Bird’s eye view of the Regis Road area

IT’S widely assumed that Yoo Capital’s Camden Film Quarter plan is forging ahead and the entire Regis Road Industrial Estate (RRIE) behind Kentish Town High Road will be transformed according to a “visionary” master plan.

This view was reinforced by the recent Yoo public consultation at Camden’s Greenwood Centre and online using Camden’s Commonplace account, although the material provided was not candid about the real state of play.

A recent public planning inquiry (occasioned by one RRIE landowner appealing the refusal of planning permission to redevelop the Alpha House site) examined Camden’s plans for RRIE’s future redevelopment and, via probing questioning from two King’s Counsels, brought important facts to light:

• UPS, the occupant of the biggest land parcel in RRIE (35 per cent of the total), has had polite conversations with Camden and Yoo but won’t be moving elsewhere or redeveloping its site according to Camden’s aspirations.

• Camden paid for a planning consultant to draw up strategies for redeveloping RRIE in 2021 and concealed the resulting report which concludes UPS’s presence in its existing building compromises comprehensive design goals.

Since the report, Camden has added the Holmes Road depot to form the larger RRIE development area by selling it to Yoo Capital.

• Yoo is now drafting a planning application focused on the western half of RRIE where it has struck deals with landowners, for example, Camden.

• Yoo accepts the RRIE access road will remain in use by HGVs and has no objections to the Alpha House proposal contradicting Camden’s leeriness about both.

Camden’s hope of an alternative route for HGVs on a new access road between UPS’s southern edge and the Alpha House site is not supported by the relevant landowners.

One takeaway is that the application of Camden’s precious comprehensivity principle – design control via a master plan – is constrained by facts on the ground (realities which Yoo and the Alpha House owner are responding to).

Comprehensivity is practically limited because Yoo cannot control at least 40 per cent of the total RRIE area.

The film quarter dream is probably intact but much work on the land in Yoo’s control is needed – to assess capacity for retaining and increasing industrial space as well as accommodating housing – and is sure to modify final commitments.

There are, for instance, no credible alternative sites for Camden Council’s car pound, recycling centre and Holmes Road depot.

Of less interest to anyone focused on RRIE becoming “a creative quarter” endowed with more spaces for public leisure is this: RRIE, designated a “growth area” in 2017 and earmarked then for comprehensive development, has seen no growth.

The Alpha House proposal offered some but Camden turned it down for not being “design led” or “future facing”, in the words of their special consultant, without giving the applicant a chance to consult planning officers.

Is Camden Council’s intense aversion to “piecemeal” development a blight on economic development?

Many of us would like an opportunity to cross examine council regeneration officers but we can’t pay a King’s Counsel’s fee.

It takes an aggrieved corporation (turnover £188million last year), denied planning permission for a site that’s just 5 per cent of the total RRIE area, to illuminate what’s happening.

Meantime, the civic-minded of Kentish Town believe Yoo’s “vision” is based on fair public consultation occluding the fact nobody – and certainly not the trade unions – from any of the existing workspaces slated for demolition has been consulted about the future of RRIE.