Residents of Viaduct Road have vowed to do all they can to spruce up their street and make it a more welcoming entrance to Brighton and Hove.
Thousands of cars travel along the road every day on their way to the city centre – but those living there in and around it agree that it doesn’t make for an enticing introduction.
Many of the house frontages are tired and peeling, cars speed along the road, cyclists use the pavements to circumvent the one-way system and wheely bins obstruct the pavement.
But at a meeting of the London Road local action team on Tuesday, those present came up with a number of ways this could be improved.
Chair of the LAT Philip Wells said: “The street is underperforming as a gateway into the city. A number of the people who came to the meeting put it much less diplomatically than that.
“Landlords said they would like to keep good standards, and they try to. To be fair to any landlord, it’s an uphill struggle because there’s so much grime and pollution.
“One person claimed they had seen a pile of rubbish that had been there for more than a year.”
“We put a leaflet through each door to say let’s work together.”
Options discussed include asking CityClean to enforce keeping wheely bins off the pavement, and the council to enforce good decorative standards.
Other possible solutions discussed included planting trees along the pavement to act as a barrier to pollution and remind motorists they are in a residential area, and a contraflow cycle lane.
Mr Wells said: “For work to progress in that way we need to get more details – there’s a number of different fronts we could pursue.”
I think the problem will be getting students to care. A number of those houses and those along Upper Lewes Road are occupied by people who are generally only residents for one year, at most and trying to get someone who is only temporarily passing through an area like this to care about their street is probably going to be pretty challenging.
Having said that I’m sure the permanent/more long term residents of those areas would very much like the environment to be more healtht and visually appealing. I would say some traffic calming measures would be a good start, trees are a great idea too.
Why not make it a single lane, widen the pavement and divert some of the traffic down London road?
I think the problem will be getting students to care. A number of those houses and those along Upper Lewes Road are occupied by people who are generally only residents for one year, at most and trying to get someone who is only temporarily passing through an area like this to care about their street is probably going to be pretty challenging.
Having said that I’m sure the permanent/more long term residents of those areas would very much like the environment to be more healtht and visually appealing. I would say some traffic calming measures would be a good start, trees are a great idea too.
Why not make it a single lane, widen the pavement and divert some of the traffic down London road?