Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Two more days at the Wards Corner CPO
Following last week's posts, we are now two days into Week Two of the Public Inquiry into the Compulsory Purchase Order for Wards Corner.
Tuesday was largely taken up with Grainger's witness on the viability of the market, in both the planned Grainger schemes and in the Community restoration plan. There was much discussion of costs per square foot in rent in the various options, with forensic analysis and projections. The rents will be temporarily slightly reduced by the S106 order in the Grainger plan, this follows Boris Johnson's intervention in 2008 after he visited the market and the boarded-up upstairs space the day before the mayoral elections. Grainger's plans at that stage did not mention the market, they thought they could just bulldoze the lot and throw up a pile of nice chain stores - eg Woolworths, BHS, JJB Sports, Comet, HMV, Barratts, Blockbuster... Boris promised on that visit to bring in moves to save the market, he won the mayorship the next day and imposed the S106 agreement on the plan that meant Grainger has to replace the market in any new scheme. Grainger's current plan is to decant the market into the Apex tower (across the road) once it's built, bulldoze the Wards town centre then move the market back into the rebuilt block, in a special bit along the Seven Sisters Road edge. This would take about five years all in. (The demolition of the old Apex House Customer Services LBH building is almost complete, this is the LBH land that the council sold to Grainger for £3.4million, that's 0.47 hectares of prime brownfield site 20 yards from one of the best tube lines in London. We still haven't seen the district auditor's report on how this was the right price, especially as it did not go to competitive tender.)
I digress.... we do not believe the market will survive this, especially two moves both with higher rents than now. So all the discussion about rents is crucial, if the Inspector can see that the market will not survive, the CPO will fail.
The Grainger rep also had a go at the numbers for the Community Plan. As the financial details in that are (a) about six years old and (b) were deliberately lacking in detail at the time, as we had to get our plan together very fast to enable it to get planning permission in good time, it was a bit silly of him to try to dissect them. He had not understood that the Community Plan would be non-profit and so would not be needing to match Grainger's 20% profit margins, for example.
So that was all the Grainger /LBH side delivered. Now it's our turn. We are damned impressive even if I'm a little partisan. Yesterday we heard from Dr Sara Gonzalez, Associate Professor at Leeds University who specialises in urban regeneration in and around retail spaces. Today our barrister Monica Feria Tinta made her opening remarks, then Carlos Burgos spoke of the evolution of the Latin market and its meaning to the Latin American people who use it, then the growth of the campaign to save it and the expansion of that into the WCC coalition that includes a far wider population. Michael Edwards, a local resident who is Honorary Professor at UCL, spoke on the various London Plans and their relevance to the Grainger and WCC plans. Abigail Stevenson, architectural designer of the Community Plan, showed our plan and how it can work to restore the market space and open the boarded-up 2500 square metres of space above. Myfanwy Taylor spoke on her PhD research into urban planning and economic diversity and how the Council's developer-led planning fails the people who are already here.
Tomorrow there will be more academic presentations plus the first of the market traders who will telling their stories then and on Friday.
You can read the statements supplied by the objectors here. Many of these make fascinating reading. The Inquiry is not a reading of these written pieces, it's to give a chance to the objectors to elaborate on and discuss those statements.
Do pop by. Civic Centre, 9.30am - 4 or 5pm or watch the webcasts.
Tags for Forum Posts: CPO, grainger, public inquiry, regeneration, seven sisters, tyranny, ward's corner
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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So Grainger expect to make 20% in a market where exorbitant London rents are not even 5%? They expect this profit to be backed by the council?
And this is just priceless: "£3.4million, that's 0.47 hectares" - BUNG!!!!!
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Permalink Reply by kotkas on
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What's so outrageous about paying market rate for land? N17 price per square metre is in the region of 6k. Do the math.
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Brownfield is MUCH more expensive. A house on land devalues it. You could build a residential tower on a brownfield site close to a tube station.
£6000 * 0.47 * 10,000 = £28,200,000 is the maths though...
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Fair enough - here are the stats - Haringey costs between 3.7 and 10m per hectare, depending on whether it is classified as industrial or residential...
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/chapter4-economic-evi...
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You're allowed to compare residential land values to industrial to support your view?
A 150sqm section on the ladder, with a house on it, is worth nearly a million pounds. As I've said the house actually devalues it. If the house wasn't there you could build three 3 bedroom flats and then the section achieves something more like its true value of £1.9 million (£1.6 according to the survey you linked to but I guess that's minus construction costs). I could fit 30 blocks of three bed flats into 0.47 hectares but close to a tube station I could build a tower 20 stories high as well.
This public land is being sold off for a song. There is a councillor working for lobbyists representing the property developers involved. They have boozy trips to Cannes to flog stuff they don't even own, what fun! It utterly, utterly stinks. There will be a race on to finish all of this before the selections in October and then elections next year.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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well the Public Inquiry is due to end next week, but then the Inspector takes away all the info and works on it for months. We're not expecting an answer before the end of the year.
Meanwhile the shell of Apex/Fagpacket Tower will begin to rise.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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A lie as usual.
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The lie that "Stanton voted it all though".
You are well aware that the 2008 planning application was the initial application and that "it" and "all" were subject to a series of applications. Including the complete abandonment of the Apex House site for social housing.
You are also aware that I was a substitute member of that committee and had no role in any of the subsequent decision-making.
I've also explained on this site that members of planning committees are legally required to deal with each individual application on its facts. And that planning committee members must take their decisions based on what are called "material planning considerations". It's not a matter of personal taste or political conviction. -
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Your lie being once again exposed, Mr Will Hoyle, you shift your ground. There was no reason for me to disqualify myself from sitting on that particular Planning Committee.
As I have explained several times on HoL, Planning committees are quasi-judicial. Councillors are required to set aside their personal opinions of an application. Decisions must be based on material planning grounds - narrowly and legally defined.
Over the years I've agreed several applications which I personally disliked. In a few cases I had a great deal of sympathy with objectors and felt that the applicants were being insensitive to their neighbours. Sometimes it was the other way roundNone of that mattered. Planning decisions are not about the committee's opinions. Or their personal likes or dislikes. It's a legal process.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to members of HoL who may not have come across this point. -
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Permalink Reply by warren miller on
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N17 has a tube.
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