Lift Up LJ activists continue their campaign for an accessible and safe station at Loughborough Junction

Over the last year, the Lift Up LJ Campaign has attempted to highlight the urgent accessibility and safety works required at Loughborough Junction rail station on Coldharbour Lane.

Lambeth Planners continue to encourage and approve major car-free residential developments which are adding significant numbers of new commuters to train services already operating at full capacity from an inadequate and non-compliant train station that is hemmed into barely half of a single viaduct arch.

Meanwhile, within their Transport Strategy document the Council recognises that projected borough-wide economic growth will further generate additional trips on the transport network and create the need to deliver new and improved public transport infrastructure at stations that do not have step free access.

The map above identifies all compliant (in green) and non-compliant (in brown) railway stations in Lambeth and their approximate catchment areas, demonstrating that almost 2/3rds of Lambeth residents have no local step free access to the rail network.

Meanwhile Lambeth’s Transport Strategy admits that “no step free access at railway stations is severely detrimental to those who are therefore excluded from travel due to disability or other reasons.”

At Loughborough Junction, this issue has become critical, with a hostile and uncompromising public realm and kerbside and a non step-free and dangerous station compromised further by years of ad hoc, unplanned and illegal development in and around Coldharbour Lane and the more recent approval of several major new residential and business developments.

So what can one of the most deprived communities in the capital expect from its council whose own actions have contributed to the hostile conditions in and around Loughborough Junction station.

When pressed during 2025, Cllr. Rezina Chowdhury, (Lambeth’s busy Transport and Kerbside Strategy Tzar), suggested the council was doing all it could to lobby Network Rail and Govia Thameslink into making station and accessibility improvements at Loughborough Junction Rail station.

Unfortunately, Lambeth’s track record doesn’t inspire, especially where, over the last 12 years and three election cycles, only Streatham station has benefitted from any significant accessibility work.

Even here the funding for these works was agreed in 2014, some years before the publication of the current Lambeth Transport Strategy.

The only other evidence we can find of Lambeth “doing all that it could” over the last 12 years was to have commissioned a feasibility study during 2020 to look at the options of improving the accessibility at Loughborough Junction, Tulse Hill, Wandsworth Road, Clapham High Street and Gipsy Hill rail stations.

However this was a desk-top study occurred during Covid where no site visits were made and this resulted in a series of errors that rendered this feasibility study both inadequate and unhelpful.

The Lift Up LJ Campaign therefore calls upon our council to treat our community with a little respect.

They should come and talk to us then use the financial resources that have already been collected locally, through S106 agreements and CIL payments (for the major development Lambeth Planners have approved in the immediate area), and actually press ahead with commissioning a feasibility study that will clearly identify the available options for developing a step-free and safe railway station at Loughborough Junction.

There are several different options for the development of a fit-for-purpose railway station at Loughborough Junction, some offering significant and realistic opportunities for third party funding, (a main condition for Department for Transport Access for All funding), which should be attractive for a council that is operating a significant budget deficit.

So we will continue to request meetings with both Cllr. Chowdhury and Mr Wilson at Lambeth to discuss these options as identified by our expert campaign team.

For more information and to join the campaign please visit the Lift Up LJ website, https://www.ljstation.com

[This article by LULJ]

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