“ Hi Mary, replying as no one else seems to be and it is a very good question worth addressing.
You are quite right there are alternative locations for hotels in High Barnet and existing buildings have frequently been converted into Premier Inns. The building you refer to would probably physically fit the bill and is in itself a clever suggestion. Thanks for it. The location doesn't have the immediate neighbours issue but would still have negative commercial impact through the amount of parking it would both swallow and displace, and simply being the sort of motel intended. The restaurant operation would also clash with the Red Lion.
The upper two floors of the Red Lion itself were a fully functioning hotel (complete with a full size ballroom). I was shown around in the 1980's and to my knowledge it is all still there. It is probably the sort of community–friendly modest sized hotel serving visitors to the town people are thinking of when they say they would support an hotel in principal and would indeed help regenerate the area. It is the complete opposite of the 101 room hostel–style motel planned for the Marketplace. However the space has been left vacant for many decades so presumably successive owners actually both in possession of the building and in the hospitality trade have all felt there is simply no commercial justification for it.
Land adjacent to the tube station has been talked about for a potential large hotel for years but has a whole chain on financing and permission issue with a number of separate businesses and public bodies involved. It would still probably be the best site for a large hotel in the area. However it just doesn't seem to fit Whitbread's very specific ambitions.
A location needs to be available and fit in with the operator's business plan. Whitbread appears to be committed to a massive increase in the number of rooms it operates by 2020. This is in itself likely to cause problems in areas surrounding new hotels if the market is oversupplied and premises sold on or repurposed. However the Marketplace will have ticked all the boxes to contribute to this deadline. It had a land owner that was prepared to sell at a good price as the project requires a chain of change of use for two sites. Contact between the applicant's agent, local community groups and the Planning Department also seem to to have delivered the promise of a smooth path to planning approval for all this. It is also a brownfield site needing very little clearing, which has previously had planning permission (and even an archaeology report) for a similar sized building, although with obviously much less impact on its neighbours. It is usually much easier, quicker and cheaper to build from scratch rather than convert an existing building, particularly with the huge number of tiny rooms the applicant wishes to squeeze in.
Sadly if you get into the detail rather than the principle (which no one seems to have done before the application) this is just a bad site in terms of impact on its immediate neighbours and those in the surrounding area, both residents and businesses.
The claims of benefit to the Spires and the town centre in general may have helped leverage the purchase of the land but are really window dressing. The calculation misquotes its source document which in any event averages very disparate operations and simply could not be used to work backwards to resident spend surrounding an individual hotel. This is primarily a transit motel and workers' hostel in which residents arrive late and leave early – it could be in the middle of a field for all they care, they simply don't need other local facilities.
Realistically the issue is not about the idea of a hotel somewhere in town in principle or that can be achieved by residents' groups or the council waving some magic wand to change the proposal. It is simply whether this hotel as proposed on this site in this application and any re-application is built or not built. ”