The trees under threat at Highbury Corner

• THE council’s answer to our local petition to save the seven important screening trees at Highbury Corner is a Felling Notice. According to the notice, the trees will be killed next Monday (March 9), a rather unusual salute to the arrival of spring.

In a way it is a simpler and more honest answer than the greenwash of their attempts to maintain that there is no other way of paying for the 27 (much needed) social and affordable homes at Dixon Clark Court.

The 14 private homes in the block could easily have been integrated into the rest of the estate. They have been placed instead where they cause the death of these seven trees.

That’s to boost their value for private sale. It’s a simple model: the more the council practises social exclusion, the more money the flats will bring in.

In fact the private flats will bring in money no matter where they are placed on the estate. Admittedly not as much as the council will achieve with this apartheid approach. But surely it is the difference between the two they should be looking to find (not an astronomical amount).

Have they even tried to find a sponsor who would put up the money to have their name on a unique urban mini-forest, alongside one of Britain’s major national highways?

The council is going ahead with this major destruction of Islington’s greenspace, despite the damage to its collective reputation.

That damage will be magnified every day by the dominance at Highbury Corner of the new luxury block, which will forever be known as Treemageddon House.

This can only mean that there are other reasons behind their refusal to change. Is this in fact not about social housing but something that touches on personal gain? What one might most charitably refer to as a vanity project? People need homes AND trees.

CONOR MCHUGH
Stop tree slaughter at Highbury Corner
Compton Terrace, N1