50 signatures reached
To: Southwark Council
Preserve Southwark's street trees
Please stop refusing to replace damaged trees in Southwark's streets
Why is this important?
Southwark Council has a new policy about tree planting: that no trees are to be planted on pavements less than 2.1m wide, excluding the kerb. That is, as you'll see if you take your tape measure outside, a pretty wide pavement; most of our residential streets are narrower.
Many of those streets already have trees on them. These trees are beloved parts of the neighbourhood: they freshen the environment, add beauty through the seasons, and make London feel a better place for people to live and thrive.
The trouble is, Southwark's policy means that if any of these much-loved trees get damaged, vandalised or diseased, the Council is now simply cutting them down, rooting them out and paving over where they used to be, leaving behind a sadder, duller street.
It's one thing to say that you won't plant new trees - though many of us would be happy to see more trees even in narrow streets - but quite another to say you won't replace old ones that were seen as a popular adornment, not a nuisance, by the people who actually lived in the area.
We love these trees, and when they die, we mourn them. Refusing to replace them doesn't make the neighbourhoods more convenient: it impoverishes them, and probably decreases the value of our property as well. Southwark Council, we are asking you to do the right thing for people and for nature and change your policy so that trees that meet with misfortunes can be replaced even if they were growing in the smaller streets.
We, the people who live in these streets, want the trees. Please hear us.
