• ESSENTIAL Living applied to Camden last year to demolish 100 Avenue Road before they had even submitted the necessary detailed construction and foundation plans.

Camden planners have, from the beginning, sided with EL rather than the interests of residents, and actually recommended approval of that application, despite the fact that such a decision would have required them to ignore a legal condition imposed by the secretary of state, requiring that “no demolition or above or below ground develop­ment may commence until full engineering plans for foundation and piling works have been submitted, agreed by TfL and approved by Camden Council”.

Camden’s self-interest has long been apparent, seduced, as they are, by the prospect of the £15million or more that will accrue from the attendant section 106/CIL agreement once this development gets the go-ahead. This fact, along with the depressing prospect of having to endure a wasteland in the heart of Swiss Cottage for as long as it takes Camden building control, London Underground and the Highways Authority to agree and approve the plans, persuaded hundreds of local people to object to last year’s application with the result that, in late July 2016, at the 11th hour, EL withdrew it!

Nearly seven months on, they are again applying to demolish the Avenue Road building, even though the same legal condition 31 applies and the below-ground construction method and design appraisals, with all their serious implications for piling above the tube station, have still to be supplied and approved.

Now EL are making even further demands. The Eton and Avenue Road tube entrances are to be closed, preventing access to the station from the east side of Finchley Road, and demolition trucks will access the site across the pedestrian part of Eton Avenue – all of which will have a serious impact on the street market, Hampstead Theatre, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, to say nothing of the residents of Mora Burnet House and the flats, houses and businesses of the immediate area.

A town hall IT “wipe-out” resulted in almost no email planning alerts being sent out through most of January. This, combined with the fact that Camden no longer send out such notifications in letter form, “conveniently” ensured residents knew nothing about EL’s latest application until it was almost too late.

Now Camden, in its rush to smuggle this latest application past us, appears to be attempting to disguise 2016/6699/P, as a “discharge” of condition 31 when the additional disruption detailed above, clearly determines that it is a “variation”. Camden’s transparency is once again called into question.

Our collective action put a spoke in EL’s wheel last July. We must, do so again. I urge everyone to join us in objecting to application 2016/6699/P.

PETER SYMONDS Chair,
The Combined Residents Associations of South Hampstead