News and views from our city councillors

I have written about the St Christopher’s School planning application here for the last few months, so just a quick update to say that we expect the application to be decided by a planning committee on the 9th August. We expect that officers will recommend refusal, and we will be supporting that recommendation. I will report back next month on what happens.

Readers with long memories may recall a consultation that the Council put out at the beginning of 2022 about some proposed changes along the no. 2 bus route across Bristol. Confusingly they call this the A37/ A4018 project, even though it uses neither of those roads in our ward!

The consultation results were finally published this May, with detailed proposals for the City Centre but nothing to say what was proposed in Henleaze. We have now had a meeting with officers to find out more. There isn’t space here to list everything, but we’ve been told for example that the proposals to close off the ends of Lake Rd and Henleaze Gardens aren’t expected go ahead, but they are still planning to mostly close the end of Holmes Grove, allowing only the left turn out onto Henleaze Road.

Most alarmingly, discussions about a bus gate on North View, which would stop all non-bus traffic from turning off the White Tree roundabout have re-emerged. This was an idea which we campaigned against and got removed from the original set of proposals in 2022, but it now seems to be on the cards again. We will continue to oppose this, and will keep you posted as we learn more.

If you’d like to know about any other of the proposals that were in the original consultation, please contact me and I’ll be happy to share what I know. We don’t expect any actual decisions to be made until at least Spring 2024, so nothing is certain until then.

We hold regular monthly community forum meetings via Zoom, which are an opportunity for you to hear a little about what we’ve been doing, but more importantly to ask questions, raise any concerns and share local information. The next one will be on the 6th September. Please visit http://tiny. cc/WandHSep23) to register in advance.

You can contact me by email on cllr.steve. smith@bristol.gov.uk, or phone on 07769 285266. I also try to post regular updates on my Facebook page at fb.com/ CouncillorSteveSmith. We publish regular email updates – please contact me if you’d like to be added to the mailing list for these.

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