Save Swiss Cottage and monitor what Camden Council departments do

• ALTHOUGH it is good to see councillors defending our community, we have to ask where they – or more likely their predecessors – were when Camden’s planning department sat down with Essential Living (Swiss Cottage) Ltd, registered in the Channel Islands, and helped them cook up this appallingly awful scheme?

If anyone with the slightest knowledge of the historic nature of the Swiss Cottage area had looked at the proposed featureless set of buildings, they would have seen that the development was not appropriate for the area.

It is too dominant. The tower is twice the height of any local buildings – and the two five and seven-storey side slabs will throw the tiny urban park into almost perpetual shadow, while looming above the Grade II-listed Swiss Cottage library, one of the few buildings of note in the whole of Camden!

The proposed set of buildings is even too large for the site, and has already taken up key sections of the narrow pathways through the site, so now two buggies cannot even pass on the main north-south path!

But the real disaster for residents will come if the tower and blocks ever come into use: the many inhabitants will clog up the local area as they order much-needed supplies, taxis and services. Camden’s stupid planners didn’t even thinks of this.

Possibly the stupidest sentence ever written in the English language was their suggestion that, as the site was car-free, it would have no impact on local services!

This is par for the course: they are the people who drew the stupid red line around the site in the first place, calling it a town centre, thus opening the small site for rapacious developers.

It is as far from being a town centre as you can imagine. They either know nothing about the area, or just don’t care; and we pay their salaries!

It’s time our councillors took an active role in monitoring what the various departments in Camden are doing: who they are talking to, and what plans they are hatching!

But “what now?” is the big question and we see EL having just three options.

— Carry on with the approved awful plan and accept that their profits might be a year or so late in coming in; they are so stupid they have already wasted seven years when a more appropriate plan would have got permission. As said before greed, arrogance, and stupidity, are never good together.

— Leave the site empty for a few more years and hope it doesn’t lose value as the uncertainty of post-Brexit idiocy impacts every area of British life.

— Or sell the site to another developer.

We are hoping for the latter. This might find a company with more respect for the historic area who would propose a more elegant building. And one not so greedy and stupid.

MONIKA CARO Chair
DAVID REED Treasurer
Save Swiss Cottage
Action Group