Kennington Triangle Timeline

We want Kennington Triangle to become a Healthy Neighbourhood. A Healthy Neighbourhood is a welcoming place where people can move safely through the streets because there is very little motor traffic, and cars travel at safe speeds. It’s a place where the streets are enjoyable and attractive, enabling people to live more active lives and making active travel convenient, pleasant, and the preferred choice whenever possible. 

Kennington Triangle Healthy Neighbourhood Goals 

Every Healthy Neighbourhood has goals tailored to the specific needs of the community and the streets in the area. For the Kennington Triangle neighbourhood, the main goals are to: 

• Increase safety for people walking, wheeling, scooting and cycling by ensuring the streets have very little motor traffic, including through-traffic, and cars travel at safe speeds. 
• Ensure residents and local businesses can access their homes and places of work so they can use motor vehicles when necessary. 
• Improve the fairness and equity in how we use the space on our streets next to the kerbside. 
• Help people live more active lives by making our pavements easier to use and more welcoming for everyone.  

Why are things changing? 

As part of Lambeth 2030, Making Neighbourhoods Fit for the Future the council aims to create a cleaner, greener, and more vibrant borough where everyone can lead healthier lives. 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. We also want our transport system to be equitable and fair and we prioritise these values in our decision making. 

We selected the Kennington Triangle neighbourhood due to its ranking across multiple factors, placing it in the top third of areas where Healthy Neighbourhood improvements could significantly enhance safety and create a more pleasant environment for walking, wheeling, scooting, and cycling. Moreover, during October -December 2024, local residents were able to provide feedback to the initial engagement of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and Walnut Tree Walk Healthy Neighbourhoods. A number of people raised issues within the Kennington Triangle area, and for it to become a Healthy Neighbourhood as well.

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 to harm. 

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. 

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 to harm. 

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. Healthy Neighbourhoods take this further. Our guiding principles for Healthy Neighbourhoods are: 

1. Fit for the future - Our Healthy Neighbourhoods program will help create streets where we can live healthier lives, reduce emissions, and adapt to climate change. 
2. Tackling health inequality - We aim to make 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 - We must act 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 - We need people to be able 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 - As we introduce Healthy Neighbourhoods across Lambeth, we will plan and monitor carefully, considering all forms of travel, to ensure we maximise the benefits, and manage any negative impacts. 

Why was the Kennington Triangle selected? 

We looked at all the neighbourhoods in Lambeth and studied key factors to figure out which areas would benefit by becoming Healthy Neighbourhoods. The answers helped us make a scorecard that clearly showed which neighbourhoods we should focus on first. 

We considered factors such as: 

1. How much motor traffic travels through the neighbourhood? 
2. How good are public transport options nearby? 
3. Is the area more or less deprived than average? 
4. Are essential facilities like schools and parks available locally? 
5. How healthy are local people today? 

We selected the Kennington Triangle neighbourhood (area 9) due to its ranking across multiple factors, placing it in the top third of areas where Healthy Neighbourhood improvements could significantly enhance safety and create a more pleasant environment for walking, wheeling, scooting, and cycling.

Through engagement on the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and Walnut Tree Walk Healthy Neighbourhoods, our attention was drawn to issues experienced in the Kennington Triangle area.. These issues cover cycling safety, accessibility, speeding and other dangerous driving, and called for Kennington Triangle to also become a Healthy Neighbourhood. In response to these comments and the neighbourhood’s ranking, we have accelerated the programme for Kennington Triangle.