‘A once-elegant corner’ in Kentish Town

• CAMDEN’S planning and enforcement functions are up the creek.

The planning committee is a shambles that rubber-stamps disastrous recommendations and ignores residents’ deputations.

We citizens look at recent planning officers’ recommendations for the O2 Centre and Murphy’s and despair.

Those are disasters waiting to happen.

But current examples are Deliveroo’s dark kitchens and the Pizza Express / North London Poly.

In Swiss Cottage, probably because of elections in a couple of weeks time, councillors actually sided with residents against officers’ recommendation to approve.

But we now learn that the kitchens in Swiss Cottage can and will continue to function for months during a lengthy appeal. Why have they not been summarily closed down?

And in Kentish Town the evidence of a disastrous bastardisation of a once-elegant corner treatment is plain to see (pictured above).

What of building control and enforcement?

The mismatch of brickwork and the crude new concrete parapet pale when you look further upward to the “close encounters” monstrosity perched on top.

Those additional metal-clad floors for penthouses were granted in return for the (hollow?) promise of a ground-floor cinema.

When, a year after the millionaire flats are sold and, surprise surprise, there’s no cinema operating because “it’s not viable”, will the community have the right to remove the over-massed carbuncle?

Or will officers recommend approval of its use as a Kentucky Fried Chicken?

PAUL BRAITHWAITE
Bartholomew Villas, NW5