Following lobbying from Tom and Julie a consultation will launch soon on the junction of Huntingdon Place and Manor Road. Plans are that the junction is to be remodelled to closely follow the original 18th Century shape of the top of Tynemouth Green beside the Boer War Memorial.
Work will make it dramatically easier to cross the street and also put back something we lost when the Victorians changed Tynemouth. Councillor Julie Day said “every time I see an older resident or a group of school kids cross the road here I wince”. It’s fantastic to see proposals out to fix this which also add something back to the heritage of this bit of Tynemouth.
There’s a lot of scope to further improve what is proposed if we start to think about things like tree planting, the area that was once the entrance to the old Tynemouth Manor House and also the more formal Victorian set of statues and memorials that form a row through this space.
Have you got any ideas or any information about the local history that could help? People are inevitably going to have a lot of questions about materials and types of paving, we will pass on more information on the consultation as soon as we have it. The key benefit to this project is the reduced crossing distance for pedestrians.
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I welcome the remodelling of this junction, but would question whether the project makes it that much safer for pedestrians, especially scholars at the beginning and the end of the school day. Surely some effort also needs to be made to manage traffic eg via a pelican crossing.
This would be a welcome change, but I would also like to see some provision for pedestrian crossing across Manor Road / Front Street around this junction. There is no pedestrian crossing for north-south foot traffic in this area, despite it being a thoroughfare for students and metro foot traffic. It would seem sensible to incorporate a pedestrian crossing into these works.