Residents start to move into Queen Mary's Place

The first phase (of four) of the Queen Mary's Place development off Roehampton Lane has been completed and residents are beginning to move in.

For those of you unfamiliar with the area or the plans, this is the half of the Queen Mary's Hospital site - including Roehampton House - that was sold off to fund the building of the new Queen Mary's.

I've been writing a lot about planning issues recently due to the huge problems the high rise plans for East Putney and the Tory Council's botched and ill-judged scheme for Danebury Avenue redevelopment are creating. Queen Mary's Place is a more sensitive and thoughtful plan in design terms but it is still going to create massive problems.

When complete Queen Mary's Place will provide nearly 500 new homes - probably housing around 700-800 people. Most of the properties are being pitched at affluent professional families, most of whom will have more than one car. The only way to get to Queen Mary's Place is via Roehampton Lane, already one of the most congested roads in Putney.

And just harking back to the Danebury Avenue plans, to this traffic chaos, the Conservatives also want to add huge amounts of additional traffic - customer and service vehicles - to a supermarket behind Roehampton Lane. All without a single line explaining where the extra road space to carry these vehicles will come from - let alone an explanation of how articulated lorries will squeeze down Danebury Avenue which they have no plans to widen.

Planning matters - it is about so much more than just the aesthetics of good and bad architecture. Planning determines whether a community will thrive or fail; whether crime levels will be high or low; whether an area will be respected or vandalised; how residents get too and from their homes; what local services they'll benefit from; how crammed-in or spaced out people will be; what recreational activities we can enjoy; what types of people move to an area; even how a particular area votes. Simply put, planning is arguably the last substantive power local councils like ours has.

Yes, planning matters. But I'm afraid Putney and Wandsworth Conservatives have built up a quite dreadful record of failing to plan prudently, purposefully and successfully. And so they bear the responsibility for making our area worse for generations to come.

For more on Queen Mary's Place visit the site's sales website.