The success of Kingsbury town centre

This post is a counterpoint to my last, on Edgware town centre, and its Portas Pilot. These two outer north-west London town centres do form a nice counterpoint for me, as I live between them, a mile south of Edgware and a mile north of Kingsbury.

Kingsbury and Edgware town centres have many similarities. They are both centres of 1930s suburbs where people live mostly in detached and semi-detached houses. They both have tube stations (but Kingsbury has no bus station, and rather fewer buses). They both consist essentially of a single main shopping street, which is also an important through-road (in Kingsbury, the A4006 Kingsbury Road, which links the A5 to Harrow). They both have considerable off-street parking provision, as well as parking on the main road and side roads.

But while Edgware town centre is considered to be doing sufficiently poorly to require a bid to the government's "Portas fund" to revive it (what anybody thinks this £80,000 odd will achieve I am not sure), Kingsbury town centre has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country at only 1.1% empty shops, and appears to be prospering.

Kingsbury Road is thronged with shoppers on a weekday afternoon

So I think people looking at centres that are doing less well, like Edgware, rather than producing a lot of opinions about what is wrong with them and what needs doing, that may or may not have much basis in fact, should look at what is right, very near by, in Kingsbury, and why that centre is doing comparatively well.

Here are what I think are some of the important things that are right in Kingsbury town centre, that are differences with Edgware: you will see that my focus is on street design and the environment.

The shops in Kingsbury are really rather functional: food shops, banks, travel shops, Asian sweet shops, Asian clothes shops, and cheap hardware shops are noticeable. There is nothing particularly chic and nothing conspicuously "smart" about Kingsbury town centre. There are some pubs and restaurants, but no "café culture".

The pavements in Kingsbury Road are extremely wide. The original service roads in the 1930s street design have been filled in, with either pavement, or segregated cycle track, on the stretch to the east of the tube station.  These wide pavements allow the shops to spill out onto the street, while still allowing ample space for pedestrians to circulate and meet, and there is plenty of room for the street furniture and street trees.

The road is narrowed by the parking down to one narrowish lane in either direction, and, east of the shopping centre, by Roe Green Park, where parking does not have this effect, the council (Brent) narrowed the previously four-lane road to two lanes using islands and central hatching, so controlling the speed at which vehicles enter the shopping stretch. (This was a highly controversial move locally, introduced by the previous Lib Dem–Conservative coalition administration). Vehicle speeds on Kingsbury Road are now mostly quote moderate.

The road has been supplied with crossings at good intervals, and at these points, the road has been narrowed further. (As these narrowings just replace the parking, cyclists are not presented with a sudden constriction in the road at these places – though cycling conditions are not particularly good.) The crossings are one stage for pedestrains (c. f. the staggered "pig-pen" crossings of Edgware's Station Road), and the green man appears very fast – five to ten seconds after the button is pushed.

Crossing of Kingsbury Road: quick to use, but a pity about the guardrailing

The side-road crossings of the footway are good. They are kept narrow, with a tight geometry, and the carriageway has been raised to pavement height, which is very convenient for the disabled. Give-way chevrons have been painted to the side-road side of these speed tables, obliging motorists to give way to pedestrians. These junctions contrast with the flared, two-branched side road junctions that Barnet Council has favoured in Station Road, Edgware. Those give priority and space to cars, these give priority and space to pedestrians.

Side road treatment in Kingsbury Road

There is a large and pleasant open space on the north side of Kingsbury Road, Roe Green Park, which is well-supplied with activities for both children and young people. The park is a combination of playing fields, playgrounds, and planted garden areas. Brent has not cut back on the maintenance of its open spaces to the extent that Barnet has (though the swimming pool that was promised for Roe Green Park was cancelled as part of the current budget cuts). There are several schools around the park, including the very large secondary Kingsbury High School, and, via the park, a lot of young people are naturally conducted to Kingsbury Road, adding to its level of activity.

Playground for young children in Roe Green Park

Play equipment for older children in Roe Green Park, with Kingsbury High School in the background.

