For most of us who live in East Dulwich, Lordship Lane defines our community.  Its importance to East Dulwich as a commercial, social and cultural centre is clear. But it also serves many other purposes too – as a bus route and a through route for traffic.

It is not surprising that everyone has a view about Lordship Lane.

Road safety is always top of the list when we ask people about how Lordship Lane could be improved – what has not always been clear is what should be done to improve the situation.

So we commissioned Living Streets to help us identify the problems on Lordship Lane. The Living Streets approach is simple but effective. They walk up and down the road with a group of local people and a clip board, identifying issues and talking about possible solutions.

This is exactly what a small gang of us did.  We identified loads of things that would improve the shopping experience on Lordship Lane.  But overwhelmingly, the one issue highlighted was that people shopping on Lordship Lane tend to walk up one side of the street or down the other. They rarely cross the street to reach a shop on the other side of the road and when they want to – they find it unpleasant, off-putting and down right dangerous.  That’s not just bad from a road safety point of view. By degrading our shopping experience it threatens the lifeblood of our local shops and encourages particularly the elderly and families to head for the safety of Sainsbury’s or White City. Better crossing points – especially outside Somerfield – was the number one way to improve things.

So that is what we have been working on and we have now got to the point where we have designed and consulted upon new crossings on Lordship Lane – at the Goose Green roundabout and outside Somerfield.

The initial results indicate that the plans are supported by over 80% of people who responded.

There is still some way to go – not least to persuade Transport for London that providing a safe crossing point won’t interfere too much with the bus timetables. I hope that in the end the road safety arguments and the need to promote our local shops in the current climate will win the day.