No building on Castle Green, says CPRE London

No building on Castle Green rugby pitches, remove traffic from town centres and get rid of unnecessary roads, say London campaigners as they respond to Barking & Dagenham Local Plan consultation

Image: Photo Gallery – Barking Rugby Football Club – page 1 of 7 (barkingrufc.com)

CPRE London has written to the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham setting out its response to the Regulation 19 Local Plan consultation. LBBD LP Reg19 Consultation response Nov 2020

CPRE London said it strongly objected to the Barking Rugby Club site at Goresbrook Road being included as a Site Allocation [p38] for housing development. Alice Roberts of CPRE London said: “This is the only playing field within a huge radius and is likely to be the only playing field available to support the whole of the new Barking Riverside development along with all the other residents in the more immediate vicinity. And this is an area already deficient in green space.”

The response also said that the Local Plan should include measures to remove traffic from town centres if its policy of ‘encouraging vibrant resilient, and characterful town centres’ is to be effective. “Traffic-ridden town centres don’t encourage people to stay, linger and spend money. They’re just too unpleasant. Town centres should be re-modelled to remove through traffic and reduce space allocated to roads and parking. The borough should focus on creating easily walkable and cyclable high streets and town centres, with wide pavements without clutter, frequent crossings, low-speed single carriageway traffic and protected cycle lanes.”

“In Barking and Dagenham roads often dominate the town centres – unnecessarily in our view – so a clear policy is needed to identify roads which can be entirely removed so the space can be used for new housing or shops, or small parks, markets or places for quiet relaxation and café chairs and tables.”