Improved access to Asda from Dorothy Road

Lavender Gardens is the small child-friendly pocket park and playground on Dorothy Road – maybe better known as a useful cut-through to the Asda car park.  A little bit of good news is the announcement by Wandsworth that later this year the path through park will be redesigned and equipped with a ramp, rather than the current steps – making access from the east a lot easier for anyone with a pram or trolley, as well as providing disabled access for the first time.

The main benefit is accessibility, but this is also helpful for safety: as a completely straight pathway it’ll improve sight lines and visibility.  As part of the works, the benches facing Dorothy Road will be relocated to the inside of the park, which will helpfully mean they’re not as accessible to our ever-lurking street drinkers after hours.  There will also be some changes to the landscaping of the north end of the park.

This is the latest in a series of small upgrades to the park – a few years ago the cut through had a street light installed, making it somewhat safer after hours.  Asda had issues for years with the steps – mainly as they used to be tiled & eternally slippery, a problem that was only solved by covering them with rough-surfaced paving stones, which fixed the slipperiness issue but made the steps of uneven height.

This is being paid for by the Wandsworth Local Fund – essentially money the Council secures from the developers of new flats in the Borough as part of their planning permission, which is used to make improvements to the neighbourhood.

All in all, a sensible improvement, that will finally mean that all three access routes to Asda are accessible.  Now if only we could do something to get encourage the marauding pigeons that infest the entrance facing Lavender Hill to move on somewhere else…

Main image (c) Google street view, artists’ impressions of works (c) Wandsworth / Enable.