Construction by the Heath is a real blot on the landscape

Published: 9 June, 2011

• CONSTRUCTION that has loomed up on a site in Millfield Lane is a disproportionate and grotesque contradiction of the rural charm of old Millfield Lane that runs hard by the Highgate swimmers’ pond next to Hampstead Heath.

A historic, narrow, lane which still invokes the old Middlesex countryside, like the Heath next to it – but for how long?

This concrete structure is, I understand, five floors; two subterranean, of course, challenging the natural water table and three above challenging the landscape. 

It lowers over the trees and tiny pavement of Millfield Lane like some gigantic steel reinforced concrete gun emplacement of the kind with which the late Field Marshal Erwin Rommel disfigured the coast of Normandy. One can imagine “Big Bertha” artillery piece on its top concrete platform, ready to take out the Everyman cinema or possibly the Royal Free Hospital on the other side of the Heath. Such is its spirit of aggression.

For about a year we have had to endure contractors’ vehicles including those carrying earth moving equipment, cranes, mechanical diggers, pile drivers, concrete rods etc, to say nothing of large lorries leaving and entering the site and lines of parked contractors’ vehicles from early morning until evening.   

Camden’s planning department has really got to serve Hampstead Heath and its users better by not permitting industrialised development of such conspicuous enormity and intensity on the very fringes of Hampstead Heath, to which such grandiose structures are the very antithesis.

ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH
Chairman
United Swimmers Association of Hampstead Heath