|
|
 |
| |
MP Frank Dobson backing the campaign to save the Torriano pub last year |
Appeal blow in battle to save the Torriano
Owners get go-ahead to turn popular pub into flats
REGULARS could be asked to drink up for the last time after developers won a planning appeal to convert part of a popular Kentish Town pub into flats.
After a dispute that has lasted nearly three years, PTP, owners of the Torriano pub in Torriano Avenue can now push ahead with their plan to turn the basement bar – currently used for community events, comedy gigs and poetry readings – into a large kitchen area and the first and second floors into flats.
Landlord Dean Guberani and partner Suzi Martin have fought the proposals, which they say will threaten the future of the community pub.
They garnered the support of Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow and the Observer’s America correspondent Ed Vulliamy, and say they will now organise fundraising events to pay for a High Court challenge.
Ms Martin said: “We are going to fight. We are going to take them on. The planning inspector’s decision was not logical and we’ll take legal advice to show this.”
She said that if this failed, they hope to persuade the current owners to sell the pub to them.
“We have approached them to see where the ground lies,” added Ms Martin.
The appeal decision has re-opened a political battle which saw the pub become one of the central issues of a closely fought by-election in the area last October.
With Kentish Town ward voters about to go to the polls, councillors on the planning committee delighted campaigners by throwing out the application – a decision now reversed by the appeal.
Within days of the decision, a Lib Dem election leaflet was delivered to homes nearby claiming the party had saved the pub while Labour and the Greens had sided with the developers.
Planning committee members, Labour councillor Brian Woodrow and Green councillor Maya De Souza, had called for the scheme to go ahead, with legally binding Section 106 planning guarantees over the future of the basement bar and the ground-floor pub which they claimed would have permanently secured the Torriano’s future.
They were outvoted and now believe political jockeying has cost the pub its future.
Cllr De Souza said: “I am obviously very disappointed. My concern at the time over the original planning decision was that the appeal would be successful – and that is why we wanted to tie them into a Section 106 agreement. It would have protected the pub.”
Lib Dem councillor Ralph Scott said: “It was the right decision at the time and I don’t think the alternative plan would have worked. We were involved in this long before the by-election.”
PTP declined to comment on the decision. |
 |
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
