Another New Road Surface for the Village

The long running saga of the road condition in Wellingtonia and Elmer Avenue’s in Havering Village looks set to be resolved again, later this month, with the laying of tarmac over the work that was carried out last year at a cost of approx £30,000.

The new work is being carried out, due to a huge dust problem that was created by the type of surface dressing used. Every time, the sun came out the surface dried off and a fine dust was thrown up into the air, causing a huge health issue and covering the resident’s cars and homes in a fine powder. No cost has been placed on the new work yet.

Cllr Mann set up a meeting with residents some 6 months ago to discuss the problems of the badly neglected roads, work was then carried out by StreetCare to replace the old road surface, which over the years had 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.

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".

The New work is set to start in the next two weeks and involves the existing surface in Elmer Avenue being converted to tarmac, leaving a narrow drainage strip of 0.85m either side of the tarmac. In Wellingtonia Avenue, the area from Bower Farm Road to the park gates will be converted to tarmac leaving natural drainage where the grass strip runs along the frontage of the properties and to the side of the community hall which was previously untouched..

Cllr Mann said “Let us hope that this time the work actually improves the roads in the village, this has gone on long enough and our residents deserve better then this, they have suffered for many years”