• AS many of your readers will be aware, the designated developers of the Murphy’s Yard site off the Highgate Road (previously railway land) have recently held two online consultations and posted images of the proposed blocks to be built.

These projections show a series of views as seen from various streets around Kentish Town on which the proposed blocks are indicated by highlighted outlines which do not give a clear sense of the true bulk and visual impact of these structures.

Inevitably these blocks, some of them up to 19 storeys high, if actually built will be grossly obtrusive from many angles, not least from Lissenden Gardens, from the Burleigh and Lady Somerset roads junction and, indeed, from Parliament Hill.

However the most disquieting views are those which concern the central Kentish Town junction where five roads meet by the railway station and the tube.

Up to now this congested heart of the area, chronically prone to traffic jams, has been saved from the worst effects of overuse by having a section of open sky to the west, beyond the railway bridge, giving at least a sense of some light and air elsewhere.

If Murphy’s Yard is redeveloped in the way currently proposed, this distant view of Hampstead Heath, and all sense of space and proportion, will disappear forever.

Kentish Town was seriously truncated and distorted in the 1860s when the Midland Railway acquired a great swathe of land here.

One hundred years later, when the railway yards closed, there was an opportunity for the whole area to be redesigned – a chance which the local authority at the time missed, ignoring local views and instead letting sections of land go piecemeal to various occupants.

Now they seem to be on the brink of allowing an even worse mistake to be made. The time to object to it is now, before it becomes too late.

CATHERINE DILLE
Leighton Road, NW5