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By DAN CARRIER
 
Mortuary at foot of garden wins backing

Neighbours protest that 'petition' swayed planners

BODIES will be stored within touching distance of back gardens in Tufnell Park after a funeral director won a planning battle to convert a builders’ yard shed into a mortuary on Thursday.
Councillors approved eco-funeral directors Green Endings’ plans at a stormy Town Hall meeting. But residents protested that many of the letters supporting the mortuary, which will back onto gardens in Oakford Road, were from people living outside Camden.
Of the 169 letters backing the plans, nearly 100 were not from the NW5 area. Letters to the Town Hall came from as far afield as Surrey, Hertfordshire and even Scotland.
Publishing director Robert Brighouse, whose Burghley Road home will overlook the mortuary, felt the committee had been misled by the number of letters written supporting the scheme.
He said: “It was an abuse of the process. There were letters that should not have had any sway on the committee but were included in the report.
“Getting the letters together was basically a petition saying it was a well-run business and has no bearing on whether there should be a mortuary in that space or not.”
Protesters who filled the Town Hall’s public benches on Thursday – and who said more than 300 letters of objection were sent – circulated pictures of children leaning over a garden fence and touching the wall of the shed, to demonstrate how close the mortuary would be to their back gardens. More than 70 homes will overlook the new mortuary, which will store a maximum of eight bodies in a refrigeration unit. It is visible from bedroom windows and gardens.
Among those who wrote in support of the planning application was John Jones, a director of PR company Calan Communications who lives in Tower Hamlets and admitted he had not visited the site.
He told the New Journal he had met Green Endings director Roslyn Cassidy at a forum for small businesses, Business Network International, and had been impressed with her work.
He said: “It seemed to me there was a scaremongering campaign.”
Ms Cassidy said she had searched “high and low” for possible mortuary sites.
She added: “People have suggested I should go to places like the Regis Road industrial estate (in Kentish Town) but funeral directors aren’t classified as industrial units, so I could never have got planning permission there.”
She hoped that neighbours will gradually come to accept the mortuary.
Ms Cassidy added: “In the past, when people died they were laid out in their homes until the funeral. It is only recently that people have been removed before their funeral, and, in other countries, such as Ireland, they still are kept at home. It is a question of perceptions.”
Several businesses in the area wrote to planners enthusing about the company’s eco-friendly policy and sensitive approach to funerals.
Newscaster Jon Snow, who lives close to Green Endings’ base in Fortess Road, wrote in a letter of support: “It (Green Endings) seems to me the kind of business Camden is keen on attracting and sustaining.”
Actor Roger Lloyd-Pack’s wife Jehane Markham, who lives in Lady Somerset Road, said she had been impressed with the service Green Endings offered – and added that she felt “some people in the area had over-reacted out of fear, suspicion and ignorance”.
She added: “To say death is not part of the community makes as much sense as saying that birth is not part of the community.”
The committee voted 5-3 in favour of the conversion.
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