Trees matter to people: Dixon Clark Court’s ‘little forest’

• TODAY, January 29, Islington Council will be back in the High Court seeking to regain possession of the Dixon Clark Court (DCC) tree-protection campsite, set up last October by campaigners seeking to stop the destruction of mature trees.

The council failed at an appeal hearing earlier this month when the presiding judge quashed a possession order granted in November.

If the Town Hall wins, the 53-year-old trees will be lost for ever, to be replaced by a six-storey block of private flats.

The camp has succeeded in drawing public attention to the proposed development of the DCC estate, something previously unknown even to some nearby residents.

It seems, for example, that only half the Compton Terrace households were included in the 2017 statutory consultation, the views of those living west of the Union Chapel apparently of no consequence.

Incomprehensible, and out of sync with the advice of the council’s own design review panel that: “The proposals need[ed] to show how the development could best connect with the proposed public realm works to Highbury Corner and how these changes could positively impact the public realm outside the site”. (Appendix, planning-committee report).

Precisely, but something the scheme’s proponents failed to do. Given the site’s prominent location – along Canonbury Road at Highbury Corner – the visual and environmental amenity with which the trees endow this busy neighbourhood necessitated a much broader, even borough-wide, debate about the proposed changes.

This is particularly so given that the major Highbury Corner infrastructure development being consulted on simultaneously included the loss of 17 mature trees from the roundabout.

While the DCC planning report stressed “that a satisfactory standard of visual amenity [be] provided” by replacement trees elsewhere on the site, for the benefit of the estate residents, it spectacularly failed to consider the impact of the proposed loss of the trees along the Canonbury Road frontage.

Attempts to engage council bosses over the last 12 months in a reconsideration of the loss of the DCC trees have met with either silence or rebuttal.

Invited to consider resiting the proposed block and thus preventing the environmental destruction proposed, Cllr Diarmaid Ward responded in July, “that if you have concerns about planning applications in future… raise these at the relevant time so that they can be given due consideration”.

The housing chief fails to explain how you can object to something you know nothing of…

The executive member for the environment, Cllr Rowena Champion, simply refused to meet, citing a “training” session as a reason.

Campaigners have been routinely sneered at on social media by certain elected members as being opposed to the building of council homes.

Can it really be the case that not one councillor objects to this outdated, environmentally damaging, proposal, or are they simply scared of the executive whip, given that the council lacks a coherent council-housing strategy?

An attempt to fob off critics of this outdated scheme with offers to cram more saplings on-site is patronising and misleading.

As this week’s report, co-authored by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, states clearly: “Tree planting now dominates political and popular agendas and is often presented as an easy answer to the climate crisis, as well as a way for corporate companies to mitigate their carbon emissions, but sadly, it isn’t as simple as that.

“When people plant the wrong trees in the wrong place, it can cause considerably more damage than benefits, failing to help people or nature”.

Or as a former Islington Council conservation officer said in support of saving the Dixon Clark Court mature trees: “One mature tree is worth 10 saplings”.

If the council – in office on just 38 per cent of the Islington registered electorate – wins in court, that’ll be the end of DCC trees. What an appalling, irreversible, unnecessary, prospect.

MEG HOWARTH
Ellington Street, N7