There is some prominent cycle infrastructure in Kingsbury Road. I have discussed this provision before, in one of my earliest posts in this blog, just about a year ago. It is not very good, because it is not coherent (like most UK cycle infrastructure). A two-way cycle track, that was taken out of the huge pavement space on the south side of the road, goes along for a distance west of Roe Green Park at footway level, generally walked upon by pedestrians, before terminating illogically at a Toucan crossing, where the route turns into advisory cycle lanes on both sides of the road, painted in the "door zone" of parked cars. On the westbound side, the route goes on to the pavement again, west of the tube station, this time between the road and service road, to terminate at a zebra crossing of the A4140 Fryent Way, where cyclists I presume are expected to dismount, as cycling on a zebra crossing is illegal. 

Illogical end-point of the two-way cycle track on the pavement of Kingsbury Road

However, faulty as this provision is, and quite poor as cycling conditions in Kingsbury are, there is at least a conspicuous attempt to encourage cycling in the streetscape design, and to provide a facility safe for children to cycle on. There is nothing for cyclists in Edgware, save a few racks, because Barnet Council has long been anti-cycling. (Though we might note, with a small "hurrah", that the odious Brian Coleman no longer controls transport in Barnet, having been forced out of his Barnet Council portfolio job last week, following his defeat in the London Assembly election.)

In Kingsbury, in addition, there is useful cycling, for both children and adults, on the paths in Roe Green Park, allowing them to access the town centre and the too-brief two-way track. Though all cycling is actually against Brent's parks by-laws (dating from 1906!), the Parks Department do not enforce this ban (as they have few staff to do so, and no interest in doing so provided no nuisance is being caused), and in fact some paths in Roe Green Park are marked as permitted routes on Transport for London's Cycle Guide 3.

Young children cycling in Roe Green Park

The most important differences between Kingsbury town centre and Edgware town centre are, however, I think, the following. Kingsbury has no large supermarket. It only has small and medium-sized shops. Generally, the major chains are conspicuous in Kingsbury by their absence. There is a smallish Boots the Chemist, and a Tesco Local was built recently by Kingsbury Circle, on the site of a pub (pubs have been decimated in north-west London in recent years). 

Shopping in Edgware is dominated by the Sainsbury's in the Broadwalk covered shopping centre, with its massive car parks both at ground level and on the roof of the centre. Kingsbury has nothing like the Broadwalk Centre, packed full of chain stores, including Sainsburys and M&S, the only businesses usually that can afford the rents in such places. Kingsbury has an off-street car park, but a relatively small and hidden one with narrow access, not one that motorists are obviously directed into, and it has about the same amount of on-street parking as Edgware.

In Edgware, the Broadwalk Centre has drained the life away from Station Road and the High Street, many shoppers arriving at its easy-to-use car park, walking straight into the centre, and not venturing further. Similar has not happened in Kingsbury. The high-capacity motor vehicle access provided to the Broadwalk Centre car park has made Edgware's Station Road far less walkable. Planning and design decisions taken for Kingsbury Road have kept it walkable. There is also no equivalent of the A5 Edgware Road in Kingsbury severing the shopping area into two parts.

The two centres look architecturally different, mainly because Edgware in blighted by the cheaply-thrown up Premier House office block and other pieces of nondescripness, while Kingsbury retains a certain uniformity and low-key dignity with its redbrick with cement decoration 1930s shopping parades, never rising above three stories. Kingsbury had lower pretensions than Edgware to start with, and has never been treated as a major centre, so has been spared out-of-scale developments. Or, perhaps, Brent Council has prevented them. The new flats above the Tesco are the worst example in Kingsbury, at six stories high.

