Abbeville Road Reimagined Timeline

What is changing in the area?

Lambeth Council aims to enhance Abbeville Road, creating a destination that supports local businesses and provides space for people to meet, relax, and travel actively. We want these streets to be climate resilient, celebrate local history and champion inclusivity, creativity, and accessibility.

Abbeville Road Reimagined project area:

Abbeville Road Reimagined Goals

Each Reimagined Street has goals tailored to the specific needs of the community. For Abbeville Road Reimagined, the main goals are to:

• Prioritise walking, wheeling, scooting and cycling
• Make it safer for young people to visit the shops and travel to school
• Champion inclusivity, creativity and accessibility
• Support local businesses and Abbeville's status as a desirable destination by improving pavements and streets and encouraging Car Free days

Why are things changing?

The way we design our streets influences how people use them. In Lambeth, we want to make it easier to walk, wheel, scoot and cycle. When people choose to travel actively, this helps us all live healthier lifestyles and is more environmentally friendly. Our transport system needs to be equitable and fair, and we prioritise these values in our decision making.

Making streets safer and travel fair for everyone

In our borough, 60% of people don’t own a car, and in some areas, it’s even over 70%. Despite this low car ownership, our roads are among London’s most dangerous, making it unsafe for many to walk, wheel, scoot, or cycle. Lower-income households face a higher risk of serious accidents, highlighting the unfairness in road safety. Lambeth’s Road Danger Reduction Strategy aims to address this issue by making our streets safer for everyone. It focuses on “safe by design” principles, keeping speeds low and ensuring dangerous behaviours don’t lead people getting hurt when using our streets.

Similarly, Lambeth's Kerbside Strategy addresses how we use street space. On most streets, the "kerbside" is primarily occupied by parked cars, which is neither fair nor efficient given that most people in Lambeth don’t own a car. By reimagining this space, we can create streets that reflect Lambeth’s diverse communities, make walking, wheeling, and cycling easier and more enjoyable, and offer welcoming public spaces for the community and businesses.

Improving our health and the environment

Noisy traffic and polluted air make it harder to stay healthy and travel actively. Transport emissions, mostly from motor vehicles, make up nearly a quarter of the borough’s total emissions. Alongside that, a third of car journeys in London are under 2km, with 60% made by just one person. Many of these trips could be replaced with healthier, greener options like walking or cycling. Reducing traffic will ease congestion, improve bus reliability, and improve air quality over the long term.

Adding exercise to our daily routine is one of the best ways to improve our health. If Londoners walked just 20 minutes each day, over 25 years we could prevent 85,000 hip fractures, 19,000 cases of dementia, and more than 18,000 cases of depression. By switching to more active ways of traveling, we can become healthier and make our environment cleaner.

Lambeth’s Climate Action Plan, adopted in 2019, aims to cut vehicle journeys by 27% and increase walking, cycling, and public transport use by 85%, as part of our commitment to reach Net Zero by 2030. In practice, this means Lambeth is committed to reducing 110 million miles of driving each year. This means more people will need to use buses, walk, cycle, scoot, or wheel, so these options must be easy and work well together.

The Healthy Streets Approach

The Mayor of London’s Transport Strategy follows the Healthy Streets approach.

This approach is about making the city a place where people can live active, healthy lives. It focuses on putting people and their health first when making decisions, encouraging everyone to drive cars less and use public transport or walk, wheel, scoot, and cycle more.

Lambeth’s Transport Strategy sets out how we will build a transport network that can be used by everyone, has a positive impact on our quality of life and the environment, and helps us deliver more homes and jobs, ensuring long term sustainability.

As part of delivering on the Transport Strategy, Lambeth had developed the 2024 Healthy Neighbourhoods Plan. This plan has three main programmes that work together to make sure all streets in the borough become safer, easier to get around, and more enjoyable for everyone. These programmes are called Healthy Neighbourhoods, Healthy Routes, and Healthy Main Roads.

We have made great strides in reducing traffic and speeds through our neighbourhoods using the Low Traffic Neighbourhood approach. Reducing traffic and speeds is simply the first step in creating local areas that empower more people to live healthier and more active lives. 

Reimagined Streets embody the guiding principles for our Healthy Neighbourhoods including:

1. Fit for the future - Creating streets where we can live healthier lives, reduce emissions, and adapt to climate change.
2. Tackling health inequality - Making streets safer and healthier for everyone, especially those most at risk on our roads, including children, older people, and people from lower-income households.
3. Creating change now - Acting quickly to address climate and public health challenges, using well-planned trial projects to create positive change now.
4. Public transport and active travel together – Enabling people to move around our borough sustainably. This means providing for both public transport and active travel in our journey towards healthier streets.
5. A borough wide approach - Planning and monitoring carefully, considering all forms of travel, to ensure we maximise the benefits, and manage any negative impacts.