3,000 join in Streets Ahead initiative

MORE than 3,000 people visited the Lewes Streets Ahead Exhibition which ended on Saturday in party style.

Now county council officials, amazed at the huge response, will begin the task of sifting through the huge number of written responses to the plans to make Lewes less dependent on traffic.

Two thousand people visited the exhibition at the Corn Exchange between Monday and Thursday.

On Saturday it moved to Harveys Yard in the Cliffe, where a further 1,000 took advantage of street entertainment, including open-air shopping and music, to further air their views on the direction the town should take in dealing with cars.

To mark the occasion organisers took away seven on-street car parking spaces and artificially created a narrower road and wider pavement to give pedestrians more room.

'It was a great success,' said travel plan officer Brian Deval. 'We were packed out.

'Of particular interest was a special planning booth set up at which people could talk to consultants, tour the Cliffe with them and then come back and write down their suggestions about what could be done.'

The consensus on Saturday was similar to that during the week in the Corn Exchange that the Cliffe should be made more pedestrian-friendly, partly by building a roundabout on the Phoenix Causeway to take traffic from Safeway out over the Causeway instead of turning left into the town centre.

There were some free buses into the Cliffe on Saturday.

No specific transport funding is available for changes in Cliffe, but any surplus from the parking scheme could be used to allow schemes such as this to happen sooner.