Welcome to the alternative Lewisham Gateway website
Send a letter of objection
Download a Word document, you can send as it is or use as a basis for your objections and comments.
NEW Send your email of objection to Planning here. This link should open up your email application and display a ready made letter. Just be sure to include your address and the date at the top, and your name at the end of the email.
You can also download a petition – get your friends, neighbours and work colleagues to sign it.
Get in touch with us at info@lewishamgateway.org and we'll give you details of where to send your completed petition.
If you would like to be kept up to date with important developments in the campaign send an email to updatelist@lewishamgateway.org
Outline planning permission has been requested by Lewisham Gateway Developments Ltd for the Lewisham town centre scheme.
It has not yet been approved.
This website has been set up by a group of Lewisham residents living on the west side of the development between the town centre and Hillyfields and Ladywell. We oppose the proposals, although we agree that it would be good to find some solution to the traffic problem in Lewisham and to provide some more amenities in the centre. However, this could be quite simple and cheap: it does not need a £250m development that will blight the area forever. We believe that the planners have failed to think things through. As a result there will MORE traffic congestion, WORSE pollution, FEWER AND WORSE QUALITY open spaces and the real possibility of unoccupied buildings creating an URBAN DESERT in a few years time. We believe that the only people who will benefit from the scheme are property developers and speculators.
This website unpicks the planning documents to prove our points. And we have an alternative, sustainable vision for Lewisham town centre that will make Lewisham attractive for local residents and visitors.
Time is short to stop them changing the character of Lewisham forever and blighting the landscape and the environment. You need to act now!
Write to your M.P. and you local councilllors! Details here
Attend your councillors’ or you M.P.’s surgery! Details here
Write to Pete Smith – the Lewisham planning officer. Details here
Contact us at info@lewishamgateway.org
How Lewisham's green spaces and rivers are going to disappear
You can see with this simple map how much green space residents are going to lose if the Gateway scheme and the Loampit Vale scheme go ahead.The new green space within the development — 'Confluence Gardens' — will be about the same size as Quaggy gardens is now — or approximately the same size as the slightly above average Lewisham resident garden. But surrounded by high rise buildings and subject to 'distressing' levels of wind.
With their usual creativity, the developers, in working out their figures for the loss of open space, have included paved areas in their proposed open space provision, and they can easily make it seem that they have provided more space.
In fact the amount of green space has gone down – from 4423 square metres to 1737 sq m. A loss of 2686 sq m, and this doesn't include the Loampit vale development where even more green land will be lost.
These figures, incidentally, don't include the centre of the existing roundabout, the developers said that the area was 'inaccessible' (from this we can also then assume that the developers didn’t have access to Ordnance Survey maps to do their calculations) and various other parcels of land which could add a further 2000 square metres to the loss of green space.
The rivers have the same treatment – a loss of 304 sq m, although in their defence (not that they don't say this themselves) the rivers have been 're-engineered to bring them into the public realm'.
The 'low-h' road system examined
The 'low-h' road system is a complicated road layout. There are many things wrong with it and it has the potential to make the traffic worse than it is now. Here, with the aid of a graphic, we pick up on some of the issues, raised not only by us, but by Tfl as well, who have said that 'the current application appears overall to be insufficiently advanced to be supported in its current state'.
Click here to be taken to the link (this will open a new window in your browser).
What Lewisham could look like in the future
Lewisham, if the developers have their way, will be a greatly changed place in the future. Although the design detail is as yet undecided they have provided enough information to make us aware of the 'massing'. This is an 'artists impression', based on information gathered from the developers documentation, of how the development might look. Please note however, the green space still visible on the right hand side will disappear. More to come when the artists can take up his brushes again.