Camden New Journal - News: Crunch time approaching for Brill Place

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Camden New Journal - by PAUL KEILTHY
Published: 27 September 2007

Crunch time approaching for Brill Place

THE government department which has so far resisted calls to halt the sale of the land behind the British Library could shortly be faced with deciding between public interest and the public purse, the New Journal has learnt.
With the auction scheduled to complete by the end of this year, the sales-team handling talks over the 3.6 acre site known as Brill Place are currently interviewing the 30 original bidders with a view to drawing up a shortlist of fewer than a dozen within three weeks.
Although the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has declined to disclose who they are on the basis of commercial confidentiality, the New Journal has learnt that at least three of the bidders being considered for the site are ‘public interest’ developers – either government-sponsored institutions or Quangos.
Although the DCMS has insisted from the start that ‘best value’ rather than public interest would determine the sale, urgent talks are understood to be underway within Whitehall to clarify the sales criteria.
The only declared bidder is a consortium which includes the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Wellcome Trust and University College London, whose proposal to build an international medical research institute on the site was revealed in the New Journal in August.
A bid for a science centre run by the government-funded MRC – where the long list of scientific breakthroughs include the discovery of penicillin, the sequencing of the human genome, and the discovery of DNA fingerprinting – is likely to carry heavy political support, particularly since a Treasury-backed MRC £28 million purchase of the National Temperance Hospital in nearby Hampstead Road was criticised by a parliamentary committee in July when it emerged that the site was too small for the MRC’s proposals.

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