Jill, Alan and Hamish have taken up recent concerns from local residents about parking issues during the ever-popular Sunday morning car boot sales at St. Philomena’s School, off Shorts Road in the heart of the Carshalton Central neighbourhood.  Unfortunately, these car boot sales do not require a licence from Sutton Council as they are not classed as “street trading”. As the car boot fairs operate from private property they do not fall under the terms of the legislation which only applies to the public highways. These car boot sales have never been licensed and therefore there is no licence or conditions to be complied with.  Generally speaking nuisance parking takes place rather than illegal parking and therefore we’ve been told  that there is no enforcement action that could be taken by our parking wardens or the police. 

We have recently contacted the new head teacher of St Philomena’s School asking that further measures are put in place to limit the disruption to local Carshalton Central residents wherever possible. When we hear back from the school’s head, we will report back soon, we hope.

We have also asked Transport for London to help. They operate parking controls on the A232 Red Route which Pound Street is on. They have confirmed to us recently that they will continue to enforce parking in Pound Street on the A232 Red Route, but they said that they didn’t think the situation has got out of control enough yet for further parking restrictions to be implemented on Sundays as the car boot fairs happen about 5 times a year.  More in a future posting..!