A new Healthy Neighbourhood for Telegraph Hill

Lewisham Council is committed to creating streets where it is safer, easier and more attractive for people to walk, wheel, cycle and use public transport for everyday journeys.

As part of this commitment, we have begun early engagement to understand local views on a possible new Healthy Neighbourhood in the Telegraph Hill area, bounded by Queens Road, New Cross Road, Lewisham Way, Malpas Road, Endwell Road, Drakefell Road, Gellatly Road and Lausanne Road. A map of the area can be found below.

What is a Healthy Neighbourhood?

The Healthy Neighbourhoods programme aims to transform our neighbourhoods into healthier, safer, and easier places to get around.

We recognise the importance of designing projects like this in collaboration with residents, community groups and businesses and want to work with the community from the earliest stage of the project. This is to help identify existing challenges in an area in relation to travel, road danger, public health, and personal safety and then to tackle these with improvements.

We are at the very start of this process. Nothing has been agreed or designed, and we have no proposals to share with you at present. Early engagement is designed to complement traffic counts and other analysis, so we understand the area properly before developing any designs.

Why here?

Telegraph Hill is one of the highest priority areas for a new Healthy Neighbourhood in Lewisham. This follows an assessment of areas across the borough, which assessed two key elements.

First, the assessment reviewed the need for a new healthy neighbourhood, considering collision data, through traffic, air quality, obesity and other datapoints. The assessment then considered the opportunities a new healthy neighbourhood would present, including how likely residents would be to walk and cycle and how their access to public transport might be improved.

Telegraph Hill ranked 3rd out of the 29 potential Healthy Neighbourhood areas we reviewed. The area ranked especially high for through traffic and asthma. The assessment also identified the area as offering an opportunity to increase the number of residents who walk and cycle.

What do we want to know?

We want to know the issues residents face as they travel across the area, what they’d like to see improved and what they’d like to keep.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be holding pop-up and drop-in sessions, targeting residents across the local area to understand what they’d like us to address as part of the preparation of a new Healthy Neighbourhood in Telegraph Hill.

We know people living near the edge of an area often want to understand how changes could affect their street. Before anything is proposed, we’ll look at how possible changes could affect surrounding roads. We’d like to hear your views on this too.