There are things that are not great about Kingsbury Road, apart from the incoherent cycle route. The new Tesco Metro, with its own car park between the pavement and the store, causing a lot of vehicle movements across the footway, was a retrograde planning step. The maintenance of the service road on the south side between the station and Kingsbury Circle is hard to explain. That should have been done away with, along with the rest of the service roads, to increase pavement space there as well. Most importantly, Kingsbury Circle is a very dangerous obstacle for cycling, a poorly-designed multi-lane roundabout with five wide geometry exits. As a fast and experienced cyclist I can negotiate it, but a lady cyclist I know, who goes everywhere locally on her bike, will not do so, but crosses the roads as a pedestrian, and I can fully understand this. It is certainly not negotiable by children and novices.

Some will no doubt point to the unpopular method of charging for on-street parking introduced by Brian Coleman in Barnet as being a factor in Edgware's problems. Coleman got rid of the ticket machines and made people pay using mobile phones. But I don't see how this can be particularly relevant, as, if you look at the on-street parking in Kingsbury and Edgware, you see it is mostly occupied during shopping hours in both places. And it is also obvious, looking at the numbers of people shopping in Kingsbury Road, that most of them cannot have cars parked on the street.

Broadly, I think what the comparison between Kingsbury and Edgware town centres shows us is that car parking is not the issue. The issue is design and planning that emphasises and strengthens the social function of the street and makes it easy to use by those on foot and bicycle (though the latter are a tiny minority here). This goes with maintaining a sensible scale of development, and keeping activity on the street by not setting-up an alternative indoor focus that is most easily accessed by car. People do not now need to go to shops at all if they don't wish to, and all shops are feeling this effect. But they still need public spaces to serve a social function, and where this happens, the businesses around benefit.

Many of the right planning decisions have been taken by Brent Council at Kingsbury, and it is quite apparent looking at the scene in Kingsbury Road that the street is serving a strong social function, despite the still quite considerable volume of motor traffic passing through. It's not a quaint picture-postcard scene; it's not a historic town square. It's plain, suburban, and middle class. But it's also varied, cosmopolitan, busy and active, and it works quite well. Those towns and suburbs with failing centres, take note. More parking and glitzy, covered shopping malls are not what you need.

Edgware town centre's Portas Pilot piffle

Edgware is a suburb of north-west London centred 11 miles from Marble Arch, up the A5 on the way to St Albans. It is divided between three boroughs: 50% in Barnet, a bit less than 50% in Harrow, and a small part in Brent. I live in the Brent part, one mile from Edgware town centre.

Apparently Edgware town centre is suffering a decline. I say "apparently" as I don't know, as I almost never go there, because it is horrible, and there is nothing there of sufficient interest to draw me to make the not very nice (by any method) journey there.

I think Edgware town centre has long had problems. The suburb grew entirely due to the construction of the Northern Line of the London Undergound in the 1920s, of which its station formed the terminus of one branch, and, with efficient, direct connections to both the West End and the City, it was always predominantly a dormitory. The so-called High Street, part of the A5, is nothing like a high street, except at the war memorial, with a few slightly villagey-looking shops and restaurants surrounding it. Most of the High Street consists of car showrooms, car maintenance businesses, warehouses, and storage sheds, with a few seedy shops and "cafs".

Edgware's "High Street" on the A5. Yes, it really does look this miserable. (Google Earth)

Development of the High Street, my neighbour (who has lived in the area all of his 88 years) tells me, was aborted by the development of Station Road, the road in which the Underground and bus stations are located, when the Northern Line came. Station Road became the main shopping street of Edgware, its affluent middle-class intentions signalled in the somewhat grand redbrick 1930s architecture of some of the shops and flats above them, and featuring one big, impressive pub, the Railway Hotel, built in mock "Stratford-upon-Avon" tudor style. The Railway Hotel is a suburban icon that now stands empty, falling-apart and uncared for by anyone, it would appear, including the Borough of Barnet. The prosperity of Station Road was, in its turn, usurped by the construction of a covered shopping mall off of it, in the 1990s, now called the Broadwalk Centre, including a Sainsburys supermarket and a massive car-park.

