“ Serious reality check needed here.
We are not waiting for an appeal or a new application to build housing. Beyond reasonable doubt there will be a re-application to the council with modest changes which may end up meaning nothing at all.
On the balance of probability this will be passed back through either the Chipping Barnet Planning Committee or borough Planning Committee with an unpredictable level of dissent. There may even be some mechanism for it to be rubber stamped by a planning officer under delegated powers. There is some chance the proposal will be refused again by a committee for new grounds. They have the power to do that, but it is unusual.
Likely changes will be relabelling the Chipping Close main entrance as a fire escape, the Bruce Road entrance upgraded from a fire escape and relabelled as the main entrance and some token obscured glass on irrelevant second or third floor windows.
Unless many people completely misheard what was said the committee judged the proposed hotel should have been set further back from the cottages in Chipping Close and its windows facing them should all have had obscured glass as in the previous proposal approved for the site.
At the time I thought the applicant is not going to do either. The proposal should have been dead and buried. I wasn't foolish enough to think it was. Between what was heard in committee and the publishing of the Refusal of Planning Permission things seemed to have changed and the proposal is back on track. It now reads:
"The proposed development by reason of its three-storey scale and close relationship to residential dwellings along Chipping Close, would result in a harmful level of enclosure and overlooking from the third floor clear glazed hotel bedroom windows detrimental to the amenities of neighbouring occupiers on Chipping Close".
Nope, I can't see how you get from one to the other either. But I can see what it means. Apart, obviously, from where the blazes are the "third floor" windows overlooking Chipping Close? Surely this must be leading to discussion among committee members, possibly impacting how this proceeds?
As the article says concerns at parking from the hotel have been totally discounted in this refusal. The applicant made it clear to the committee that the proposed adaption of the Spires for 24 hour use by hotel residents was limited to keypad operation of the entrance. The required complete, expensive and far reaching re-engineering of vehicle and pedestrian access of the car park and the Spires itself is completely off the applicant's radar. It clearly wasn't going to happen.
Beside all that, people will simply not pay to park somewhere when there are more convenient free alternatives for the hours they require. 80 to 100 vehicles would swamp evening and overnight parking in the Stapylton Road car park and surrounding streets.
This would be a stake through the heart of existing evening businesses the most serious inconvenience and noisy disruption for local residents 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The problems would be compounded if CPZ hours are increased as being widely proposed.
Meanwhile the Barnet Society is still promoting the hotel to the public and its members using the applicant’s assertions of benefits to the town. These wholly discreditable claims are now joined suddenly by promises of "major retailers" queuing to take units in the Spires on condition the hotel is built, a claim strangely few if any were hearing before the application hit the buffers.
Now we hear Barnet is to be a tourist attraction and the hotel will be needed to accommodate visitors to the battlefield. No wonder this article can claim people the Society canvases think the hotel would be a good idea as the Barnet Society is still so committed to telling them it is. But come on – widespread support? Not from many people that live anywhere near the Marketplace.
Get real. This is a transit hotel offering hostel–sized rooms for motorists breaking their journey as briefly as possible and tradespeople working on local projects in need of somewhere to crash out between shifts.
Time and time again the Society has raged at being deceived about aspect after aspect of this proposed development. The old saying fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me has never been more applicable.
If this goes through even if revised as the committee actually intended this would still be an appalling imposition on the residents of Chipping Close and a grievous and permanent wound to the town centre. I am sorry, but the conditions the Society says it had won may be worthy but just seem totally inadequate to the point of irrelevance.
I should be encouraged by the Society's promise to scrutinise forensically any fresh application. However why wasn't this done on the refused proposal, it was not by the residents' groups, it was not by the planning department. The applicant made a claim and GULP, it was swallowed hook line and sinker without any technical appraisal whatsoever. It must be said hardly a single claim in the application withstood any critical scrutiny at all.
Scrutinise the next application, see this cheap motel without a carpark for the blight it is and then fight like fury to protect your residents and the town centre – it is what the Society exists to do.
Then, but only then, by all means talk about suitable housing on this site. And then perhaps an hotel with decent sized rooms all on columns over an extended station carpark, with proper bus and shuttle facilities to the town centre as part of the project. ”