• NEW buildings are springing up everywhere and lovely old buildings are empty and boarded up.

Why not use the empty buildings and force owners to use the buildings, renovate and hand over to the council for social/affordable housing if they have left them empty for years?

On the rather lovely Wedmore estate, off Holloway Road, a monster of a building is going up, everyone being blinded by the promise of social housing.

So everyone has to swallow the upheaval, the parking mayhem, the destruction of the playground, the cutting into Whittington Park and concreting up for portable cabin site offices, the car parking being moved under the residents’ windows etc etc… Madness.

A new block was just built on Holloway Road across from Wedmore Street. How about obliging the construction company to hand over some of the flats for social housing?

More flats are going up at the site of the old Thomas Brothers site – a few flats to be secured for affordable/social housing?

And then there would be no need to destroy the lovely estate, and the playground and gardens, to destroy Whittington Park where there is already that awful eyesore of a block in the place of the old pub.

Where will they stop? And at the former women’s prison site, again more flats?

How much housing is needed? A proper count of people needing housing and the number of empty properties should be drawn up first.

If this Covid-19 pandemic showed us anything, it was that we need a lot more open spaces, parks, allotments, and communal spaces.

HANNA,
N19