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Great post. Are you a member of the Walthamstow NEWS group? A strong faction of antis on there, their main beef seems to be that they're sitting in traffic longer in the surrounding streets. I have no idea if this is true or not but the first casualty of war is always the ability to get yr kids to school in less than 30 mins.
Crispin_Glover
bothwell
Orford Road, including Finamore, is rammed at the weekends. Now, some of that has undoubtedly been the sunshine of the last few weeks. But I was just up there for a coffee on a Monday mid-morning. Fairly busy. And it's raining today. Most businesses are clearly doing well out of it - and the environment is massively nicer. Meanwhile down on quieter Grove Road, a new cafe opened up and seems to be doing well also.
As far as I can see, the antis are increasingly shrill and insane - the filtered permeability "closures" have now been compared to, variously, North Korea, the Berlin Wall, and a black hole for cars; they've dragged a coffin up the street to signify the death of the village; they've compared council officers to Nazi concentration camp guards ("only following orders") etc. They're also all over the shop. They variously claim that they're pro cycling facilities and segregated tracks and only anti closures; but their page has loads of stuff saying to object to tracks at Whipps Cross and Hoe Street etc. The parallels to the SOS campaign in Green Lanes are very obvious. This lot of NIMBYs are just anti any change.
Meanwhile, yes, disabled folk can park at several spots within yards of the 100m stretch of Orford Road they can't get to, emergency services are at worst a bit confused if the driver hasn't navigated the closures before, and the anti shop next door to Finamore currently has an application in to change use from an architects' office to a cafe with pavement tables. As far as I understand it from several conversations with people who do know Finamore, btw, his stated problem that he can't load/unload for him or customers is rubbish - he has rear access with parking. The issue appears to be he used to rent that parking space out to someone else, and now can't.