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Glass houses plan will ruin our garden
• WHAT is Camden Council doing at Holly Lodge? In the 1960s the council bought these amazing ‘Tudor’ flats, and in no time – against strong resistance – knocked one block down and replaced it with a hideous modern one.
In the 1990s, the council designated the estate a conservation area. In 2005, council planners enthusiastically welcomed an application to demolish another building, and put up new ones. This was eventually refused.
The council then spent a lot of money redecorating the outside of the mansion blocks. Now it is embracing the latest application, to replace two Tudor cottages with four glass – yes, glass – houses.
These cottages are special. Their fronts gently close the end of the flats’ long, main garden. Designed 80 years ago, the garden is still a quiet and beautiful oasis, and we now have a substantial grant to spend on its improvement.
But if the plans go through, there will be four taller, bigger, angular, white-glass-covered presences here, ruining the Arts and Crafts garden, weakening the estate’s original masterplan, and opening wide the door for further developments. If the council seeks a site for fashionable architecture, this really is not it.
The cottages’ backs face Swain’s Lane, where they are part of Holly Lodge’s striking ‘medieval’ presence in this popular ‘Gothic’ stretch of the lane, between fairytale Holly Village and the Victorian gatehouses of Highgate Cemetery – in an area of the Hampstead and Highgate Ridge protected by the council because of its beauty.
Despite 99 objections, the planners completely accept the developers’ opinions and (sometimes oddly inaccurate) statements. To grant planning permission is, of course, the easy way. It prevents an appeal which, if lost, would cost the council money. But this proposal, like the last one, has nothing to recommend it.
MARGARET DOWNING
Chairwoman, Holly Lodge Flats Residents Association
NW3
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