Almost unbelievably, the council is proposing to erect a massive, illuminated advertising hoarding on the north side of East Hill at the junction with Trinity Road – as high as a three-storey house, or two and- a-half buses.

Two ugly hoardings have just been erected by the council on bridges over Trinity Road, despite local opposition.

The new hoarding, too, would be ugly and obtrusive over a wide area, including Wandsworth Common and the local conservation area, and it, too, would distract motorists, risking accidents.

Local residents are furious. No one, no councillor, has expressed public support for an enormous, overwhelming piece of street clutter and glitz.

Council officers have tried hard to justify it: the hoarding would not be “entirely alien and incongruous”; it would “on balance” not cause “unacceptable harm” to the local scene; its ads would be “unlikely”

to be “dangerously distracting”

(emphases added).

Convinced? The Wandsworth Society is not. Local concerns cannot be brushed aside. The planning applications committee needs, in our view, to look very critically at its own council’s application (2015/0507) this Thursday evening – and reject it.

DAVID KIRK
Chairman Wandsworth Society