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Found: space for three new parks
• THREE new parks in Finsbury, below City Road, where every square inch of space seems to be built on? You’d have to be joking! But no! That’s the happy prospect opening up there.
In Seward Street, there is an existing but closed park with a 120-foot frontage. Its lease to a private school expired last year. A total of 630 people now live in Seward Street and they have no recreation space.
This park was given to Islington Council’s predecessor in 1891 by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, which is pursuing the council to re-open it. The school is still using it for a £67 weekly rent. It could, of course, continue to use it along with other people.
Paton Street, opposite the Homes for Islington office in Central Street, on the corner with Seward Street, is actually a small park. It is closed at both ends. It has six trees and seating for spectators of football being played on Finsbury Leisure Centre pitches.
The flawed St Luke’s Framework plan by EC1 New Deal has it replaced with a multi-storey building by the separate £16 million St Luke’s Parochial Trust. In a retrogade way, this would eliminate 100 feet of frontage on Central Street, and 20,000 square feet of open space would be alienated. The council needs to look afresh at this. It wants to increase green space by 54,000 square feet by 2010, according to papers in its recent budget.
Money needs to be spent on Paton Street to uplift it, not plunk an edifice and rat-run street on it and the adjacent football pitch. The pitch would be replaced by a double-decker pair of pitches. The architect who designed that in the EC1 New Deal plans obviously was not a footballer.
In Baldwin Street, behind Moorfields Eye Hospital, is a little-known but vast open space with six, possibly 100-year-old, London plane trees on it. It has a 70-foot frontage to Baldwin Street and goes back an impressive 320 feet.
It is behind the 13-storey blue glass building in Old Street, near the roundabout. This is due to be demolished. Architects now are working on two new buildings to replace it and another eight-storey building there.
At what seems to be this comparatively early stage, the council and voluntary bodies such as the Islington Society, the borough amenity body, need to talk to the site manager of Frogmore Property about retaining the space and possibly opening it to Old Street.
LEO CHAPMAN
Dufferin Street, EC1 |
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