Enough of tower blocks!

Published: 17 June, 2010

• ON the latest proposals for the Abbey Area Regeneration, a consultation being co-ordinated by Camden Council and GVA Grimley seems to have ballooned quite rapidly since the last round in March this year Now one of these new proposals is for a 24-storey tower block on the Belsize Road/Abbey Road junction which will, to follow Camden’s website timetable, be put in for planning this summer.

I am sure, with the hope of the consultants that, if rejected, a second option for another, slightly lower, tower block will be approved. 
Apparently a tower block is the only way the costs of developing the site can be made to stack up.

We are reliably informed that the tower block would be of a landmark design.

So what!  We have enough tower blocks and using them as a justification for even more is nonsense.

Most people want and need human-scale homes with outside space.

This consultation process has been a farce.

Providing residents with Post-it notes to scribble wish-lists over a plan, to enable the consultation team to pick and choose what they want to suit their own agenda, is insulting.

Dividing stakeholders into smaller focus groups can affect sensible conversation. 

Indeed the our estate’s representatives felt their views carried no weight at all and thus they no longer wished to legitimise the “consultation”’ process.

I simply cannot believe that people in this part of Kilburn and Swiss Cottage really want more high-density, high-rise, housing and certainly the streetscape is not going to benefit from this approach.

I haven’t seen any evidence of how building up this area with residential and retail units, substantially changing its character, is going to impact on the retail of Kilburn High Road and the area around Belsize Road roundabout and Boundary Road, let alone school places.

And who will live in this high-rise landmark tower block? Presumably it may have large penthouses for sale with some unspecified social housing in the less desirable bits of the site.

Using costs to justify proposals is the wrong way to consider the strategic development framework for the long-term future of this area.

A public meeting, together with all the main stakeholders, would have a view different from that being put across on Camden’s website.

Opportunities for the area are not being maximised. I don’t feel fully informed of Camden’s “vision”.

I fear the area will be blighted by further inappropriately scaled building. 

Questions need to be asked now about who really benefits from this sort of consultation and whether the £500,000 of fees are being spent wisely.
FLO CUBBIN
Ainsworth Way, NW8