Abbey Road
in Belvedere is a special place for Bonkers. Without it this
website would never have been created. In 2009 Bexley Council took a perfectly
good and accident free road and decided to make it much narrower. Narrow enough
for buses not to be able to easily pass near the Abbey itself and
narrow enough
elsewhere to cause many accidents. (Report on just one of them.)
The justification by Cabinet Member Peter Craske and his Highways Manager Andrew
Bashford were largely lies and obfuscation. I knew they were because they quoted
two Transport Research Laboratory reports without realising that my own
son had had a hand in their publication.
I naively thought that the lying must be a shameful one-off and
made the details
available on the web only to find a small deluge of comment to the effect that
Bexley Council lying was the norm. Bexley is Bonkers was born.
Needless to say the road reconstruction job was not done properly and the pock marked road surface
was retained. The ruts caused by buses and other heavy vehicles were in effect, on
a narrowed road, moved much closer to the kerb.
They fill with water and drench pedestrians whenever ir rains. I have for many
years refused to use it on rainy days preferring to use the car instead even for
the shortest of journeys.
And now for the good news.
Ten years after Abbey Road should have been resurfaced the job is to be done.
The section alongside St. Augustines’ Church was resurfaced three years ago and
the section to the west of Lesnes Abbey was done more recently. Now it is the
turn of the three quarters of a mile in between.
Work is scheduled to commence on 1st July and take two weeks - well it is quite a long stretch.
In full accordance with Bexley Council’s policy of ignoring the inconvenience
caused to residents their letter bearing today’s date says “it will be necessary to
impose a road closure”.
Exactly what that means is left unsaid but taken literally there will be times
when many hundreds of homes will become inaccessible by road.
Presumably Abbey Road will have no buses for two weeks either.
As though this area has not suffered enough road disruption already but there is
no denying that the road is badly in need of some loving care, it has had none
for 30 years or more.
On the downside the surface is currently so poor that speeds are necessarily
curtailed by the safety conscious, but sadly too many vehicles already pay
little regard to Abbey Road’s speed limit.