• THE current planning application for the Murphy’s site is a hot topic.

It’s a difficult scheme to get in perspective. Glistening 3-D views are provided to make it harder to do so. Be assured, what’s going on is dead ordinary.

First, the current application is an outline planning application.

That means general things get decided. The quantum and type of housing won’t be – without up-to-date viability assessments.

With construction still a long way off, those cannot be available now which means the housing figures are very provisional.

Take non-residential uses: the application says anything between 43,000 sq m and 95,000 sq m could be provided. That’s a big range.

Community uses floor space could vary between a maximum of 1,300 sq m and a minimum of 300 sq m (essentially a modest hall).

Meantime a purportedly core use, which is industry and research, could vary between 40,000 sq m and 80,000 sq m.

Although the developer is a civil engineering company, it does not appear to be interested in any new infrastructure to reduce the awkwardness of the site’s relationship to the surrounding area.

The basic conditions of rail severance, even in the middle of the site where an open cutting creates a major pinch point, aren’t changed substantially.

The guff about “stitching the neighbourhood together” is imaginary.

“Makers Lane” is no more than a possibility 100 per cent dependent on the go-ahead of the Regis Road redevelopment set out in the Kentish Town planning framework; and no one is saying very much about that at the moment.

As for the Kentish Town station end of the Heathline – it’s no more than a dotted line on the plans: there’s no real commitment to bring it into the middle of Kentish Town high street.

The Murphy’s site has very poor access, a difficult topography, and ludicrously awkward shape. None of that will change. Its low-intensity use as a major contractor’s yard for the last 50+ years seems a sensible way to use it.

What’s proposed isn’t very clever however much you shout about the housing crisis.

When you look at the proposals remember they are really very ordinary; another piece of industrial backland on which a developer is trying to intensify as much as they can with a compliant planning authority’s help.

Keep your tinder dry. This is a long-term battle to introduce common sense into the planning debate. Our job is to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

TOM YOUNG
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