English Heritage has questions to answer's

AS you reported (Now it’s all got personal, January 21), with reference to the British Museum’s planned extension, Paddy Pugh of English Heritage has accused the Camden Civic Society quite wrongly of making “personal attacks” rather than “focusing on the issues”.
It is true that the civic society, together with the Bloomsbury Conservation Area Advisory Committee, has now made two formal complaints to Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage, about EH’s handling of the museum’s original and revised planning applications. But these complaints stick very closely to the harm the scheme will cause the museum’s grade 1 existing buildings and the way in which this contravenes government policy.
We would be glad to “engage in a constructive discussion” with EH, but Dr Thurley has dismissed our first complaint and has yet to respond to our second, though this was sent to him on December 15. 
Mr Pugh is also wrong to say that the British Museum buildings have been “changed a lot over the years”. Additions have taken place, but both Robert Smirke’s original building and John Burnet’s King Edward Galleries, the other area of the museum to be affected by the new scheme, have survived essentially as built. Both still serve the museum very well.
One earlier alteration, the lengthening of the windows in the north wall of Smirke’s Great Court, work carried out in the 1930s when the Great Court was hidden from view, was rectified as part of the recent Millennium project, thanks to a lottery grant. Yet the museum now proposes making three new doorways through the solid wall of this same magnificent façade. This architectural mutilation is inexplicably supported by EH, who in their advice to Camden of November 30 wrote that “the overall benefits of the openings… which include the restoration “in spirit” of the Smirke rooms, decisively outweigh the minor visual harm they may cause… ” The Smirke rooms referred to lie directly behind the façade and we have pointed out in our latest complaint to EH that the museum’s application does not in fact include any proposal to restore them.   
At the development control meeting on December 17 when the museum’s revised scheme was passed, Councillor Paul Braithwaite said that he thought that EH had “performed abysmally” at both stages of the museum’s application. We agree completely with Cllr Braithwaite and, as reported last week, we shall be requesting that the council’s culture and environment scrutiny panel examine the service given to Camden by EH.
MARTIN MORTON
Chairman, Camden Civic Society