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 52 Prince of Wales Road |
The story of No 52 Prince of Wales Road
Paul Keilthy investigates the Dalby Street project
DEVELOPERS pocketed more than £3 million from a proposed seven storey apartment block in Kentish Town just weeks after they got the planning deal they wanted from Camden Council – and without lifting a single brick, the New Journal can reveal.
Trac Properties Ltd, whose plans to build two restaurants and 54 flats next to Talacre Gardens have sparked protests, sold their share in the project to an offshore company for a massive 1,840 per cent of their initial investment while the derelict site was still untouched.
Land Registry documents obtained show that Trac – a development company co-owned by a prominent Primrose Hill Professor and his son – paid £190,000 in 2001for the crumbling railway house at 52 Prince of Wales Road which is at the heart of the project.
They sold it to Cornwall Overseas Development Ltd, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, for £3.5m in May this year.
The site rocketed in price after Camden Council agreed to sell a former travellers’ compound behind the Prince of Wales Road house owned by Trac as part of the planning application approved in January 2006.
Three travellers’ families were bought off the site for an undisclosed sum.
Assuming an average of £350,000 for the mixed sized flats, the complex could be worth more than £19 million when complete.
When the project is built, Camden’s schools will profit by £65,000. The developers will also give £10,000 to next-door Talacre Sports Centre, while project partners the Community Housing Group will build 19 affordable homes on the site.
The approved scheme will see Dalby Street ‘stopped up’ so that developers can build on it. A ‘New Dalby Street’ will be built next to the railway line on the other side of the new apartment block, across the land now owned by and promised to the developers. A campaign by residents and users of the park has protested that the new road will be too narrow, create a hazard at the junction with Prince of Wales Road, and restrict access to Talacre Sports Centre, which is at the end of the current Dalby Street.
They also fear that the developer wants to create an access road across the park during construction works and argue that the affordable flats re too few.
Cllr Heather Johnson chaired the December 2005 Development Control committee which approved the proposals. She said yesterday (Wednesday) that planning decisions were made for individual sites, not developers, and legally Trac were fully entitled to sell the land on.
She said: “It’s galling, but I don’t see how one can stop that sort of thing from happening.
Prof Bill Fulford, honorary consultant psychiatrist at Oxford University and the father of fellow Trac director Charles Fulford, was unavailable for comment at his Regent’s Park Road home.
The rules of incorporation in the British Virgin Islands protect the identity of the directors and shareholders of Cornwall Overseas Development Ltd, which holds its UK registration at a solicitors’ office in Wigmore Street. |
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