• RESIDENTS of my building received a letter from Westminster Council on May 18 afternoon telling us that from June 5 (less than two weeks’ time) Berwick Street would be closed for eight months.

Still reeling, on Monday we woke to mayhem of which we’d had no warning whatever; both Marshall and Beak streets were closed, shutting off not only vital access to Regent Street but the only route by which a vehicle can reach Shaftesbury Avenue. And this closure is to continue, at an optimistic estimate, for the next 10 days.

On Tuesday morning, devastated by the news of the Manchester atrocity, I found myself surrounded by total traffic gridlock in Broadwick, Poland and Great Marlborough streets.

Whatever extra police are on the streets, Westminster is ensuring that emergency vehicles couldn’t reach anyone if such an atrocity happened here.

And if we are lucky, and escape such a nightmare? Yet again, not just for these coming days but then for eight months, those many residents in our area who must rely on transport of some kind to get to vital medical and hospital appointments, let alone anywhere else, will find themselves enclosed by total chaos.

Yet again the avowed intent to turn central London into a no-go area for the disabled will be made all too clear. We are the new lepers. What an advertisement for the council. “We’ve trapped the disabled so they can’t get anywhere – so what!”

Nor, of course, will it just be frightful for the disabled. Perfectly fit people can have accidents, need an ambulance, be the victims of a fire, and Heaven help them, too, because how any emergency vehicle will reach them is a mystery to me.

Broadwick Street is already a congested, often impassable nightmare due almost entirely to the parking of huge lorries and low-loaders on double yellow lines to serve yet more developments, thus reducing the space for normal vehicles to get through or blocking it entirely.

Low-loaders and lorries are parked in Poland Street, on double yellows, often for hours. If Poland Street is made two-way to accommodate the closure planned, who on earth is going to ensure no parking is permitted there? Nobody, if past experience is anything to go by.

One-way traffic has a hard enough time getting through in present conditions; two-way will be gridlocked if nothing is done about the enforcement of any parking prohibition.

Residents, shopkeepers, businesses, all of us in this part of Soho will be affected but, as always, the attitude of authority is that if we don’t like it we can leave – and make way for another property development.

I’ve adored Soho all my life, as do countless others, and I wish I knew why the council hates it so much.

Savage development, street closures, and wiping away historic Berwick Street market is only the latest stage of it: craftsmen of every kind have been priced out by soaring overheads for even the smallest workroom; where once there were seven butcher’s shops – French, Belgian, English – there are none, just as we have lost so many delicatessens (once it was unthinkable that there wouldn’t be a kosher delicatessen left in Soho).

Once friends of mine envied me for living here, not just for its atmosphere, its glorious accepting heady mixture, its life, but sometimes simply because they could shop here for anything they wanted, from continental cuts of meat to antique pearl buttons.

But everything that was unique is being wiped out and replaced by something that only aliens from another planet would believe was the real Soho. It’s breaking my heart.

ALIDA BAXTER
Broadwick Street, W1