Charlotte Street Streateries for outdoor dining

Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how people in Camden live, travel and work. We want our streets to have more safe space for everyone to walk and cycle, for children to get to and from school safely and healthily, for businesses to be able to flourish, to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles and for you to be breathing cleaner air.  

To help, we have been making temporary changes across Camden in our Streateries Programme: Streateries change parking bays to spaces in the road for businesses to place tables and chairs for al fresco dining, protected by barriers. This means pedestrians, wheelchair and buggy users can pass safely on the pavement. 

We want to ensure that our streets support a strong recovery from the pandemic and provide a lasting legacy of greener, safer, healthier travel, places for people to spend time and enjoy, and the regeneration of our local town centres and High Streets.  To support this we are consulting on extending some of our existing Streateries for a further 18 months trial period to aid the recovery and long-term success of our town centres and High Streets.

High Streets play a crucial role in community life; they are places where residents, workers and visitors shop, work, socialise, and access culture and services. However, they have been facing a range of challenges in recent years with a shift away from traditional retail to online shopping, accelerated by the pandemic.  In response Camden has developed a Future High Streets programme  to support our high streets into a robust recovery but also reorientate them for a new future role so that they continue to add to community life. Streateries are essential for delivering this vision:  they help to revitalise streets, creating destinations for residents and visitors to meet, socialise and spend time, adding to street life and vibrancy, increasing footfall, and regenerating the wider local economy. 

Why your views matter

Charlotte Street, in Fitzrovia, has numerous cafes and restaurants. The stretch of Charlotte Street between Goodge Street and Percy Street has about 24 hospitality businesses.  

Several temporary Streateries were implemented on Charlotte Street in 2020.  We are now proposing to retain the scheme as a trial, using an Experimental Traffic Order (ETO) for a further 18 months, to May 2024 (subject to the business securing a tables and chairs licence), and we want to know your views on this proposal:   

• Keeping the existing Streatery outside nos. 38 – 40.  This space was created from the removal of 6.6 meters of residents' parking bays, 10.2 meters of single yellow lines (loading during the hours of control, and parking outside the hours of control), and 4.9 meters of electric vehicle charging bay, to provide 22.5 meters of outdoor dining space.  The disabled parking bay outside no. 38, Thai Metro, has been relocated to outside no.36.

• Keeping the existing Streatery outside nos. 37 - 41.  This space was created from the removal of 19.4 meters of residents' parking bays to provide outdoor dining space

• Keeping the existing Streatery outside nos. 32 - 34.  This space was created from the removal of 12.4 meters of residents' parking bays to provide outdoor dining space

• Outside nos. 16 - 22: Removing 17.7 meters of paid for parking and 6.3 meters of motorcycle parking to provide 24 meters of outdoor dining space.

• Keeping the existing Streatery outside nos. 2 - 14.  This space was created from the removal of 30.9 meters of residents' parking bays and 14.3 meters of single yellow line (loading during the hours of control and parking outside the hours of control) to provide 45.2 meters of outdoor dining.

• In addition, we propose to:
  Retain 17.9 metres of single yellow lines and 7.4 metres of paid for parking, outside nos. 24 - 30, to provide 25.4 metres of loading only, 7am to 4pm with a maximum stay time of 20 minutes and no return within 1 hour.

• Retain the one-way only direction for motor traffic, southbound, between Rathbone Street and Percy Street, except for cyclists, and provide a northbound cycle contra-flow on this section.  

To view the plans and find out more about this proposal, click on the links in the Related Section at the bottom of this page.

We want to engage our local residents, businesses and stakeholders in changes happening on their streets and to know what you think about these  proposals.

What happens next

After the consultation, a decision report will be produced and published online via our website. Local residents and stakeholders will be notified of the outcome. The report will consider a broad range of information including consultation responses, feedback received during the current trial period, relevant policies and other data/information including any monitoring information collected during the recent trial period.

All of this information will be considered in making a recommendation in the report about whether to proceed with the Streateries on Charlotte Street  for a further 18 months trial period.