Lights on and ready to go: Silvertown tunnel looking complete
With little more than a month until the Silvertown tunnel opens recent trips past the northern tunnel entrance shows the area as good as complete.
Passing by last week showed traffic signals all working and going through their cycles, with pedestrian countdown timers heading to zero for nobody – yet.
Transport for London have gone to the effort of landscaping areas but also stuck in an ugly six foot stainless steel fence. If spending millions on landscaping at least paint the damn fence so it looks less conspicuous – or use a less intrusive design.
There’s ways to prevent access that aren’t quite so harsh on the eye. They’ve even partly used more appealing fencing design in part around the tunnel’s control portal but not elsewhere.
Tunnel opening
If no snags hit the project (and it any did it’d likely be with internal systems) then the opening date will be little over a month on 7th April.
On that date tolls will apply not only to the new tunnel but also Blackwall tunnel.
At £2.2bn the tunnel is an expensive piece of infrastructure that was built and will be maintained by private consortium Riverlinx. Toll revenues will pay off construction costs in coming decades.
Public transport
With work wrapping up a long-proposed DLR station near the tunnel site is still unconfirmed. A Transport for London meeting this week states discussions are still ongoing.
It’s supposed to serve around 5,000 new homes but not a single plot has yet commenced.
Planning approval was given five years ago. It’s running many years behind schedule – and timescales were drawn up with full knowledge the tunnel was being built.
That isn’t a reason for non-existent progress. Here’s when each phase was due to start.
It’s GLA land to be developed in a private partnership with Keystone. Add it to the list of many sites across London where planning approval is given but little then happens.
So whilst the tunnel has met its deadline to open, plans for a new DLR station and housing nearby are many, many years late – and counting.
Again those houses would be directly under the city airport flight path. Nobody would like to live there. Until city airport closes houses will only be built at a very very slow level. Same at Silvertown quays and Greenwich peninsula.
City airport stops the development of 30,000+ homes desperately needed.
As long as the homes are properly built with air conditioning, triple glazing and other sound proofing you will never know. Keystone was just land banking, GLA should have a clause in the contract that construction has to start and be completed by certain dates.
There’s probably hundreds of thousands of people in London if not millions that are in poor housing and so locations below a flight path would still be preferable than costs to live in flat shares or those in temporary housing, overcrowded dwellings or homes miles from the nearest station to get to work and similar problems.
I’m not sure the airport alone can be excused for inactive developers. Extremely slow builds appear an issue all over the capital regardless of noise including but not limited to Earl’s Court, Canada Water, Deptford and even many areas of Stratford to name but three.
Having said that I do agree City Airport closing would allow many more desperately needed homes and it acts as a block on far more development in terms of land take and heights.
@Ole and @Ed: close London City Airport and lose thousands of jobs?