Ladywell Community Planting Day

Well done to LVIG and thank you to Envirowork Lewisham and all the local residents who came along and made today's planting day in Ladywell Village such a success. Contrary to the weather forecasts, it stayed dry and about twenty of us helped to replant the existing planters and bed up another four.

Three generations from one family took part - grandmother, mother and 14-month-old baby, who brought her own bucket and spade with her!

The plants will take a few weeks to get established, but Ladywell Road and the corner of Algernon Road are already looking more cheerful.

The highways works that we were assured would happen before the event didn't happened, but I've been told they will happen soon. The consultants have been and looked again at the guardrails, and those with white paint marks either side are the ones they plan to remove. They is some kind of question mark over new government regulations on what consultation needs to take place, which hopefully will be sorted soon to allow the works to go ahead. Six sites where it is possible to plant trees on Ladywell Road and the end of Algernon Road have been identified, and hopefully these will be planted in the Autumn. The options are fairly limited due to lots of underground cables, but six trees will still be a lot better than nothing.

It's possible that the planters that were formally on Loampit Vale may be moved to Ladywell Road as well, but that's all still to be confirmed. Apparently TfL (who are responsible for Loampit Vale) said they had to be moved, but we would like to use them elsewhere as our localities fund paid for them. I think we will need to look and see what can be done to improve things along Loampit Vale - I'd like to see some street trees, but we would need to get TfL's permission for these.

Brockley Road - watch this space, hopefully we will have news of a mini-makeover for a section of that soon as well.

The obligatory posed politician's action photo, suitable for use in ward newsletters etc etc. This one is genuine - I was planting stuff, but as the SLP photographer arrived after we had finished the planting we had to do some pretend gardening for him!

You can see more photos from the day on Flickr, tagged under ladywellcommunityplantingday.