“ I would add that hundreds of jobs are likely to be lost if the businesses with storage units at High Barnet Station are evicted. Each of the 120 self storage containers represents at least one local job while some of them many, many more. Many of these jobs are those of local people. These are jobs that will be gone if alternative premises can not be found, a near impossible task.
Similarly with the scaffolding yard. Scaffolding is essential for building and maintaining the sort of homes we should perhaps be seeing built rather than the modular high rise, high density estate we would have forced upon use with the High Barnet Station proposals.
The faults of this scheme are simply not confined to an extreme adverse impact on local parking and through that the viability of High Barnet's increasingly damaged Town Centre. I would argue and have argued the proposed cramped apartments, with cramped corridors, stairwells and lifts on a cramped site with cramped outside spaces and exceedingly poor access have always been inappropriate. In the new normal of any post (or ongoing) pandemic world they would be an obscenity.
I know many people find the containers unattractive. In reality the site operators have worked hard to ensure they are well maintained and tidily arranged. I would respectfully suggest they have far less impact on the character of the town than the proposed estate. I am confident when the people of Barnet see the final plans they will be shocked and agree with me on this point at least. The development is of a whole different order of magnitude. Its impact on this site and over the wide area over which it would be seen would be staggering.
The containers are in reality stacked far lower than the proposed row of apartment blocks and act as a guide to the height of them. It is argued whether the the buildings would be the height of 8, 9 or 10 containers. You will soon know. All this is happening now. As the article says final plans are scheduled to be submitted to the council some time this month.
I know the argument that homes come before jobs and before transport but all are essential to a community. Whatever the future looks like it will need jobs, it will need transport. That transport will need hubs properly served by road vehicles including buses, cabs and yes, even private cars. They will not work as just a train station stranded half way up a hill and with appalling pedestrian access. It will not need the types of homes so small, densely packed and inaccessible they would have been condemned as a recipe for social deprivation and the spreading of disease 100 years ago. Have we really already forgotten the lessons of the last century and even the last three months? ”