Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity
1 Morland Gardens on 1 April 2023. (Photo by Margaret Pratt)
The photograph above is similar to one that introduced a previous guest post in January 2023 (1 Morland Gardens – How many more times can they get it wrong?). It was taken on 1 April, but this is no joke. The “April Fools” are at Brent Civic Centre.
If the Senior Officers, Council Leader and Cabinet members had listened, to me and others opposing their plans for redevelopment of the (now former) Brent Start college at 1 Morland Gardens since early 2020, they could have amended their project. They could have retained the heritage Victorian villa they seem determined to demolish (in complete contravention of the Council’s own heritage planning policies), and had a scheme which still delivered perhaps 20 affordable homes as well.
The wide footpath, from Hillside, with community garden on the right. (Photo by Margaret Pratt)
Instead, they pressed ahead with plans which were supposed to deliver 65 affordable homes, built partly on land that is a wide footpath and a community garden. They currently have no legal right to build on that land, despite claiming it is part of their site, and there are objections to the Stopping-up Order they would need. That is because their plans would force pedestrians to walk through heavily polluted air, and remove many trees, in breach of Brent’s Air Quality Action Plan and Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy.
The funding for the project, which Brent’s Cabinet approved in January 2020, included £6.5m from the GLA’s Affordable Housing Programme 2016-2021. Although this programme was extended to 2023, local authority projects for funding under it had to “start on site” by 31 March 2023. As a number of photographs taken around 1 Morland Gardens on 1 April by a Willesden Local History Society member show, no actual work had begun on the site by then.
Blue hut in the car park at 1 Morland Gardens, 1 April 2023. (Photo by Margaret Pratt)
An “Oasis” self-contained welfare unit (including canteen and toilet facilities) had recently been delivered to the former college’s car park, ready for any workers to use. But none of the “Start on Site Works”, as defined in the GLA’s funding agreement, had been carried out by the key date. Brent Council has therefore lost that £6.5m funding, for a scheme it was already admitting, in the November 2022 affordable housing report to Cabinet, was unviable. So the Cabinet approved recommendations to “value engineer” the 1 Morland Gardens project.
Construction details from the February 2023 Construction Logistics Plan.
From the latest documents I have seen, that “value engineering” means ditching the more environmentally friendly “award winning” design which was given planning consent in 2020, and switching to a traditional concrete frame, with precast infill panels. This will require much stronger foundations, involving 454 20-metre-deep concrete piles across the site. It seems all too reminiscent of the methods used to build Brent Council’s Chalkhill and Stonebridge estates in the late 1960s / early 1970s, which had to be demolished around 30 years later!
Construction of a “Bison” concrete block of flats at Chalkhill, c.1967.
My title mentions a planning complaint, and I will ask Martin to attach a copy of my open letter of complaint to Brent’s Head of Planning at the end of this post, for anyone interested in the details. It concerns the Construction Logistics Plan (“CLP”) for the Morland Gardens development (application 22/4082) which I wrote about in my January 2023 article.
That application could and should have been refused, yet I found out last week it had been granted consent on 27 March. But it wasn’t the CLP submitted with the application in December 2022, it was a completely new one submitted in February 2023. That new CLP was not published on Brent’s planning website until 17 March, there was no consultation on it, and even those of us who had commented on the original CLP were not notified of its existence!
I don’t think the secrecy over it was part of a “plot” to try to get the CLP approved in time for work to “start on site” at 1 Morland Gardens by 31 March (it was too late for that), but this is far from the transparency Brent residents are entitled to expect, especially when the application relates to a proposed Council development.
Will the loss of the £6.5m GLA funding make Brent Council finally accept that their current plans for 1 Morland Gardens are hopeless? It should do, but the past 3+ years have shown that their foolishness is not just confined to April.
Philip Grant.
10 comments:
You can imagine the 147 year old Altamira villa singing, I'm Still Standing!
Like the BISON truck image.
The rarer 16 storey Bison can still be spotted living in South Kilburn Land
The stench of .......... coming from Brent Council is becoming overwhelming
In my article above, I mentioned that Brent's "value engineering" of their Morland Gardens project, to make it less unviable, appears to involve a change to an all concrete structure for the proposed new building.
As well as a CLP condition in the 2020 planning consent, another condition required a Construction Method Statement ("CMS") to be submitted and approved before construction of the project could begin. Hill Partnerships Ltd submitted a CMS, which is application 23/0299.
My February 2023 objections to that application include the following paragraphs:
'3.1 Consent was given to application 20/0345 on 30 October 2020, and Condition 2 of that consent requires that: ‘The development hereby permitted shall be carried out in accordance with the drawings and documents’ which were approved in that application.
3.2 One of those documents was a Structural Engineering Report, dated 23 August 2019, from StructureMode Ltd. The Structural Statement from that report made clear that although there would be ‘significant structural requirements for load transfer at first floor and upper ground floor level’, ‘no significant structural transfers’ were required above first floor level.
3.3 The Structural Statement referred to the use of ‘CLT’, which is the abbreviation for Cross-Laminated Timber, a modern construction method which has many environmental benefits. The report went on to give further details about how CLT was to be used in the proposed building, for which planning consent was given under application 20/0345, and some of the environmental and construction benefits this would deliver.
3.4 The approved building was to have reinforced concrete for its structure up to first floor level, but CLT for the structure of all of the residential parts from the second floor upwards. That is not what the CMS sets out for the structure of the building, in document CMP Section 4.
3.5 What is now being proposed is that the new building to be developed, although it looks from the outside in the computer-generated images like the approved building, will have a reinforced concrete frame for the whole of the structure, with ‘SFS’ (the abbreviation for Steel Framed Systems) infill.
3.6 The construction method proposals in application 23/0299 do not comply with the planning consent given under application 20/0345. This current application should be refused.
If the applicant wishes to change the construction method for the proposed development at 1 Morland Gardens, a fresh planning application should be required.'
Application 23/0299 is still shown as "Awaiting Decision" on Brent's planning website. Will Brent's Planning Officers approve another 1 Morland Gardens "condition" application which should be refused?
Or will they "take the hint" from my complaint on the CLP, that to do so would be unacceptable? We will have to wait and see!
The London Borough of Bent do it again.
Another Brent slum block going up, it's like the 1960s again in Brent, how long will this particular non design block last? 30 years perhaps? Brent Council and Cllr Butt's coterie are morally corrupt and sadly lacking in anything like good ideas. This is Brent in the 2020's, a very, very sad place full of pound shops, porn brokers, betting shops, fast food outlets and bars where you can get knifed, oh, and don't forget the poverty throughout the borough, or mega city as Cllr Butt sees it. Be careful you don't fall into a pothole on the way home to your tiny box of a home, or trip over laughing gas canisters, but then again, you could always get shot or knifed by one of the many drug gangs on the way to school.
Signed
Time to leave Brent
Why not convert the empty office space in the Brent Civic Centre to college space or flats? And then the Altamira could be retained as a local community centre benefitting the local area.
Perhaps the shrinking and pointless council should move to Altamira
True Brent is drifting towards total outsource/ total colonial. When is a council not a council?
Its taxpayers of course will own all liabilities be they in its resilience or in its anti- resilience zones.
Great idea
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