You can get away with murder here.” Fortunately, the proto-murderers know this.

Broken windows theory looks far too simplistic to explain all the world’s ills by itself - but then what could? If you see a broken window, some litter or graffiti, fix it quickly and you’ll save yourself far more trouble later. But don’t be discouraged from walking in your neighbourhood with confidence just because a few people have been inconsiderate enough to litter and vandalise the place.

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By filling out a form on TfL’s website or phoning their call centre, you can let them know about a street problem that needs to be fixed. The hope and expectation is that they’ll do so with appropriate haste and keep you informed as they do so.

One of its fundamental flaws is that if the reporter wants to track the progress of the fault, they must keep returning to the website and enter the lengthy fault code to see its status. If someone has gone to the trouble of reporting a fault, it’s likely that they care about it getting fixed. Providing a simple mechanism for keeping the reporter notified without making them do any extra work is the least the system should do as a “reward” for the reporter’s efforts. As Lynne Truss would say, “Why am I the One Doing This?”

I can think of four ways to notify the reporter when a fault’s status changes; two that are obvious, two less so.

1. Send emails

When reporting a fault, the system already asks for a full name, address, phone number and email address. A tick box that gives permission to send email notifications would be a good start. Each message could come with a unique unsubscribe link.

2. Send text messages

Likewise, a tick box that gives permission to send text message updates to a mobile phone. The downside to this is that it’d be hard to make an easy unsubscribe mechanism. At best, the reporter would have to reply to the text, but it’d cost them the price of sending a message. From TfL’s end, the cost of sending text message notifications would be trivial against the entire cost of fixing a fault, but a mechanism for validating the reporter’s mobile number would be needed to prevent people maliciously or accidentally signing up other people’s numbers. This is a poor solution.

3. Create web pages

A fault’s status isn’t private information. Why not put updates on web pages that everyone can view, with an overall list of outstanding and recently closed faults, and each individual fault having its own page (and therefore a URL) that the reporter can check at their leisure? Then, keeping up to date would be as easy as sending the reporter a message like:

Thanks for reporting this fault. If you want to check its progress, visit:

http://streetfaults.tfl.gov.uk/faults/123456789

Someone who was keen could then bookmark that page and visit it as often as they wished.

4. Create an RSS feed for each fault

The last idea is an extension of the same principle: it’s public data so just make it available to anyone that cares to look. Give each fault its own RSS feed and let the reporter subscribe to the feed if they wish. RSS has none of the spam, privacy and virus problems of email. People can keep regularly updated without any extra effort. RSS has none of the complex usability problems with unsubscribe mechanisms. Tools to read and manage feeds are widespread and will soon be available in all mainstream web browsers. It just works.

The Sutton Liberal Democrats’ manifesto for the council elections on 4th May says that if returned to office,

We intend to look at making use of new technology to allow residents to use their mobile phones to send information and photographs about street scene problems directly to the appropriate council offices. (page 7)

Let’s hope that if they do it, they choose a system that gives people good feedback and encourages them to get involved in future.

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Regular exercise is important for everyone to maintain good health and especially important for people with diabetes so that they can avoid serious complications to their condition.

If you’d like to join the Monday walk in Morden Hall Park, contact Sarah Wheatley by email at sarah.wheatley@smpct.nhs.uk or phone 020 8251 0511. Everyone from Sutton and Merton is welcome, including people without diabetes.

Living Streets promotes everyday walking as part of a healthy lifestyle for everyone by campaigning for cleaner, safer streets and more shops and local facilities in walking distance of home.

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