• WELCOME to our wonderful new world. With Covid-19 we are shopping more and more online.

Out go the shops on the high street, in come our new neighbours: the 24/7 warehouse operators, literally next door, like giant warehouse landlord Segro’s planning application for a last-mile depot running 24/7 in the residential hinterlands of Kentish Town, (Neighbours fear new distribution centre will clog up Kentish Town backstreets, January 21).

How wonderful for us last-mile end customers. By all standards this is an eccentric plan:

a) to instal a 24 hour, seven days a week, operation of a delivery warehouse in a predominantly residential area;

b) to claim that its future tenant, who will pay good money for the permission to operate around the clock would only do one delivery journey per vehicle a day (and letting those vehicles sit empty for the rest of that day which Segro claim in its supporting documents); and

c) to further claim that this delivery company with a minimum of 92 daily two-way trips – remember: according to the application, each will only do one (!) delivery journey although with permission to operate 24/7 – all fired up most likely with diesel – would have no impact on air pollution and traffic on the wider Kentish Town area!

Kid us not. This eccentric planning application has not been made by a small or failing business but by the UK’s biggest and one of Europe’s largest warehouse landlords.

They know what they are doing. They are trying to muscle into central London, and the inhabitants of Kentish Town are their test case or, in plain speech, their guinea pigs.

Either we buy as many shares of Segro as we can afford, and move out of Kentish Town, or we have to speak out.

ARIEL GEMS,
NW5