New Road for Elmer & Wellingtonia Avenue's

Following a meeting Cllr Mann set up with residents some 6 months ago to discuss the problems of a badly neglected road, work started this week in Wellingtonia and Elmer Avenues in Havering-Atte-Bower on replacing the old road surface, over the years it has become badly neglected and was in need of major works to level the road and to remove all of the holes.

The problem with the road has been the reluctance of Havering Council to acknowledge that it has to deal with the road, although it is a private road and not an adopted highway (like almost all of the roads in the Borough) the owners of the said private road, or actually Havering Council.

As land owners, the Council owns many roads in the Borough and in particular all of the approach roads to Havering Country Park, including Wellingtonia Avenue, Elmer Avenue, Pinewood Road, Kilnwood Lane and Clockhouse Lane (by the Pinewoods Pub).

They where all compulsory purchased by the former Greater London Council in 1982 when the Country Park was formed; the idea was to protect the park from the ingress of new buildings and as the Park is land-locked, would safe guard any unauthorised development on and around its entrance.

The work is set to take another week and involves over 200mm of old road being dug out and then replaced with a type 1 hoggin that will be levelled and rolled in place, the surface should then be good for many years.

Cllr Mann said, "I have been involved with the residents in trying to get the Council to take its responsibilities seriously and to resurface the roads around the Country park for almost 4 years, after hitting my head on a brick wall for a lot of that time, I finally enlisted the help of the former Chief Executive of Havering (Stephen Evans, now retired) to push this along, to his credit he did start getting officers to deal with this situation before he retired.

However, it took the threat of Court Action under the Highways Act 1980 to get it going, I am just glad at long last the residents have got some justice for their campaign, all that leaves now is for the Council to start working out how it will deal with the other roads in Havering Park Ward that are privately owned by the Council and need repairing".