Time to once again ‘defend the legacy of rustic Hampstead Heath’

• EVERY now and again we are required to take up the cause of defending the legacy of rustic Hampstead Heath.

Wise heads, decisive minds, and visionary eyes of reforming 1860s and 1870s England, organised to save part of London’s rural past, for the sake of its future.

We must now challenge those develop­ments along its fringes, which betray their vision and our inheritance.

The latest example of inappropriate develop­ment along the Heath’s borders, comes in a planning application to demolish 55 Fitzroy Park, and to replace it with not one but five houses; an enterprise in multiplica­tion that will involve taking away some 50 trees plus greenery and the civil engineering of much of the entire site of a single existing habitation, lying at the very edge of the Heath.

Fitzroy Park is that amazing thing: a still rural, quiet country hamlet of a relatively few houses, hidden close to the heart of a great city.

Our condition of increasing physical disconnection from nature, rising mental health challenges and a lost sense of identity, clearly has need of this rare spot.

There is a case for greater density of housing, it is certainly not here, in this still rural setting, alongside the country lane that passes the Kenwood ponds and Hampstead meadows.

The thing that will be lost is greatly more valuable than the mere market price of the proposed five houses: no matter how high their estate agency valuation might be, ironically, because of their location.

As to the building development application, we are charmingly advised that these five houses are a “family” development for “family” occupation.

For how long one asks? Is not London made up of thousands of families and is not the Heath and its environs intended for the enjoyment of them all?

The scarcity and social value of Fitzroy Park should be protected from overdevelopment, given its nature and integral relationship to the Heath and those social objec­tives which first led to the Heath’s preservation from property development.

Five into one, does not go! Certainly, not here at this blissful spot where Fitzroy Park hold hands with Hampstead Heath.

ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH
N2