St Luke's School Street trial consultation

Next steps for St Luke’s School Street

In November 2021, as part of our commitment to make our streets cleaner, greener and healthier, Islington Council introduced a trial School Street outside St Luke’s Primary School. 

The St Luke’s School Street is one of 35 School Streets in Islington, bringing cleaner air and a more pleasant, environmentally friendly atmosphere to 36 schools. It does this by preventing cars from driving on Radnor Street, Lizard Street, Bartholomew Square and Mitchell Street during pick-up and drop-off times.

To measure the impacts of the St Luke’s School Street trial, we collected your feedback throughout the trial period and held a public consultation from Monday, 6 March to Sunday, 2 April 2023. We also carried out monitoring. We’ve carefully considered the wide range of feedback we received throughout the trial, including email correspondence, formal objections and the public consultation itself. 

The feedback that we’ve received and the monitoring data that we’ve collected demonstrates that the School Street has had largely positive impacts and has achieved its objectives. 

Therefore, we’ve decided to continue the St Luke’s School Street on a permanent basis. The School Street will continue to operate as it already does.

This means that vehicles will continue to not be permitted to access Radnor Street, Lizard Street, Bartholomew Square and Mitchell Street from Monday to Friday between 8.40am to 9.20am and 3pm to 3.45pm during term time, unless they have an exemption. You can read the full consultation report in the Useful Documents section on our website at School Street Projects | Islington Council.

Why did we introduce School Streets in Islington?

The first School Street in Islington was introduced in 2019 in response to increased traffic levels and pollution outside school gates. We wanted to create a cleaner, greener and safer environment around our schools.

School Streets:

• improve air quality, and reduce pollution at the school gates
• reduce road danger, making it safer for children to get to and from school
• make it easier for children, and their parents and carers, to be more active on their way to school by walking, scooting or cycling.

Find out more about School Streets.

What impact has the School Street had?

We have monitored the School Street at St Luke's over 11 months, and found that:

• air quality has improved with Nitrogen Dioxide levels below the council’s annual objective and in line with borough-wide trends based on provisional data (decreased by 24% when compared to 2019)
• traffic has reduced on the School Street by 56% in the morning and by 58% in the afternoon overall
• the proportion of vehicles speeding has reduced on the School Street by 2.9% during the morning School Streets operational hours
• cycling has increased by 72% in the morning and by 88% in the afternoon School Street hours.

You can see the full monitoring results for the St Luke's School Street trial on the right hand side under St Luke's School Street consultation documents. Visit our website to read programme-wide monitoring results.