Another chance to see inside Hornsey Town Hall

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Permalink Reply by Maddy on November 14, 2012 at 23:27

I watched 'The Hour' tonight - it seemed strangely wooden. I think they're trying to emulate the understatedness of 'Mad Men', but not really succeeding. And the accents aren't nearly "cut glass" enough, even if they've made the set look as authentic as possible. Good to see the Town Hall though.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 16, 2012 at 13:55

The 'anchor tenant' wants to occupy all the rooms permanently (well for the 125 years of their £1/yr lease) preventing community use. It's a land grab! We're being allowed interim use of three rooms.

If £300 per day is too expensive for any community groups, or if you want to rent for less than a full day, please let me know in case we can put together some sort of shared scheme.

If the community actually has a use for any of this vast publicly-owned campus bang in the centre of Crouch End, then I guess the tenant is rich enough to pay a 'percent for the community' that could see £300k per year spent on us as crumbs from the table. if nobody wants the money, they could pay some of the executives more than the £100,000/yr they're getting at the moment.

If we do lose this vast campus slap bang in the middle of our town as a community asset, we gain a bit of wall space in the foyer and a student cafe, and Saturday morning 'family-friendly' courses.

This is what we own:

LBH property dept plan to demolish the clinic and let the desperately needed open space behind the Town Hall be built on by developers (including the tenant themselves) so as to use the money to create a luxury HQ for the private school. 

After we spent £2m over many years to get an arts centre, it's been cancelled in favour of building the green bits:

If planning permission is refused, the 'interim' use by the community can turn into a permanent one, so best get in early!

The building is paying it's way as a film studios using just the lower part of the blue bit of the campus - the community could gain a subsidy from the rental income from the rest of it, without having to demolish the 1930's clinic (highly usable) and stuff 78 luxury flats into the other half of the green bits not occupied by the tenant.

If the many local groups and people who like living in Crouch End and want it to be better find themselves unhappy that the centre of our town is to be snuffed out, it'll be too late to do anything about it. The tenant has already been awarded £4m of our lottery money to hire consultants to project manage the rewiring, heating etc of the blue bits and replace the unique lifts.

So, it's up to us. If we lose the opportunity at least we'll have an arts-based tenant effectively in charge of our public cultural life, feeding off 600 students paying them up to £15,000/yr each - could be a lot worse!

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