Cardiff Green Party is supporting the Save the Northern Meadows campaign in their fight against site clearance due to start at Whitchurch’s Northern Meadows. The grassroots campaigners believe that building a cancer centre on the Meadows would be a disaster both for cancer care and the environment.
The planned centre will lack many of the facilities needed to properly advance cancer treatment in Cardiff, including intensive care and onsite surgery. 163 healthcare professionals have made it clear that the proposed model is not the right one and that any new centre should be co-located with an acute hospital. Cardiff needs new cancer services, but they must be built in the right place.
The development of the Northern Meadows is a disaster on environmental grounds. As well as destroying wildlife habitats, the build would remove a piece of land which local residents (including those living with and recovering from cancer) have walked for decades and found beneficial to their physical and mental well-being. The build would increase air pollution, including around local schools, putting the health of children at risk.
Debra Cooper
Debra Cooper, Whitchurch resident, Save the Northern Meadows activist and Green Party member said
“If this build goes ahead, Coryton Primary School and the high rise flats of the Hollybush Estate, will be encircled by pollution. With the M4 to the north, Pendwyallt Road to the west, the building works will add emergency access road 50 metres from the school gate to the south and a building site to the east. The decision to allow this build across green spaces is deplorable.”
Despite Cardiff’s Labour-run council declaring a Climate Emergency in 2019, they have done nothing to oppose this development. In fact, as with the planned destruction of Britannia Park to build a Museum of Military Medicine, Labour have proved perfectly willing to allow vital green spaces to be developed.
It is clear that this development is a poor decision on both health and environmental grounds. With the Cardiff Council elections coming up in 2022, Cardiff residents can send a message that destruction of valued green spaces will not be tolerated.