Southwark Council has destroyed a flower walkway in Walworth as part of a borough-wide crackdown on anti-social behaviour.
Volunteers at Nursery Row Park, who installed the plants with £10,000 funding, have said the park now looks like “a wasteland”.
Police reportedly believed the plants were blocking CCTV sight lines and asked the council to remove them.
Local police and the council have described the change as “temporary” and suggested the plants could be reinstalled. But a park volunteer has pointed out that it took ten years to grow the flower walkway.
It comes just days after Southwark Council removed table tennis tables and benches from Camberwell Green, also in a bid to tackle anti-social behaviour.
Luke Miller, Chair of Friends of Nursery Row Park, said: “I’m really, really sad. We spent a long time making the park somewhere nice…it makes me very angry indeed.”
He added: “Police see anything growing above knee height and want it all down.”
The park was redesigned back in 2007, when a landscape architect recommended installing several metal girders to echo the area’s industrial past.
In 2011, unhappy with the girders’ appearance, Friends of Nursery Row Park trained plants up the posts using £10,000 funded by Southwark Council’s ‘Cleaner, Greener, Safer’ grant scheme.
This created a walkway lined with flowers which people would walk through when travelling to and from the local high street, East Street.
Last week, Luke was warned that police had recommended that the plants be removed. To his horror, on Tuesday (September 19), he was sent photos of council workers uprooting the plants.
“They haven’t done it with any horticultural knowledge. It’s like they’ve been vandalised by children,” Luke said.
Superintendent Shaz Shah, responsible for local policing in Southwark, said: “This decision was taken following consultation with the local authority and the community to prevent anti-social behaviour and other crime at the locations.
“It is a temporary measure alongside arranging for additional officers to patrol the area to respond to concerns. We met with community members to explain the reasons for this and they overwhelmingly supported the decision.”
Cllr Kieron Williams, Leader of Southwark Council, said: “Following residents’ concerns about antisocial behaviour, and after a recommendation from the police, some benches and a table tennis table have been removed from Camberwell Green and some planting from Nursery Row park, as a temporary measure while we address these issues.
“We will be consulting with residents about what we put back into the parks and how they can be improved in the future for all to enjoy.”
Big shame but anti social behaviour is on the rise and the public must be made safe