The boarded-up Railway Hotel in Station Road, Edgware (Google Earth)

The spiritual and public centre of Edgware should be the crossroads of Station Road, the High Street, and Whitchurch Lane (which leads to the church of St Mary, where Handel once played the organ and rehearsed his works). By this crossroads stands the parish church of St Margaret of Antioch. But this crossroads is dominated by through-traffic on the A5, and another massive 1930s pub – a very ugly one this time, the Masons Arms, and dismal, cheap 60s or 70s concrete architecture housing betting shops and fast food joints.

The "Masons Arms" crossroads at Edgware town centre (Googe Earth)

One big office block was built in Edgware, I guess in the 1970s: Premier House in Station Road, which at one time was the HQ of the Green Shield Stamps empire (who is old enough to remember licking those for their mum?). But it doesn't seem to have brought much benefit to the area. Just beyond this, going up Station Road, is the pedestrian entrance to the Broadwalk Centre (they ban bikes, one reason I do not go there), and then the bus station, cramped onto a very unsatisfactory site which means that buses have to go in and out on the same narrow road, making a tight right-angle turn off Station Road, the in and out flows of buses crossing over within the bus station. The bus station also has the habit of playing excruciating mock-baroque "easy listening" music to anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck waiting there, apparently to deter the "yoof" loiterers.

On weekdays during the rush hour, Station Road suffers from massive congestion, with extra pollution from the large number of buses using it and the bus station. It is a very poor walking environment, with staggered two-stage crossings with islands and cages for pedestrians to negotiate, and walking-unfriendly, wide-mouthed side road junctions at roads such as Manor Park Crescent and Edgwarebury Lane, plus a profusion of pedestrian "safety" barriers (because pedestrians can't be trusted to cross in the "right" places, and cars can't be trusted to stay on the roads). The worst place is between the A5 crossroads and Premier house, where the road in and out of the Broadwalk car park interrupts pedestrian progress on Station Road with an utterly inappropriate five lanes of traffic at a signalised junction where  it seems to take forever to get the green man to get across. Needless to say, there is no safe or appropriate way to cycle into this car park, though there is a bit of cycle parking there. There is a narrow, mal-designed cycle lane which skirts the inbound lifting barriers, but, as pedestrians also seem to have no properly-designed route from this part of Station Road to the car park, they walk here, understandably. There are several narrow pedestrian footpaths that also lead into the car park from other directions, but they all ban bikes.

Churchway, Edgware, the dismal place where five lanes of traffic in and out of the Broadwalk car park meet Station Road.

Edgware epitomises, in my view, much of what has gone wrong with British town centres, which are now failing, with their confusion between the transport and social and commercial functions of roads and streets, and their enslavement to planning for people in cars. There is no attempt at what you see in Dutch towns as the core of planning policy, the separation of "roads for movement" from "streets for communities". Edgware has a by-pass, has long had it, the A41 Edgware Way dual carriageway. This has no shops on it, is almost parallel to Station Road – running only, at minimum, 500m north of it – and so should carry all the through-traffic. But in the normal British way, the construction of the bypass was not accompanied by the removal of the town-centre from the through-traffic system. So every road is clogged by cars, parked and moving, which have multiplied to fill all the space allocated to them, with short, unnecessary car journeys facilitated at almost every point by the planning decisions that have been taken.

So when I found, though the Barnet Council website, this video about Edgware, entitled Portas Pilot: Station Road, Edgware, I was intrigued to know what it would suggest for improving the area. Having watched it, I have to say I am none the wiser as to what this "Portas" vision is.

If you view this on the YouTube site you discover that there is a whole gentre of these Portas Pilot videos, from all over the country, including one from Sussex entitled, slightly amusingly, Seaford Shags Portas Pilot bid. There seems to be a small industry of producing these videos. Well, I can't see how the production of these videos is going to save one failing town centre.

The Edgware video gives quite a good impression of what the place is actually like, and shows most of the features I have mentioned above. But there is no planning or public policy solution here, just well-intentioned, but empty, blather and piffle from a variety of people. In fact, worse, it contains just more of the same historically-failed thinking as before, coming from the policeman, who thinks it important that it is made easier for people to park to access the shops that are not in the Broadwalk Centre, while we see, behind him, a Station Road full of parked cars.

