2003: by mid-summer, the party wall has been raised by over half a metre and the three dormer windows have become eighteen roof-lights. You write a flood of objections to the Planning Offices, but the Officer in charge of the project is forever being changed and more often than not knows nothing about the site history. ‘I’m new to the job’ begins to sound like a mantra. In October, out of desperation you ring Hackney’s Head of Planning. She assures you that the developers ‘cannot deviate from the approved plans without Council consent, but if they do they will be obliged to remedy the matter through an Enforcement Notice’. You then ring the developers to inform them of this. You are told in no uncertain terms to ‘go fuck yourself’.
2004: in January, Planning Officers finally visit the site and warn the developers about the consequences of deviating from the approved plans. For all that, in March, the houses are put on the market at £400,000 each, with no mention at all either of the live/work condition or, of course, of possible enforcement issues. In April, the developers file a retrospective planning application to retain the roof-lights while avoiding the issue of the heightened party wall. In the same month the Council refuses the application and orders that enforcement action is taken. In June, the developers file a further retrospective application to retain the roof-lights with slight modifications. By the end of the year, no enforcement action has been taken, two of the houses have become inhabited and the increase in noise and light pollution has become tangible.
2005: In March, you attend a meeting of the Planning Sub-Committee at Hackney Town Hall where the second retrospective application of June 2004 is to be considered. The hearing is deferred until April because the Council has omitted to inform the developers of the meeting. In April, the Committee refuses the application and, once again, enforcement action is ordered. By November, no action has been taken on the Enforcement Order. You ring the Council to ask why. They casually inform you that the Legal Department has made an error. In December, the developers file yet another application, this time to make alterations to the roof-lights. Again, no mention is made of the heightened wall.
2006: in January, the application is refused and enforcement action is again ordered by the Council. By March, no action has been taken, but the developers have made still another application to retain the roof-lights with slight alterations. This application is also refused, and in April the developers respond by filing an appeal with the Planning Inspectorate against the first refused application of April 2004 to retain the roof-lights. At the same time, as a leapfrog manoeuvre, the developers file another application to retain the roof-lights with further modest alterations. In July, the developers file an appeal with the Planning Inspectorate against the Council’s enforcement order to remove the eighteen roof-lights and lower the party wall to its original height.
In August, the two Appeals are heard as one. Despite photographic evidence that the party wall has been heightened, the developers vehemently deny that this has been the case. You are informed that the results of the Appeal will be posted to you within two months, but by December you have heard nothing. You ring the Planning Office to find out what is going on. They apologise for having omitted to inform you that, apart from two very small modifications, the developers’ deviations from the Inspectorate’s planning conditions have been given the seal of approval: fait accompli.The heightening of the party wall has severely restricted daylight to the ground floors of all the adjoining properties. Your studio feels colourless. The installation of eighteen roof-lights has, as one neighbour comments despairingly, made the view from the top floors like that of looking down onto an airport. At night it looks more like Blackpool illuminations.
2007: in August, an application is made to remove the one remaining unbroken planning condition of the Inspectorate’s ruling of 2002. The developers want the live/work condition dropped. The Council invites comments from those ‘who might be affected’. After seven years of daily ‘development stress’, plus the immense effort made by yourself and your neighbours to seek some form of justice over the flagrant abuses of the developers, you have lost any faith that you might once have had in the Council. Your response to their request for comments is short and succinct: ‘I’ve had enough of your uselessness. You’ve done absolutely nothing to help. Stuff it’. Two weeks later you receive a letter from the Council thanking you for your correspondence and saying that ‘the issues you have raised will be taken into consideration’. Well, there’s always a first time.
Since the first application in 2000, you have written over seventy thousand words of objection to the Council. At an average of one thousand words per day, you have spent ten solid weeks attempting to ensure that planning laws are adhered to by developers who from the start knew that the Council would be helpless in stopping them from doing precisely what they ‘sodding well like’. On top of this, you have appeared at seven separate Appeals or Hearings, and have written innumerable letters to politicians, local councillors and others who might have supported your cause (but didn’t). All in all, the developers have cost you a quarter of a year’s life. While you and your neighbours suffer the consequences, the Council continues to bungle its way through peoples’ lives, and the developers have got away scot-free with a good deal more than a cool million.
In early September, you’re out walking and by chance you bump into the Asian mechanic who used to run the mews garage. After having been unceremoniously evicted, he’d been unable to find other affordable premises. With his income slashed, he and his family had had to move away from their rented home of fifteen years into a small flat. With an air of sad resignation he informs you that his old home has been converted into ‘luxury studio-style apartments’. He’s now working as a stacker in a supermarket. His four assistants are on the dole.
There’s dog shit on the pavement and a crumpled local newspaper celebrating the ‘regeneration of Hackney’. The Council are proposing an alcohol-free zone around Dalston Station. That should help. |
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