Photo Gavin Rendall
A local resident in Thames Street is so alarmed at the speed and weight of traffic in our historic centre that he has started a petition. Support has been strong. He is not alone,. But residents have been trying to get Surrey highways and local council to put measures in place for many years, to no avail. We understand one local stal-wart lay down in the road to stop traffic some years ago. Still nothing changes. The letter below is a reasoned and meas-ured request. Lets hope someone takes notice this time before the fabric of the Georgian houses is irreversibly affected.
“I moved to Lower Sunbury at the end of 2020, to a Grade II listed building in Thames Street. I’m a retired Chartered Engineer and have loved my time here so far. It is a delight-ful area with a fantastic heritage and beautiful surroundings. It didn’t take me long, though, to realise that the existing 20 mph speed limit on Thames Street was largely being ignored, especially in the non-commute hours. I found this alarming because the narrow road and pavement makes this particularly hazardous for pedestrians (including me!).
I was also surprised by how much my Grade II listed house shook whenever a heavy vehi-cle or bus went past my house. In addition to speed, much of this seems linked to the steep ramps of the speed bumps. Talking to my nearest neighbours I discovered they experi-enced the same thing and were as frustrated as me. There are so many lovely heritage build-ings (some more than 250 years old) along Thames Street and this massive shuddering will be slowly damaging their structures and underpinnings.
So my partner Jane and I prepared a petition to try and address these problems, with a pro-posal to install a speed camera and to smooth out (not remove) the speed bumps. Over sev-eral days we went up and down Thames Street with flyers and received fascinating feedback from both local businesses and residents. What we thought would take 1-2 hours actual-ly took 3 times that because people wanted to vent their frustrations. There is a clearly a lot of support for change based on pedestrian safety and protection of the buildings. There was also an overall feeling that the amount of traffic through Thames Street is getting great-er with time. It was enlightening to find out that many people had written individually in the past to complain to Surrey County Coun-cil but had made little or no progress.
The scope of the changes suggested in the petition are an example of addressing the con-cerns we have, but there were many other suggestions made in our walkabout as well – chicanes, more road bollards, time average speed cameras to name a few. The net objec-tive in all cases was always the same – to re-duce the speeding along Thames Street and provide more protection for heritage buildings that are so characteristic of Lower Sunbury. “
If you want to add your signature to the peti-tion and find out more , the link is: