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Kenwood stages concerts debate
OBJECTORS who complained about excessive noise from the Kenwood concerts in Hampstead are being invited to thrash out their differences at a meeting with the event organisers.
English Heritage, which manages historic Kenwood House, hopes the meeting on Tuesday will kick-start a “productive and focused” debate about issues surrounding the concerts.
The Kenwood House meeting is the first with objectors since this year’s season was controversially axed by concert chiefs last month.
They claimed a Town Hall decision to cut two concerts from the season following complaints from residents had left it “financially unviable”.
Rebecca Kane, visitor operations director for Kenwood, said: “We have invited all the people who objected. We need to engage with people. At the moment, people are either anti or pro the concerts and we need to forge a common ground.
“We hope that, by establishing a common ground, we can speak with a common voice and Camden will recognise that and respond to it when we re-apply for a licence.” Others asked to the invitation-only meeting include members of Kenwood Landscape Forum, a representative body of local groups which meets English Heritage twice a year.
Selected councillors from the Town Hall have also been invited to attend as observers. But the meeting will not be open to the general public or the press.
Ms Kane said: “We need to make it as productive and as focused as possible. We want to have a meeting where people can speak openly, where we can have a full and focused debate and come up with some options.”
But she added that calls by residents to re-introduce more classical music concerts into the season were unlikely to be heeded by English Heritage.
She said: “Those concerts did not stack up and we lost money when we ran them. We have fixed production costs at Kenwood, including the floating stage, that are very expensive. We need more than eight concerts to make the stage pay back.” |
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