• AS you pass along Abbey Road near the junction with Belsize Road, you may notice behind the trees a small, beautifully spruced-up, one-storey, white concrete, building sitting quietly next to Neave Brown’s masterpiece estate, the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate (A&A), still greying away in spite of its Grade II*-listed status.

That small building is known as The Hive and is owned and managed by Camden Property Services. For years, the A&A TRA demanded the Hive be assigned back to our estate (it was a community nursery in the 1980s, and then a community centre before falling into disrepair).

Our plan was to raise funds and convert it into a gymnasium for residents priced out by all the gym franchises and fitness boutiques that keep mushrooming in the area.

Camden refused, its officers being adamant that it was their duty to extract “best value” from all of Camden’s properties. They told us that, according to their expert surveyors, the building needed £80,000 of repairs and they could only spend that sum by recouping it from renting out The Hive at the commercial rate of £25,000 a year over five years.

Our TRA could not afford that rent, so the council went on to advertise The Hive for rent and, in consultation with us, identified what appeared to be a commun­ity-oriented private nursery as a potential leaseholder. We did appreciate that the council had to make ends meet.

Except that the council ended up spending £177,919 on refurbishing The Hive: more than twice what Camden’s own surveyors had calculated. Someone had got their sums seriously wrong; over five years Camden would only be able to recoup £125,000 of that sum, in effect leaving them (that is, us) with a net loss in excess of £50,000.

It seems Camden did not have the resources or the imagination to invest in a community project, but when it came to spending public money to spruce up a building assigned to a private nursery (when Camden’s own public nurseries are suffering from some of the worst cuts in decades), it simply reached deeper into its public finances – our money.

We asked Camden to compensate for that shocking financial loss by granting residents on the estate a social dividend, in the form of a small 30 per cent guaranteed quota or a priority waiting list for local families wanting to send their children to the new private nursery which, in theory, is supposed to be opening its doors to the public in September, two months from now.

Both the nursery managers and Camden’s property services turned down our requests. The best they could offer was (possibly) extending the lease by another five years, and “engage with local residents” and “advertise placements” throughout the estates.

Our community has suffered considerably from the cuts forced upon us since 2010. We appreci­ate austerity policies have been driven by central government, and Camden has had difficult decisions to make.

But mishandling this project in such a spectacular way, while imposing more cuts to local services, including public nurseries, is a further indication that the few public resources still available are sometimes being misused, on the basis of seemingly perverse policy priorities.

THE ALEXANDRA AND AINSWORTH TENANTS’ AND RESIDENTS’ ASSOCIATION