Much-loved architectural gem is under threat again

Published: 25 March, 2011

• The Beaux Arts residents in Holloway are being forced to resist for a second time an assault on their beautiful Islington building. After hundreds of letters and a long struggle, we managed to fend off a planning application to bulldoze our entrance hall and erect bungalows in our gardens and car park. 

The council ducked making a decision but the Planning Inspectorate turned down the plans. Now we find, unbelievably, that the developer is allowed to resubmit slightly tweaked applications and make us go through the whole ghastly opposition process again. 

We are all furious at having to fight the same battle twice. Someone has to put a final stop to these attempts to destroy the architecture and ambience of this historic and much-loved building.

BEN LEWIS
Beaux Arts Building
Manor Gardens, N7

• A YEAR ago you featured a picture of the magnificent lobby in our building, which the landlord was then attempting to convert into two flats. With your support, we managed to beat off this planning application.

Now, the lobby is under threat again – from a new application to move office, storage and mail-room functions into it so he can convert the current functional areas into a new apartment.

The lobby is used for meetings and social events – it is very important to us as a community. If this planning application goes ahead, the hundreds of residents will have nowhere for communal activities, and Islington will lose one of its architectural gems. 

LISA MILLAR
Chair, Beaux Arts Residents’ Association

• THE plans for the Beaux Arts Building expose a fault line that may affect many other blocks of flats. 

On the one hand, planning law doesn’t seem to make any provision for space for management functions that big blocks like ours need; nor does it protect the “common parts” inside buildings, however beautiful and however many people use them.

In our case, hundreds of non-residents enjoy the beauty of the entrance hall to our block each week. I am beginning to think planning law treats the communal front hall of a 200-flat block as if it were the private hallway in the landlord’s own home. 

On the other hand, leases often do not protect leaseholders from their landlords taking away “common parts” (provided he continues to provide functions specified in the lease, such as a way into the building). 

Leases have to give latitude to freeholders – otherwise one single awkward leaseholder could prevent changes that all the others want or the building needs. If developers are paying for later parts of a large development by selling flats they finished at the beginning, the leases have to be loosely written to enable them to do this. We in Beaux Arts are suffering from this now – who else will be next? 

MARY CAMPBELL
Beaux Arts Building