Great Queen Street Streateries - permanent proposals

Overview

We are seeking your views on proposals to make our trial Streateries for outdoor dining on Great Queen Street permanent.  

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 you to be breathing cleaner air, and for businesses to be able to flourish.  We want our streets to provide a lasting legacy of greener, safer, healthier travel with places for people to spend time in and enjoy, regenerating our local neighbourhood centres and high streets.  

To help, we have been making trial changes across Camden as part of our Streateries Programme: Streateries change parking bays in the road to spaces where businesses can place tables and chairs for al fresco dining (subject to an approved tables and chairs licence), protected by barriers. This means pedestrians, wheelchair users and buggy users can pass safely on the pavement.

Camden’s town centres and high streets are at the heart of local communities and community life: they are places where residents, workers and visitors shop, work, socialise, and access culture and services. Camden has developed a Future High Streets vision to support our high streets 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 helping to regenerate the wider local economy.

We are now consulting on whether or not to make some of our trial Streatery spaces permanent, including some on Great Queen Street in Covent Garden. There are several restaurants and cafes on the section of Great Queen Street, between Drury Lane and Parker Street where Streateries were first implemented as a temporary measure in May 2021 in response to the pandemic when indoor seating was limited. Parking was removed or relocated to create new spaces in the road for tables and chairs, protected by wooden planters and screens.  In April 2023 the Streateries were extended for a further 18 months as a trial under an Experimental Traffic Order (ETO) until October 2024.  We are now consulting on whether or not to keep the trial Streateries and wooden planters/barriers permanently at the end of the trial period. 

The proposed permanent Streatery on Great Queen Street would also help to deliver our wider Holborn Liveable Neighbourhood project.  We want to transform Holborn into a place for people with attractive, healthy, accessible, and safe streets for everyone. To do this we're creating ideas for transforming the area through changes like widening pavements, making some areas car free, improving cycle routes, adding public spaces and plants and trees. Our proposals for a Streatery on Great Queen Street is one of our STARter projects which are ones we want to deliver first.  For more information on the Liveable Neighbourhood project and to get involved you can visit our website.   

Over the past few years our Streateries Commonplace webpages have allowed residents to provide feedback on all our Streateries across the borough. The majority (77%) of people commenting on our Streateries overall are happy with them, as well as this one on Great Queen Street.   

Why your views matter

This is your opportunity to comment.

We are now proposing to permanently keep the Streatery spaces on Great Queen Street together with the wooden planters and screens and we want to hear your views. We want to engage our local residents, businesses and stakeholders in changes that are proposed on their streets and what you think about these proposals: 

• Permanently keep the Streatery outside nos. 32 - 35 Great Queen Street. This was created from the removal of 17 meters of residents’ parking to provide 17 meters of outdoor dining space in the road and wooden planters/barriers. 

• Permanently keep the Streatery outside nos. 37 - 39 Great Queen Street. This was created from the removal of 20 meters of shared use loading and ‘out of hours’ residents’ parking, to provide 20 meters of outdoor dining space in the road and wood planters/barriers.

• Permanently keep 10 meters of loading bay outside no. 60 Great Queen Street (Freemasons’ Hall) created from the removal of 10 meters of paid for parking space. 

• Permanently keep 20 meters of shared use residents’ parking and paid for parking ouside the Freemasons' Hall which were created from converting 20 meters of paid for parking only.    

To view the plans please click on the link in the Related Section at the bottom of this page.

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 officer observations, consultation responses, feedback received during the trial period, relevant policies, and other data/information.

The report will then outline if at the end of the trial period, the experimental scheme should be made permanent, modified, or allowed to lapse. Subject to the decision to make the scheme permanent, officers will continue to monitor the scheme and will consider additional measures if necessary. These will be progressed and publicly consulted on as part of a separate scheme.

For information on how we will use data collected from this consultation read our privacy statement: Data protection, privacy and cookies - Camden Council