The overall site of Woodberry Down is contained on three sides by the New River, and on the fourth, to the North by Green Lanes, and for the rest by the end of the old council buildings, or their modern replacements. You can see this in the image below which is taken from a Berkeley Homes presentation made to the WDCO board
From the image the division of North from South by Seven Sisters Road can be seen, marked by the pink stripe running right-left (east-west) across the middle
The present situation
Woodberry Down Councillor Sarah Young, Cabinet Member for Climate Change, Environment and Transport, has kindly provided the following commentary
Please feel free to share this response with all WDCO Board members.
Improvements to Seven Sisters Road were approved (in principle) as part of the last Woodberry Down Masterplan. As you know, this is currently under review.
In summary, the proposals were to narrow the section of Seven Sisters Road which runs through Woodberry Down Estate, to widen the pavement, to improve greening, and to add crossings and improve the existing crossings. The overarching aim is to bring the two sides of the estate together and improve the public realm. Berkeley Homes have put forward funding for these changes and the rest of the money will be provided by Transport for London as this is a TfL road.
No designs have been approved yet. The next stage (as well as the next Masterplan review before Planning Committee) is for TfL to present us with draft proposals. TfL have agreed to attend the WD round table and, I think, WDCO Board to present their draft designs so that WDCO can feed in. This is in advance of any formal consultation. LB Hackney’s Streetscene Team will also attend.
As well as direct engagement with WDCO, draft designs will undergo full public consultation so that all members of the community can feed in.
It might also be helpful for you to know that (as I mentioned at WDCO Board) LB Hackney and LB Haringey are keen to get TfL to tackle Manor House junction as part of this project. There is a TfL cycle route which is intended to run from Camden to Tottenham which currently only runs as far as Finsbury Park (Cycleway C50). In order to complete this, the cycleway will need to get around Manor House junction and along the Woodberry Down section of Seven Sisters Road. This provides an excellent opportunity to make real improvements to safety and convenience at Manor House.
While I can find lots of material about the section of this route from Finsbury Park to York Way, I can find nothing about its extension to Seven Sisters Road. I will make further enquiries of Streetscene.
Narrowing of Seven Sisters Road in the Masterplan
I have been supplied with this plan view of Seven Sisters Road by Berkeley Homes and have been told that this is the “the ‘current scheme’ which TfL are currently updating – once the Delivery Partners have a revised one, we will share this with WDCO.“
and that
TfL are aware of the access points proposed by this Masterplan and are working to these.
From a pdf supplied by Berkeley Homes converted to an image by PDF24.
Looking at the lanes set out in these diagrams the cross section of the road is still very much like that set out in the SNC Lavalin Atkins proposal of 2018 https://wdco.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SNC-Lavalin-Atkins-Seven-Sisters-Road-Scheme-July-2018.pdf
Hackney’s Regular reports to WDCO
In most months Hackney includes a few paragraphs about Seven Sisters Road in its report to the WDCO Board. Should you wish you can see these paragraphs ion the attached file. In summary, for the first half of the year the reports barely changed, except that a planned January meeting took place in April and some non-specific undertakings were repeated.
For the second half of the year more specifics on the difficulty posed by traffic at the Manor House junction were made clear. In the December report it is made explicit that no detailed reports to the WDCO board are planned but that the SSR Steering Group will report first to the Round Table.
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