The College Entrance
The Hill Group held an on-line consultation and an in-person consultation this week in the first stage of their engagement with the public over plans for the extensive Dudden Hill campus. I attended both.
The College will be demolished in phases with the eventual move of both the Dudden Hill and Wembley Park students to a new building in Wembley Park on the site of Network House.
The plans are for c1,500 new homes, work spaces, retail, nursery and community facilities. They are at an early stage and little detail is available. This gives residents a possible opportunity to influence the development.
Some buildings were demolished some time ago but there are also comparatively new buildings that will be demolished when redevelopment gets underway:
The plans include a central green open space as well as the retention of the green at the junction of Dudden Hill and Denzil Road.
A tree survey of the site is to be completed but a tour of the site yesterday demonstrated that there are some attractive specimens which I hope will be retained.
The size of the plot can be seen from this satellite image. Note the green corridor along the railway line and the area near Dudden Hill Lane and the green where buildings have already been demolished.
Among the issues I raised was the heights of the buildings. The highest blocks will be along the railway line and complement the tall buildings on the other side of the line on the former garden centre site. Lower blocks will front Denzil Road and Selbie Avenue.
I was told that tenure for the homes had not yet been decided and there were ongoing discussions with Brent Council. I stressed the importance of the provision of genuinely affordable housing and the findings of the Brent Poverty Commission that social housing was the only housing type that was affordable for Brent residents on the housing list. It was cleared that despite the issues involved shared housing would be part of the mix as well as private sale and built to rent. We discussed the current conditions regarding cost inflation.
You will see from the boards below that there is quite a lot of retail planned within the development. When I raised doubts about that given how many such units remain unlet in Wembley Park I was told that this was a different sort of development and the retail would serve the residents rather than visitors. It was not envisaged that it would compete with other nearby retail outlets.
Community spaces are planned and the public are invited to share ideas for what they should be. A nursery is already planned. An earlier visitor had suggested a swimming pool. I was interested that there shddould be an accessible and affordable space in which the new residents and other locals could get together with perhaps a cafe along the lines of the Chalkhill Community Centre model.
Further questions were raised about 'child yield' the number of chidlren expected to live in the 1,500 homes and the capacity of local schools as well as the impact of increased commuter traffic on Dollis Hill Jubilee line station.
The on-line webinar had a small section on the separate but connected WembleyPark campus redevelopment also to be be built by the Hill Group. This is separate from Quintain's development of the 'Fulton Quarter' which includes the curren retail park, McDonalds and the former TV studios, now a temporary theatre,
The Wembey site has the Wealdstone Brook running by and there are plans to see if this can be naturalised. I of course spoke about the extreme climate change flooding dangers as covered elsewhere on Wembley Matters. A very tall building will be the cornerstone of this development but there will be a separate consultation on this.
Concerns that came up earlier when plans were first publicised was whether the new integrated College site in Wembley Park would be able to house the space hungry engineering and building faculties that exist in Dudden Hill and whether Willesden area students would be happy travelling to Wembley Park for their courses.
Have a look at the Exhibition Boards below kindly supplied by Hill Group and submit any questions or feedback to collegegreen@fourcommunications.com .
Click on bottom right corner for full page view.
1 comment:
22 years since the College of Northwest London was demolished in South Kilburn.
And those were nationally the days of TB's "Education, Education, Education".... yet locally fun days when estate young people could literally fall out of bed into college were brutally ended.
Key social infrastructure migrating to where required, to be replaced here by you guessed it the first of many COLONIAL MONO-GROWTHS.
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