• THE wrangles following the costly development of a property in Millfield Lane, which runs alongside Hampstead Heath, starkly illustrates the nature of the problem of property development next to the Heath.

Put simply, it attracts too much money, too little sense of proportion, and too small a concern for the interests of the rest of us.

How can a £2million pound budget for a domestic dwelling, reach a £3million overrun and take an entire decade to complete? It puts the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s in proportion.

These Heath-edge property developments are not situations where people wish to buy a home for security, on a mortgage, but who rather, aim to destroy a house to build another and much more.

The amount of steel and concrete, reportedly creating an underground swimming pool, gymnasium and “what else” in the Millfield Lane site, was staggering and threatening to the Heath’s water-fed environment.

It disrupted life in the little lane for several years. To build a house with its own private underground swimming pool, right next to the free and open swimming ponds of Hampstead Heath, seems like a rejection of paradise.

The site was left as a man-made ruin of concrete and steel, for 10 long years; resembling, I always thought, one of the late Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s wartime, concrete, gun emplacements on the French coast.

Now, eventually completed, it rather resembles a discrete, upmarket, gated, Swiss abortion clinic.

ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH
N2