This is our sixth annual pollution blog covering official air quality monitoring in Newcastle upon Tyne. In all six years, air pollution in Newcastle has exceeded legal limits. In 2021, the highest reading was 98μg/m3, over double the limit. Read more [...] Air Quality Update 2021
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This is our sixth annual pollution blog covering official air quality monitoring in Newcastle upon Tyne. In all six years, air pollution in Newcastle has exceeded legal limits. In 2021, the highest reading was 98μg/m3, over double the limit. Read more [...] 
It is now over eighteen months since wands were installed on Gosforth High Street as part of the Council's response to Covid. This blog looks beyond the look and feel of the wands, focusing instead on their impact on traffic volumes, air pollution and road safety, and suggests specific actions that could be taken to help the High Street thrive in future. 
With Covid-19 cases rising again, and Government lock-down regulations further restricting how businesses operate, it is more important than ever that local streets support social distancing so that people feel safe and can confidently go out and use local shops and services. Updated government guidance (at 23/9/2020) also reconfirms the recommendation that for local journeys you should "walk or cycle if you can" to "reduce pressure on public transport and the road network."
The Council 
Newcastle City Council has published its plans to give more space to customers visiting Gosforth High Street, to allow remaining shops to open safely and comply with the Government's physical distancing rules. 
Sunday 10 November 2019 was Remembrance Sunday. As is traditional, local cadets and scouts paraded down Gosforth High Street and into Gosforth Central Park for a short service and to observe a two-minute silence in memory of members of the armed forces that lost their lives in the two world wars and later conflicts.
The Remembrance Day Service in Gosforth Central Park offers an opportunity to reflect and mourn for the past, and it is also an opportunity to pause and to examine the present. 
We now have the official air pollution measurements for 2018 and the air we breathe in Newcastle still hasn't met the legal limit that should have been achieved in 2005. 
In 2015, at SPACE for Gosforth's launch event we asked local residents, what do they like about the High Street and what could be improved? The Your Streets - Your Views survey gave us an opportunity to revisit this to see whether, three years later, these concerns were widely shared.
At the Your-Streets Your-Views survey feedback meeting we asked residents for ideas on how to build a better Gosforth. In particular: Opportunities for more trees and greenery.
Routes to school and how to make them safer; Suggestions to reduce traffic on busy residential streets; and Locations or changes crossings on main roads. 
Newcastle City Council have released the Air Quality Feasibility Study that will be used for its forthcoming consultation. Whatever the final plan that is chosen, it must by law meet air quality limits within the shortest possible timescale. The question for the consultation therefore is how should that be achieved. 
Newcastle City Council are seeking your views on a proposed crossing to be sited on Salters Road. You can access the original consultation, which closed on 23 December 2018, on the Let's Talk website. The proposal is to remove the zebra crossing and replace it with a puffin crossing outside of the Spar shop.
Update 3/9/2019: The Council approved the original proposal without modification.
Update 21/1/2022: The Council have installed the crossing (see bottom of blog).
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