Tower Bridge Road

Tower Bridge Road is one of the major roads in the Bermondsey Neighbourhood Plan area.

While most the stretch of the road between Tower Bridge and the Abbey Street/Long Lane junction has been extensively redeveloped over recent times, the area south of Bermondsey Square (ie from the Grange Road Junction to Bricklayers Arms) has seen little physical change for many years and provides much scope for improvement.

This area is characterised by a wide variety of restaurants and independent shops - from cycle shops, clothes shops and art studios. In many ways the southern part of the road is an up-and-coming version of Bermondsey Street, to the north. There are currently very few national chains along the road.

The buildings are mainly a series of attractive Victorian Terraces and the variety of shop fronts adds to the vibrancy of the road. However the state of the pavements is poor and the streets are cluttered with posts and signs and there are often bags of rubbish outside the shops

Traffic
Tower Bridge Road is part of London's Inner Ring Road and is the edge of the congestion charging zone. This means it carries quite substantial volumes of traffic - and this status means that it is hard to do anything to reduce the traffic

What should be done in the future

 * The environment along Tower Bridge Road should be improved by improving the pavements and removal of unnecessary posts, signs and other 'street furniture'


 * The Victorian terraces housing most of the shops and restaurants should be retained and improved


 * The triangle of land south of Grange Road between Tower Bridge Road and Bermondsey Street has the potential to make an attractive public space, but is untidy and much of it is a hard-to-access road used mainly for parking.

Non-planning matters
A number of people have commented that Tower Bridge Road would be better if some of the businesses were more effective and responsive to customer need. It was suggested that some business mentoring or some form of mutual support, such as a Business Improvement District, might help to strengthen the businesses in the area.

Action should be taken to improve the street cleaning, including the approach taken to removal of rubbish from the shops.