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Betrayals on the Heath
• TURNING historic Whitestone Pond, Hampstead, into a municipal traffic management scheme is not the only betrayal of the area by the area’s protectors.
How did the naff scheme to install Centre Point’s 1960s fountains get past Camden Council or the Heath and Hampstead Society?
The replacement of the historic York stone with Tarmac outside the Old Court House is a warning for Oriel Place and Flask Walk.
The “modernising” mentality even extended to the removal of the bus shelter needed by walkers and school children because it did “not fit in with the scheme” (Transport for London information office).
But over on the Heath other horrors are taking place.
Silver birch are being eliminated (because they are not a native species), undergrowth cleared away and large areas of natural grassland mown down to regulation golf-course height, in an apparent design to turn the Heath into some ghastly American nature trail.
But worse than this, by the suburban gardeners of the Corporation of London, is the limb-winching of mature healthy trees and the coronet-cutting of branches, which can only introduce disease.
The forested areas of the Heath are littered with destroyed trees especially Silver Birch.
The Heath is losing its seclusion, its mystery and naturalness to philistine egotism.
Michael Edwards
Address supplied
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