How the redevelopment of the Murphy’s Yard site was due to look

• IT was with great relief to local residents that the totally unacceptable planning application for the Murphy’s Yard site was withdrawn.

But the reassurance of the Folgate Estates developer Andrew Wilson that they would “look again at refining it” seemed to suggest that either the consultation message may not have been entirely gathered or that a very positive spin was being imposed on the situation.

I do not dismiss the claim by the developer to be “avuncular to life in Kentish Town” but they may want to expand their familial responsibility to the other neighbouring areas such as Gospel Oak, Dartmouth Park and, crucially, Hampstead Heath.

The Heath & Hampstead Society objected strongly to the scheme in the protection of residents and all those who enjoy the Heath.

What remains from the episode is the unanswered question about how exactly the developer, having engaged in an expensive pre-submission discussion with Camden through a planning performance agreement (“a framework in which parties come together to agree how they are going to take a development proposal through the planning process”), arrived at the conclusion that such a grouping of over-tall towers would ever be appropriate in this location.

Why on Earth did officers not recognise a bad scheme when they saw one and did not steer the proposal more forcefully to a decent outcome?

There is one analysis which bears consideration:

Camden has a clear need to deliver new homes and near to Gospel Oak this pressure has been exacerbated by the demolition of the entire Bacton Low Rise Estate and the present inability to even start that vital reconstruction.

This has already removed so many families from the area that one school was effectively made temporarily redundant.

Does Labour-led Camden want its job of delivering new housing done for them?

Was this what swayed planners into backing such a greedy proposal?

This mess crosses planning, education, communication, and democracy.

While I was a Conservative member I made the point to full council, also pressed by residents from West Hampstead, that the waste of the huge fee paid to Camden for poor advice was not right.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats voted against our motion to set clear limits on high-rise buildings in the borough.

This was a missed opportunity to prevent this type of wasteful and disruptive misadventure. Put simply, Conservatives do “what it says on the tin”. We look after things.

Is it too much to ask that the Camden Council listen to reason and protect the Heath and other conservation areas?

STEVE ADAMS, NW3