I won't go here into all the evidence that shows that, even in apparently car-dependent places like this, most journeys to shops are not by car, and most expenditure in local shops is not by people arriving in cars. I won't go into the lack of evidence that  exists for the slightest relationship between the provision of car-parking, its cost, and the success of shopping centres. A good post was provided on this subject on At War With The Motorist – see also many other relevant posts on that superb blog.

All I'll say is this: People who wish to drive to a shopping centre, park in a huge free car park, and wonder round a covered mall, have ample opportunities to do such, and good luck to them. There are huge roads provided for them to get to these places, and they use them, in this area to access the Brent Cross Shopping Centre (which certainly has played a major part in undermining NW London centres like Edgware over the last 40 years), Westfield at White City, Westfield at Stratford, The Harlequin in Watford, St Anns Centre in Harrow, and so on – maybe even Bluewater in Kent.

Other people want something completely different. I mean, completely different, as an experience, and will look for where they can find it, or satisfy all their shopping needs from a comfortable keyboard at home, and their social needs in other places.

Edgware town centre, only one mile from my house, will not be seeing much of my custom in the foreseeable future. What would it take to get me there? Well, if the boroughs or Transport for London built me a convenient and safe bike route to get there, that would be a big thing. What that would have to mean in practice would be Dutch-style segregated cycle tracks along the A5, which is amply wide enough to take them. What else? Pedestrianise Station Road, at least during business hours. Demolish the ugly buildings and restore and care for the nice ones. Use the vast area allocated to car parking better. Create more intelligent access arrangements for the buses, and allow cycle access everywhere.

Without these measures, I am sorry, but I have to say:

Edgware town centre, Portas Pilot you may be, 
You are still the weakest link, so it's goodbye from me.

The A5 Edgware High Street. No room for segregated bike tracks, or course. (Google Earth)

A damp but colourful Spring Clean, and pavement parking in Brent

I am sure Climate Rush's Spring Clean protest against London's filthy air quality, and against Boris Johnson's policy of trying to conceal the problem by gluing the pollution particles to the roads by treating them with calcium magnesium acetate powder near monitoring stations, would have attracted a much larger crowd, had not London been deluged with heavy rain for most of the day on Thursday. As it was, a small but spirited and colourful crowd marched from DEFRA in Smith Square to Parliament Square waving feather dusters and banners, to make the point that obeying the UK's legally-binding international treaty obligations on clean air should not be regarded as optional by the government and the Mayor of London. The lives of those who die because of our polluted air (estimates range from between 19,000 and 29,000 per year for the UK) should not be treated so lightly.

Spring Cleaners at DEFRA in Smith Square

Feather dusters to the fore at Pasrliament Square. The police would not allow an occupation of a lane of Westmister Bridge, so a picnic was held in the square instead.

Another group who seem to think that obeying the law is optional are some of Brent Council's drivers. Here I witnessed not one, but two of Brent's vehicles parked on the pavement in Stag Lane NW9. The more distant one is clearly making the footway impassable.

Brent Council minibuses on Stag Lane

Perhaps the drivers of these vehicles have become confused about the function of the footways because of the way in which Brent, along with many other authorities, is now designating parts of them, in many places, for parking, as here, not far away, in Church Lane, Kingsbury NW9.

Church Lane NW9

I have looked up Brent's criteria for deciding where the designation of footway parking is appropriate.
It says here:

Brent Council has the power to exempt certain streets from the regulations to enable drivers to park either partially or fully on the footway to maintain the safe flow of traffic. At the same time, the conditions must be right to protect pedestrians, so where exemptions are granted, there is sufficient access for pedestrians without being forced into the road. There are certain criteria which have to be met before a street is granted exemption and they have been approved by Brent Council's Highway Committee.

So it's to do with maintaining "the safe flow of traffic". But here is a wider view of the street in question.

