Earlier this year my Bethnal Green grassroots community group, Save Our Safer Streets in Tower Hamlets, scored a stunning win in the Court of Appeal against the council to secure the future of our well-loved Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

It was a triumph that belonged to the whole community. The story started with a group of strangers drawn together by the sudden threat of destructive action by Tower Hamlets Council, and over three and a half years snowballed to take in hundreds, then thousands of local people. Our win was a rare example of the courts vindicating a mass movement against a public authority.

In summer 2022, the newly elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets promised to “reopen the roads”, which meant removing benches, trees and bike lanes and destroying several £million of infrastructure that had created a safer, healthier and friendlier Bethnal Green just a year before. I was shocked to receive a consultation letter right after the election which offered residents a stark choice: keep the newly-installed street layouts as they were, or, as per the council’s clear agenda, rip them out entirely. It already looked as though any compromise was off the table.

As a dad who saw my neighbourhood much improved by the LTNs, I panicked when I saw the letter. And it turned out I wasn’t the only one. A group of locals gathered in the street to figure out how to resist the council’s rushed and dangerous proposals.

Within a week, we’d organised under the “Save Our Safer Streets” name and were knocking on doors in the neighbourhood, letting people know what was happening and encouraging them to respond to the consultation. Our biggest boost was realising that our cause had support from people right across our varied community, although some would only say so privately.  

We formed an amazing core team including project managers, researchers, activists, stay-at-home parents, lawyers, writers and techies, and we built our coalition to include teachers, doctors and business owners. More than 3,000 people signed our petition in summer 2022 and clear majorities of locals supported our position of keeping and improving the safer streets in consultations in 2022 and 2023.

We had our share of setbacks: the Mayor of Tower Hamlets blundered on and decided to remove the Bethnal Green LTN in September 2023, ignoring the views of local residents, businesses, doctors, the police and Transport for London. And even with a successful crowdfund and top legal team, we lost our judicial review of that decision in the High Court in 2024.

But we have always persevered, spurred on by the growing sense that we, not the elected mayor, represented the views of the local community on this topic. Democracy includes, but is not limited to, elections. We raised over £100,000 from 1,300 people to fund a Court of Appeal challenge, and in January 2026 we got the incredible news that we’d won. It was overwhelmingly joyous and a huge relief – we’d known all along that our cause was just, but these things just don’t usually happen.

These days everyone lives with a growing sense of cynicism, anger and powerlessness, caused by things like the pandemic, cost of living crisis, the war in Gaza and the new Government fixing no-one’s problems. Our campaign has felt something like an antidote. We’ve found that focusing on the local area and working outside of party politics has opened up conversations and connections that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. 

I’ve lived for 15 years in Bethnal Green, where about a third of the population has Bangladeshi heritage, and thanks to the campaign I now have much stronger friendships with Bangladeshi neighbours. I recently went to an Aqiqah – a ceremony welcoming the birth of a child – for the first time, and I feel more deeply rooted in my area than I ever did before. 

I’m actually more optimistic now than I would have been if the 2022 local election had panned out differently. Had the previous administration held on to power, false narratives about the LTN’s unpopularity would have festered and people may not have realised how much safer streets meant to them. Instead, our community has come through a crisis and built a wide coalition in support of safer streets.

The elections in May will test what we’ve already found: residents in Tower Hamlets, where two thirds don’t drive, want more, not fewer, safe streets. Neither do they want business as usual from the established local parties. I’m confident enough about this that I’m standing as an independent candidate to be a councillor for my neighbourhood, Bethnal Green West. Without this crisis I’d never have got involved in local politics. So while I wouldn’t wish the last few years on anyone, I’m hopeful that the future for the community of Tower Hamlets will be better because of our fight.