The controversial tower block scheme in Swiss Cottage

• THERE is a simple way for the developers to get out of the mess they are in with their over-development of the 100 Avenue Road site in Swiss Cottage: build something smaller, (100 Avenue Road: Fury as tower block developers seeks to remove affordable homes, January 21).

The good thing is that this creates a golden opportunity for Camden’s planning department to make this happen.

As cost is the main concern of the developers – Essential Living (Swiss Cottage) Ltd (based in the Channel Islands, I wonder why?) – the planners should make them abandon the obtrusive and ugly tower which, with 24 storeys, is inevitably very expensive to build.

They should ask the developers to build something smaller and more in keeping with the historic nature of the area.

This would still be profitable, given the insane level of rents and house prices in this city which, Essential Living must know, have also been increasing in the last few years.

Of course, if Essential Living had shown any concern for the area in the first place they could have done this years ago and had a smaller, but still profitable, building in use by now.

Instead, they ignored the more than 900 complaints from residents at the start, and didn’t listen to the numerous reasonable arguments in the public inquiry, so now they are facing reality: this set of buildings is unviable.

This confirms what we’ve said before: greed, arrogance and stupidity are never a good combination.

There are also serious concerns about the impact of Covid-19 on building works which are likely to continue for many months more.

In addition, most large companies now realise they do not need all of their staff in offices all of the time. Smaller offices mean fewer people passing though London, the very people Essential Living were planning to house in their awful buildings.

So we hope Camden’s planners will now use this opportunity to “take back control” and make Essential Living give us a more suitable building for this historic neighbourhood, and one with at least some affordable homes for local people.

MONIKA CARO, Chair, and
DAVID REED, Treasurer
Save Swiss Cottage Action Group