Lewisham drops to last across inner London on Healthy Streets
Cyclist and road safety campaigner Tomilyn Hannah Rupert examines the high and lows of Lewisham's performance.
The Healthy Streets Scorecard 2025 is out, and Lewisham has dropped three places, now ranking last of the 14 inner London boroughs.
It’s down three spots, from 15th to 18th, out of the 33 boroughs overall.
The scorecard uses ten indicators to measure how healthy streets are in London, with indicators ranging from share of active travel to car ownership, and proliferation of safe streets in front of schools.
Below, a look at four key indicators:
School Streets - the only bright spot
The one positive is Lewisham’s strong record of school streets, which continues unchallenged.
According to Healthy Streets Scorecard, “it has the highest proportion in London for the second year running, setting a new record at 56.7%.”
According to the School Streets Initiative, a school street is,
“a road outside a school with a temporary restriction on motorised traffic at school drop-off and pick-up times. The restriction applies to school traffic and through traffic.”
Controlled Parking Zones
Lewisham has been consulting on new controlled parking zones (CPZs), which restrict parking to permit holders for certain times and hours, as it tries to roll out its Sustainable Streets programme.
Control Parking charges car owners for storage of their vehicles on public land. The amount of land in the borough under a CPZ is now 27%.
The latest Sustainable Streets meeting of the council on 21st May showed Brockley, Catford South and Hither Green CPZs are in "ongoing consultation".
CPZs often face local opposition from car owners, such as in Crofton Park where a petition was launched and signed by 195 residents. But their inclusion in the Healthy Streets Scorecard is due to the important role they play in encouraging a reduction of car dependency, and they are fairer for the over 55% of Lewisham households that don’t own a car but by default are subsidising free parking spaces through general taxation.
Meanwhile, nearby Lambeth increased its share of CPZ coverage to over 71% , one of the factors in its move up the ladder board of the scorecard by two places.
Protected Cycle Lanes
Anyone who has headed out on two wheels in London, knows the difference between a road with a painted bicycle on it, and one with a barrier between cars and cyclists.
In Lewisham, the needle hasn’t moved, with just 1.5% of roads with protected cycle lanes. (This doesn’t include tracks through parks.) Other than the CS4, which runs along the A200 through the borough, and further a stretch near Lewisham centre, there's almost nothing.
The nearly-finished Church Street cycle lane will improve this slightly, but considering the London mayor's Active Travel target of 40% of Londoners living within 400m of a cycleway by 2030, we'll need lot more projects like this, and quickly.
Greenwich, an outer London Borough, puts Lewisham to comparative shame delivering protected cycle lane coverage at 4%, nearly triple Lewisham's effort.
Road collision cyclist casualties
On this grim measure, Lewisham scores 2.8 serious and fatal casualties per 1,000 daily cycling trips over the year.
This is a full 1 person per 1,000 trips worse than the inner city average, with only Tower Hamlets even more dangerous for cyclists, among inner London boroughs.
Given the mayor of Tower Hamlet’s move to rip out cycle schemes (currently paused by a court battle), and the borough’s other actively anti-cycling moves like attempting to block cycling in the Greenwich foot tunnel, this is hardly a flattering comparison.
The future
Lewisham is consulting on its Active Travel Strategy till July 20th, where its 2030 strategic goal is to rank 10th on the Healthy Streets Scorecard. Without bolder action though, it’s unlikely it will catch-up.
Healthy Streets provides an email template you can use to ask the council to step up in specific areas, including protected cycle lanes, more low traffic neighbourhoods, and bus priority.
Tomilyn Hannah Rupert is a New Cross based writer, campaigner for safer streets and co-founder of Amersham Gyratory Action group.
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