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Heath is not a park or corporate playground
• HAMPSTEAD Heath should not be built on.
The Heath does not require further development of any kind. Non-essential roads and buildings and clutter should be removed from it rather than added to it. The Heath is not a park or a corporate playground.
The erosion of Hampstead Heath, which is a national treasure, must be challenged at every turn. The job of a responsible custodian is to continually return it to “heath” against the flow of temporary demand for modernisations. Going with the flow of commercial thinking is no longer appropriate for high streets let alone the Heath.
So my first objection is that the development is going in the wrong direction, and the thinking behind it is fundamentally, socially, and environmentally flawed.
It was useful to hear Heath management committee chairman Bob Hall and his team asserting their authority over the public who gathered at his request on February 14 to “walk” through his proposed new “route” which he and his team publicly accepted was a road when challenged.
It’s a simple thing, but the huge resistance to calling a road a road was unsettling and provoked many questions that clearly had either not been addressed by the consultation or had not been answered by the consultation.
Throughout our walk and talk with Bob, what stood out most was the explanation of the kind of vehicles that were likely to cause the problems, that meant we needed a road.
What appears to be going on here is the movement of office staff and an administrative development onto the Heath into buildings that are being made available by a reorganisation of genuine services and depots. Maybe part of a corporate restructuring, a cost-saving exercise or more closely to oversee future development.
The road is a proposed solution, not to an existing issue, but to an issue that the City of London are creating.
My second objection is that the proposal may not be what it appears to be at all and therefore it needs further examination.
Clearly there are plans for commercial development beyond the office block that requires the road. The café is to be demolished and incorporated into a new development with a heritage centre and who knows what other commercial attractions. While the café will be run by the family who run it now, it seems inevitable that it will become a franchise and that commercialisation of the Heath will continue.
The heritage centre, or whatever it turns out to be, could be delivered through the web, local cafés and bars and through Kenwood.
It appears the people who are the guardians of the Heath don’t seem to want it to be a heath but a managed open space, targeting consumers to meet perceived current needs, rather than focusing on the health benefits of an organic natural landscape.
The road will service this development, that’s what roads do.
This decision to go ahead will change the Heath forever, and not for the real benefit of the community. City businesses are looking for ways to turn back the clock on environmental degradation and this scheme flies in the face of logic.
Robin Smith
Mackeson Road, NW3
The cost of moving offices
• I WISH Bob Hall would come clean and admit the proposed road (Forum, February 12) has nothing to do with safety and more to do with moving offices from Archway onto the Heath.
The corporation tried to do that 20 years ago when they took over the management of the Heath. Now it’s dressed up with a bid for improved sports facilities.
Residents of Gospel Oak and Lissenden Gardens would stand four square behind any improvements for sports facilities etcetera but why should lottery money be used to help the City corporation move offices?
Brian Hummel
Lissenden Gardens, NW5
Conserve it
• DURING the last 10 years Hampstead Heath has unquestionably lost much of what Bob Hall calls its “rural feel” (Forum, February 12).
This is because so much vegetation has been destroyed or badly disfigured. I am no naturalist but I can vouch for at least four animal habitats that have been ignorantly devastated.
The Corporation of London is in no way fitted to run the Heath and if it gets this lottery money it will only misuse it. The Heath needs conservationists to manage it, not bankers who are as irresponsible in relation to nature as they are in relation to banking.
David Forbes
Barrington Court, NW5 |
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