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Long walk for Johnny
• RECENT press coverage has highlighted some of the shortcomings of Arsenal’s proposed sports centre in Queensland Road. However, the issue has now drawn attention to the much more obvious and much more critical shortcomings in the level of amenity that will be available to the residents of proposed social housing in Queensland Road.
There is already a general recognition that the housing plans for Queensland Road are much, much too dense but, as usual, the devil is hidden in the detail.
There will be about 650 residents in social housing and, on the basis that there will be 360 parents/carers (two parent/carers per flat), that leaves about 290 children and young people.
The appalling aspect of all of this is that the only amenity available to these residents (and particularly the children and young people) will be a strip of partitioned pocket-sized gardens to the rear of the block of social housing and “500 square metres of garden terraces on the roof”.
The current proposals do not include any provision, in Queensland Road, where these kids from the social housing can have a casual kick-around.
What is particularly interesting now is to see Arsenal’s consultants scrambling around for locations around Holloway and Highbury where these kids and young people can play and have a kick-around in order to fulfil box-ticking regulations.
Residents who are familiar with Queensland Road will be surprised to learn that Arsenal’s consultants consider it to be a site “surrounded by large areas of open space” and that little Johnny (aged 12) who resides in the social housing will be expected to go to Paradise Park to have a kick-around with his mates… that is if he can first negotiate Benwell Road, Holloway Road and then Liverpool Road.
And, hopefully, he will make his way back safely if he is not mugged by kids from another estate.
This aspect of inadequate provision of social amenity for the residents of the proposed social housing (and Arsenal’s consultants’ pathetic attempts to meet box-ticking criteria) has turned this whole issue into a farce.
It would be amusing if this was not something serious and critically important.
Against this backdrop, the sports centre (with its restricted access to residents and its admission costs) might be viewed as somewhat of an irrelevance, or a red herring, in the context of the much more pressing needs of the residents of the social housing.
The only encouraging feature in all of this is that there does now appear to be an awareness among councillors that this is a critical shortcoming in Arsenal’s proposals for Queensland Road and that simplistic box-ticking is a much too naïve approach to addressing the issue of the amenity available to residents of the social housing.
D THOMAS
Bryantwood Road, N7
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