Monday, 23 June 2025

Edgware: The Canary in the Coal Mine for London's Suburbs - Guest Blog from Anuta Zack at the Save Edgware Campaign

Guest post from at the  Anuta Zack Save Our Edgware Campaign

Edgware is under threat — and so is the future of London’s suburbs.
Ballymore and Transport for London (TfL) are pushing a high-density mega-development that doesn’t just endanger Edgware — it risks setting a dangerous precedent for speculative, unsafe, and unsustainable redevelopment across the capital.
This isn’t just a redevelopment of the Broadwalk Shopping Centre. It includes the bus station, the surface-level bus garage, and the town’s only public car park. All of these vital assets are being swept aside in favour of over two dozen tower blocks, unaffordable housing, and infrastructure that doesn’t even meet basic safety standards.
Please voice your objection by filling this simple form: https://saveouredgware.co.uk/object/by-form/

An Underground Garage With No Safety Regulations
At the heart of the scheme is an untested underground electric bus garage — located directly beneath thousands of new homes.
There are no UK building regulations that support this type of structure. The London Fire Brigade has raised serious concerns — including the risk of high-intensity electric fires, inadequate ventilation, and even structural collapse of the buildings above in the event of an incident.
Equally alarming: Ballymore and TfL are proposing, as a fallback, to use the space for a diesel bus garage underground — despite the fact that no such facility exists anywhere in the UK. Why? Because the idea of diesel buses running underground has always been considered dangerously unviable — due to carbon monoxide, explosive risk, and lack of air circulation.
This isn’t regeneration. It’s reckless experimentation with public safety.


Outrageous Density: A Town-Sized Development Within a Town
Ballymore is proposing 3,828 new residential units — in a ward that currently contains just7,212 households.
That means increasing the local population by more than 50% in a single development, without proportional investment in infrastructure, healthcare, education, or transport capacity. This isn’t solving a housing crisis — it’s creating a services crisis, while setting a dangerous precedent for hyper-density in suburbs not designed to absorb it.
And yet, despite this immense scale, essential transport facilities are being reduced, not expanded.




A Model That Destroys Local Economies
Edgware’s high street and town centre economy are facing destruction.
The proposal would:
  • Remove all commuter car parking, and cut public parking from a capacity of 1,035 spaces to just 292 — barely enough for a supermarket, let alone a town centre with a catchment of 400,000 people;
  • Close the covered bus station and instead run all buses along a series of bus stops on Station Road — Edgware’s main shopping street. This would turn a busy pedestrian and retail area into a noisy, polluted bus corridor, making the town centre less safe and less welcoming, particularly for older residents, families, and people with mobility challenges;
  • Cause up to 20 years of phased construction, choking off footfall and displacing long-established small businesses.
Station Road, the spine of Edgware’s economy, cannot survive this scale of disruption. The “new shopping centre” model Ballymore proposes has already failed in nearby towns — producing hollow retail spaces beneath towers, disconnected from the communities they are supposed to serve.

A Town That Will No Longer Qualify as a Town
In 2013, Barnet Council’s own strategy documents stated:
“The average weekly footfall through the centre is estimated to be 130,000, with a broad catchment population of 400,000.”
It was these figures — along with Edgware’s strategic transport interchange andregionally significant shopping centre — that earned it designation as a Major Town Centre in the London Plan.
This scheme removes the very features that justified that status.
Without a functioning integrated bus station, without adequate parking, and without a viable shopping core, Edgware will no longer qualify as a Major Town Centre — even as it is forced to absorb one of the largest housing increases in the borough.
This is not regeneration. It is planning vandalism.

A Dangerous Precedent for All of London
TfL is now functioning not as a public transport steward, but as a land developer — one willing to:
  • Eliminate critical transport infrastructure,
  • Gamble with unregulated, unsafe experimental designs, and
  • Funnel public assets into speculative private development.
If this scheme proceeds, it will become a template for unsafe and unsustainable development across outer London — undermining community integrity, reducing infrastructure, and accelerating the breakdown of suburban town centres.

Edgware Deserves Better. So Does London.
We are not anti-development. We are pro-safety. Pro-economy. Pro-community.
This scheme fails on all three counts.
  • You do not build thousands of homes on top of a fire hazard.
  • You do not destroy a town’s transport interchange and shopping economy.
  • You do not erase a community to test a speculative model.
Edgware is the canary in the coal mine. If this goes ahead here, it will not stop here.
#SaveOurEdgware
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Anuta Zack is a memb er of the Save Edgware Campaign. Guest blogs are always welcome.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well sad Anuta. Why are Barnet not only agreeing to this plan but helping financially! Who, apart from Ballymore, will benefit!? Certainly not local families! Oh I forgot about all the overseas investors, who buy new builds in London and leave them empty as future investments .

Anonymous said...

When I fill in the form and press Submit something seems to go wrong...

Roy said...

Such a major increase in population has to be serviced and supported. The lack of this in the plan is so concerning and would love to know the impact assessments to the communities in the immediate vicinity. Its impact in long term does not appear to be thought through