This pavement parking exemption is clearly just here to allow parking outside this small parade of shops to be doubled up, both sides of the service road, and still allow space for a car or van to get through. There is in fact pavement parking allowed on both sides of the service road.This has nothing to do with maintaining a "safe flow of traffic". The flow of traffic on the road is unconnected with this, being maintained by the presence of double yellow lines. And note how the word "traffic" is here being used implicitly to mean "motor vehicles", not pedestrians or cyclists. And note, again, the enormous total width available on this road, as so often in suburban north Brent, but that clearly there is not seen to be the space available for any sort of cycle facilities. Well, there are "cycle facilities", if you include cycle parking stands with that phrase. The part of the pavement that remains after the chunk taken out of it by the car parking has also been used for these curious, newly-installed stands by the "Biking Borough".

But that's not what I mean by "cycle facilities". For Church Lane is a difficult and intimidating street to cycle along, being a rat run, with high speeds, intermittent blocks of parking and stopping buses which a cyclist needs to pull out around into the 30+ mph traffic stream, wide lanes in both directions encouraging these high speeds, with occasional pinch points at the pedestrian islands where drivers tend to try to overtake cyclists dangerously, and prevalent poor driving standards, the norm in north Brent. By "cycle facilities" I mean space in which to cycle with a measure of subjective safety, which would mean cycle lanes or cycle tracks. The space is clearly there, but the street would need some rearranging to accommodate them. At present, it is arranged to allow lots of parking, and excess space on the road, which leads to speeding. Note how none of the several cycle stands are in use, in the middle of a working day. This is a measure of how little cycling there is here, itself a measure of the bad environment.

But to go back to Brent's pavement parking "exception criteria", we read:

• Exemption to be granted only where parking of vehicles wholly within the carriageway reduces the carriageway width to less than 3 metres.
• A minimum footway width of 1.2 metres be available for pedestrians.
• Roads in shopping and other busy pedestrian areas not to be considered.

There are more criteria, you can read them if you wish. But note that the first three have all been disregarded here. The parking of vehicles wholly in the carriageway would not reduce the width of the carriageway to less than 3 metres, even if it were allowed on both sides, because the carriageway is the main road, not the service road. And even if you interpret carriageway as the service road, which I think is technically wrong, you could still have more than 3 metres width, with parking, if you put double-yellow lines on one side. There is no law, national or local, which says you need parking on both sides of a narrow service road.

The second criteria is also broken: there is not 1.2 metres available for pedestrians on the outer pavement. Look at the placing of the tree in the first picture of the row of parked cars. And, clearly, this is a shopping area, so the third criterion is violated.

I would like to know why Brent's traffic planners are ignoring the council's own criteria for allowing pavement parking. Of course, I know why. It is due to political pressure. There is a recession on. There are lots of small local shops going out of business. There is a prevailing public feeling here, in the outer suburbs, that trade for small shops is inextricably linked to the availability of car parking, and that parking restrictions, and even parking charges, are a contributory factor in businesses going under. There is a feeling that these shops cannot compete with supermarkets, with shopping centres like Brent Cross and Westfield, and with the retail sheds, for the want of the practically unlimited free parking that these provide. I have encountered this view at the Brent Council local Consultative Forum for this area. The alternative view, that of course I have tried to put, that most shoppers, even in these car-dependent suburbs, do not actually arrive by car, and that dedicating the streets to cars in this way produces an uninviting shopping environment for those using bus, foot, and bike, gets very little shrift.

The truth is that shops are having a hard time irrespective of parking regimes, and they would be having a hard time if there was not a recession. People don't have to go to shops now. I rarely do so. There is the on-line alternative, for everything. The more unpleasant the streets are made, to try to pack in more parked cars, the less shopping I will do in small local shops like these. I suspect I am not alone in this. To compete with the internet and the shopping malls, the small parades of suburban shops need to be able to provide something better than this inconvenient shabbiness on the fringes of a dangerous rat-run. And that's down to local authorities having a bit more backbone, and planning vision, than this.