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Camden New Journal - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 30 August 2007

A little vision is called for behind the British Library

• THE land next to the British Library should be developed as social housing along with other sensible uses such as shops and spaces for services.
No one, of course, is the slightest bit surprised that this site is likely to end up developed as luxury housing.
Local authority and government bookkeeping makes the prospect of the land sale receipt enticing. We are in a buoyant property market so the receipt will be big.
The money will keep the books balanced, help pay salaries, and possibly enable capital investment by the local authority and government.
We have to evaluate those benefits against the benefits of “just doing it”. Instead of talking about housing, the land next to the library is an opportunity to do it.
Development costs would be even less if Camden could take advantage of the renewal of councils’ rights to develop their own social housing.
A real assessment of the opportunity cost involved in a sell-off to private business needs to be made. Many of the public land disposals made by the previous Labour administration which so prided itself on good housekeeping were reviewed in a narrow way. In our area – Gospel Oak – the sell-offs have been built out as social housing. That’s OK except we have lost a lot of commercial space in the process.
One problem we face at the moment is not just the luxury housing brigade, but the housing at any cost mob. Housing by itself is a benefit, but if it is built on sites which once supported “employment uses”, you end up with peculiar dormitory districts.
There is no danger of a dormitory district right next to the British Library and King’s Cross St Pancras. Yet it isn’t difficult to see the risk of the library site developed wholly for public housing becoming a dismal welcome to visitors exiting the Eurotunnel terminal at St Pancras. Luxury housing would not provide a much better option in this regard.
There is ample scope to do something interesting with the site which takes advantage of its unique proximity to the station and the huge office developments on the King’s Cross Railway Lands, as yet unbuilt.
Inevitably, the people leaving the station and the office workers in Kings Cross will thirst for a bit of real London. Bland, corporate space offered in the station and the King’s Cross development isn’t going to be enough. Only individuals can produce real London.
The example of Brick Lane in respect of the City of London comes to mind.
What would be a fascinating turnabout would be to develop the library site in a way to encourage myriad small businesses and small investors. Guess what, doing this is tremendously difficult. Big property business and the public bodies which tax it look for streamlined answers – big corporate tenants, simple ownerships, well-known retail brands.
The luxury housing model for the site is destructive of London’s identity. It means swank flats (though inevitably far less groovy in actual fact than the sales pitch lets on) with secured parking in the basement. There’ll be a health spa thrown in and some ornamental garden. It will have all the vibe and character of some of St John’s Woods more tedious streets.
It will speak of the suffocating anxiety of the very well off – the type that enables estate agents to sell ghastly box-room flats to socially anxious professionals keen to buy a part in a prestige development.
We can do better than this.
A new chunk of real London is what is needed. Let’s do it. But we need a visionary somewhere in the process, not just a row of deadbeats box-ticking and doing the least dangerous option – selling it to a dull purveyor of mass-produced deluxe flats or flogging it to a tedious housing association is not the answer.
TOM YOUNG
Bassett Street, NW5

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, Camden New Journal, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@camdennewjournal.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Tuesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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