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Athlone House |
Our Heath is under threat from architects building ego projects
Gordon Forbes of the Highgate Society explains why building on the edge of Hampstead Heath is simply out of the question
THE Garden House in the Vale of Health focused attention on the Hampstead side of the Heath, but there are also threats from developments on the Highgate side.
The most recent is the aim of a new multi-millionaire owner to demolish historic Athlone House and replace it with a palatial Classical-reproduction style house in Bath stone, visible from many parts of the Heath.
When Athlone House was sold by the NHS in 2004, Camden gave permission for three new blocks of flats on the site, on the strict condition that Athlone House itself was to be restored and the NHS additions demolished. Any new development was to be no larger than the floor area of these NHS demolitions. Kenwood Place, the new flats, is at present being built under that agreement.
The 8-acre site was recently split. The house and most of the original fine Victorian landscape have been hived-off, and the new owners, disregarding the requirement to retain the House – an important part of Highgate’s architectural history – propose to replace it with a materially larger new building, against both Camden’s own policies, and national planning policies for protecting Metropolitan Open Land.
As part of the Athlone House Working Group, the society will oppose any such scheme for a variety of reasons.
Athlone House is a fine Victorian (1870-72) mansion. It is structurally sound and there is no need to knock it down. It has large, generously proportioned rooms, planned logically but informally around an impressive Victorian stairhouse with carved, exposed roof-beams, housing a fine carved staircase lit by a large Morris & Co stained glass window. It will all go into the skip.
Recent press reports tell us that the new house will be worth £230 million, making it the most valuable private dwelling in London – but the poor taxpayer will not have a share in this bonanza, although Athlone House was public property.
Add in the profitability of the new flats under construction, and proposals to fix up the historic Coach House, and we would be very interested to know what part – if any – of this increase in value the taxpayer will receive.
Was the NHS just so keen to get someone to take Athlone House off their hands that they did not dare ask for any financial interest in the increased value it might deliver?
What incompetent management of public assets.
In the Times (April 5), facing their article on Athlone House, we learned that Lord Darzi is being advised how surplus NHS land could be used to finance new development. We hope that the advice he gets is smarter than in the case of Athlone House.
Camden recently permitted the demolition of Fitzroy Farm, in Millfield Lane, and the construction of another pseudo-Classical private mansion aping Kenwood House itself.
There is, however, the problem of how 6,000 cubic metres of soil can be taken off site so that the underground pool and gymnasium can be built – work necessitating 20 eight-wheeler trucks a day churning up the track used by thousands visiting the Heath and the Ladies’ Pond, and anticipated to ruin the lives of the residents of Fitzroy Park for up to two years.
Another loss of an unobtrusive house and replacement by brash, ostentatious architecture is at Heathfield Park, Merton Lane. The white stone cladding of the new house, under construction now for about 10 years, screams out across the Heath, and there have been so many applications for planning changes that Camden may be forgiven for wanting to just give up.
They must not, but the green slopes formerly visible from the Heath have been degraded for the sake of this architecturally disappointing piece of self-aggrandisement.
Driven by high land values and owners with more money that taste, the edges of our precious Heath are suffering from a plague of poorly-related houses of unconvincing architectural merit. The quiet domestic character and scale of the Heath’s borders is threatened by a jumble of ostentatious designs competing for attention, all determined on a view of the Heath.
From the Heath itself all this presents a view that is less than inspiring. Hampstead Heath, and the public, deserve better.
The Highgate Society is fighting to halt the gradual destruction of this Conservation Area, which desperately needs more imaginative planning control than it has recently received.
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