Good morning

Last night, Jeremy, Alastair, Colin, Alice and I had a very interesting, exciting, positive and, crucially, productive meeting with key members of Southwark Council including:




Councillor Barrie Hargrove (Cabinet Member for Transport, Environment and Recycling)

Des Waters (Head of Public Realm at Southwark Council)

Councillor Dora Dixon-Fyle (Cabinet Member for Health and Adult Social Care)


Councillor Peter John (Leader of Southwark Council)


Sally Crew (Southwark Council transport planning)


Councillor Abdul Mohamed (Cabinet Member for Equalities and Community Engagement + Southwark Champion for Cycling)

Councillor Michael Situ



Having developed it together at Southwark Cyclists' monthly meetings, Jeremy was given the opportunity to present the above group with Southwark Cyclists' "Cycling in Southwark - the Opportunity". And what a superb job he did. Please have a look at it if you haven't already (please find it attached as a PDF so that it is much smaller).


The clear messages conveyed within the presentation about the need to be more ambitious, creating safe 'green links', getting more people to cycle, capitalising on current key development schemes etc, set the tone for the meeting and provided a catalyst for us all to discuss our hopes, experiences, expectations, challenges and targets both on a practical and detailed level as well as more broadly.

We firmly believe that this meeting demonstrated the benefits of a positive, constructive approach to campaigning.

It goes without saying that we are all entitled to an opinion but when we are all fundamentally working towards the same goals (just with a different approach at times), it seems incredibly churlish, divisive and counter productive to be attacking both us and the Council. On occasion, the charges against us have been nothing short of absurd and it has proved hard to know how to respond or even whether we should. 'What would Barry do?', I ask myself.



But back to the matter in hand - what happens next? 



In the next few days Southwark Cyclists and Southwark Council will be producing a joint press statement setting out our goals, our plans to meet regularly as a working group and the achievements and progress we've made so far. We will also start to look in detail at our suggestions for ‘green links’ in the borough.



Many thanks to everyone who attended and in particular to Jeremy.

Watch this space.



Alex Crawford


Coordinator | Southwark Cyclists
0777 599 0087
alex@...
www.southwarkcyclists.org.uk