• READERS should be aware that there is, in the mind of Camden Council, a plan to demolish the perfectly decent West Kentish Town Estate (which needs little more than a sprucing up and better insulation) and replace it with an overdevelopment consisting of very large, very high, very tightly-packed residential blocks.

In the plan the present-day residents, a long-established community living in carefully-planned housing interspersed with green spaces and fine trees that have matured over the years, are to be confined into a large block built round a noisy courtyard that will fill up with parked cars and will receive little or no sunlight at any time of the year. The trees will be chopped down.

Their new homes will all be in a specially designated “poor block” of the redevelopment, designed in such a way as to keep the social housing tenants closed away and segregated, out of sight and out of mind of the posher, upwardly mobile, careerists who will buy the higher-spec new flats in the other blocks.

This nefarious, discriminatory, anti-social idea is being sold to the populace with the use of partial or erroneous information, intentionally misleading drawings, and spurious “consultations”, all with the alibi that the West Kentish Town Estate is an unredeemable place of severe deprivation for which the only remedy is wholesale redevelopment (which in the PR speak is now called “regeneration”).

I hope nobody will be fooled by any of this; but if they want to do something about it they will still be faced with the eternal subjection of the municipal decision-makers to the money-grabbing private landowners and developers.

This supine attitude by councillors seems to be a hereditary illness that has been with us for a long time; just this morning I happened across an article in the Daily Mirror for June 12 1975 by the late, lamented Keith Waterhouse (the author, among other things, of Billy Liar), who wrote about “…the development thugs, of course, with their disregard for anything but rent per square foot.

“The planning officers who are always so pathetically behind the times, like faded society belles wearing last season’s gown. The architects, who make up in arrogance what they lack in talent.

“For my part, I would put most of the blame on the councillors who invite and encourage the laying-waste of their own townships. The trouble is that many of them are not very bright.

“They have neither the intelligence nor the know-how to realise how they are being manipulated by the property gangs. Yet somehow the destruction must be stopped.”

Some things never change. Of course, not all of today’s elected representatives are lacking in intelligence, just as not all architects are arrogant or untalented.

So there must still be some hope that the brighter brains sitting on Camden Council will not be seduced by the smoothies and the smooching, and will somehow succeed in representing their constituents properly by calling a halt to the forthcoming destruction that threatens West Kentish Town.

Hopefully they will see beyond the PR and the deception, and will listen to others who, without payment and with no thought of personal gain, are working to demonstrate how the current proposals for the “regeneration” are inappropriate and should be completely rethought.

I urge our more thoughtful councillors to listen to those alternative voices – before it’s too late.

TOM MUIRHEAD
Address supplied