Cllr Nina de Ayala Parker, King’s Cross Partnership’s Jamie Quinn, the Tribune’s Charlotte Chambers, Prof Peter Bishop and Cllr Adam Harrison [Alice Horsley]

A PLANNING expert described Euston Road as “dysfunctional” and called for roads to be closed during his appearance at LDNCOP.

Professor Peter Bishop, from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, asked students to “imagine a new future for Euston Road.”

“The ideas they came up with were actually really quite simple,” he said.

“Widening pavements, greening the pavements. Looking at how you cross it, looking at how the side streets work. Why can’t we just close Judd Street and Fitzroy Street and have pocket gardens and then connect them across with crossings? Simple ideas.”

A road that runs parallel to UCL Hospital should be closed entirely to give patients and visitors respite while they recover, he added. “It’s about imagining that there has to be a better future for these dysfunctional places, like Euston Road,” he said.

A former director at Camden Council who helped mastermind the King’s Cross development, he led on the Bishop Review of 2011, which fed into government policy on planning law.

But he described a “disjuncture” between that work – which aimed to support achieving net zero – and “what happens in real life”. He said: “We can have as much policy as we like but the disjuncture in this country between broad government policies to achieve net zero and what actually happens on the ground is so wide, that one can only be intensely pessimistic.”

He added: “If you then take it down to the borough level, yeah, the policies are fine but your planning department has to be resourced enough and has to be strong enough to enforce it.”

He described the decision to knock down any building “deeply, deeply shocking,” and called for a presump­tion against demolition. “It should be absolutely exceptional,” he added.

Another panellist, Councillor Nina de Ayala Parker, called for ecocide to be registered as a crime.