1 Morland Gardens –Brent’s latest NON-development (and a planning complaint).

 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.