A farce in five storeys

Published: 13 August, 2010

• OBJECTORS to plans for the building known as Odeon House, next to the grade II-listed Odeon cinema in Holloway, did not receive notice of the planning committee meeting until July 21 although the letter was dated July 15 (Outrage at ‘undemocratic and offhand’ attitude of Town Hall, August 6). 

The recommendations to the committee consisted of 60 pages, and it was only on application that we received a copy, so we had from July 24-29 to consider it. Many of us were on holiday or at work or ill or looking after children. That is why I, a 78-year-old survivor of cancer and stroke, found herself representing objectors at the meeting.

Since the speaker system was not functioning properly no one could hear the council planners or developers. I and my co-objector, Joan Chasin, were sitting in the front row of the ‘audience’ – a misnomer since all that could be heard was a muttered gabble when the microphone was not used or a distorted reverberation when it was. 

Both of us have got good hearing. We were seated only three feet from the developer’s planning consultant but could not make out what he was saying. It was a farce, especially when (surprise, surprise) the appeal to the Planning Inspectorate was withdrawn. 

Most of my brief comments were directed at the way in which the council planners and the developers could not even agree on what a “storey” consisted of – the developers using the terminology “ground plus five” for instance, which the planners interpreted as five storeys. 

To make things more confusing, the designations “Block A” and “Block B” were often reversed. 

Perhaps the chairman, Councillor Robert Khan, would have done better to listen to this more patiently, since he and his committee might not then have been in the sorry position, according to the minutes, of having passed P100956 as a “five-storey” building with basement (Block B) to provide 31 residential flats, instead of the two blocks, A and B, at five and six storeys respectively, which the previous documentation led us to believe were being considered.

We would naturally by now be happy to accept one block of five storeys, if that is really what is on offer, but can only resent the imposition of shops on a residential road which is not in the Nag’s Head Town Centre, their usage “restricted”  to 17 hours a day and change of use infinitely flexible. Whatever happened to “the importance of context”?

BRYAN HEALING
Tufnell Park Road, N7