Waldron Health Centre public realm - still a fail!

Although I've been posting recently about successful public realm works and local parks such as Fordham and Twinkle Park, unfortunately not everything in the garden is quite so green.

It's now more than two years since the Waldron Health Centre opened, at which time I posted about the landscaping fail in front of the building.

While slagging off the poor quality of the landscaping that had been completed, I optimistically suggested that the unfinished bit - perhaps a car park, I thought - would be tidied up and finished off in due course.

In fact it seems that the land on the corner was intended to be used for construction of a four/five storey residential block - presumably part of the deal for the developer building the health centre - but there's no plans available online from the 2003 application, so I can't provide any renders of the proposal. But here's what it looks like at the moment, having steadily turned into a grubby rubbish dump over the last few years.

The miserable trees in the square and the uninspiring landscaping in which they are situated were incorporated in the plan as 'compensation' for the loss of half a dozen mature London Plane trees which were chopped down in order for the new health centre to be built.

Sadly not only are we still waiting to see this corner completed, but several of the trees that were planted are now either dead or struggling to survive. Clearly they have been dumped in the ground and left, with no maintenance being carried out and no concern for whether they live or die. The tree pits serve as little more than rubbish catchers and/or dog toilets. I challenge anyone to claim that these trees can offer suitable recompense for the mature ones that were lost, even those that manage to reach maturity.

It's truly depressing to come across such piss-poor public space like an unattractive wart right in the middle of the 'Kender to the Creek' walking and cycling route that the council has put so much effort into improving. This is certainly one area that the planning enforcement team should be focusing its attention onto.