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Youngsters outside the motorbike workshop |
Artist protests as bike project revs up for expansion
ONE of Britain’s best-known installation artists has lost a battle against plans to increase the size of a motorbike workshop for vulnerable young people near his King’s Cross home.
Michael Pinsky, 41, urged Islington Council’s West Area Planning Committee to refuse the Sparkplug charity permission to expand its premises on a small site in Pembroke Street. Sparkplug gives 12 young people the opportunity to maintain and ride scrambler motorcycles.
More than 50 residents, including many from the Bemberton estate, objected to plans to demolish a single-storey workshop to make way for new £400,000 two-storey premises. A mature maple tree will have to be axed under the proposals.
Mr Pinsky, who was exhibiting at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea this week, argued that, as well as the noise from the workshop, residents had witnessed young people, often without crash helmets, “scrambling” up and down Pembroke Street on motorbikes and frightening pedestrians.
Supporting the scheme, Caledonian ward Labour councillor Paul Convery said that Sparkplug was a popular and innovative charity keeping young people off the streets. The new development would provide more room and contain the noise within the workshop, he maintained.
Mr Pinsky, a father of a 15-month-old baby, said the workshop, launched in 2002, should never have been sited so close to people’s homes. “There are a number of large empty warehouses owned by Islington Council close by which would make ideal workshops,” he added.
“We’ve been woken up at 1am and 6am by people coming and going to the workshop. The baby has been woken up. If we had unruly neighbours we might be able to do something but because it is a council-supported operation you can’t complain.”
Cllr Convery said he suspected that Sparkplug was being blamed for a lot of the noise in the area that had nothing to do with it.
“I live 150 yards away from the workshop and we do get boy racers but they are not from Sparkplug,” he added.
“There’s not a huge amount of revving up in the workshop in my experience but this will be contained in the new development.”
Putting Sparkplug on an industrial estate would defeat the point, Cllr Convery said. “It’s not just a motorcycle workshop, it’s a youth project,” he added. “All the evidence shows that schemes like this work well in the neighbourhoods where the kids come from.”
Other residents objecting to the scheme included one who claimed that the young people involved were referred from all over the borough, not just the immediate area. Another argued that her view would be ruined.
But the committee, chaired by Labour councillor James Murray, supported the scheme. |
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