Impression of how the new research lab could look in King’s Cross

• FOR more than a decade Camden have been liaising with the owners of the Belgrove House site, with the developers coming back and forth with various proposals for different buildings and different uses, (Lab too ‘ugly’ for spot near St Pancras? March 4).

From the start, Camden’s planners made it clear to us that design considerations and heritage matters were “front and centre” in any proposal coming forward.

Many years ago Camden’s planners and councillors were strong enough to just say “no” to inappropriate propositions.

But in recent times they are increasingly unable to resist being pushed around by big developers, getting ignored and bullied by those corporations with deep pockets.

Over the past few years the developers of Belgrove House have ignored all advice from Camden’s planners and even their expert design review panel, starting from a bad place and making the design uglier and uglier.

As Cllr Oliver Cooper rightly put it: “only a supervillain could design a building as ugly as this”.

The theatrics of the planning committee meeting and the embarrassing officer attempts at advocating the design of this building hide a simple yet ugly fact. Camden’s planners disliked Belgrove House, and tried to secure something better.

But they were too weak to be able to take on the combined might of AHMM and Precis, who have now successfully spent hundreds of hours carefully crafting a giant middle finger to all of Camden: its communities, heritage, and council.

This site is an international gateway, not just to Camden, but to London and the UK as a whole.

Camden’s planners should have acted as the gatekeepers that they are, using all the expertise and resources they could muster to secure the only acceptable outcome on this site: an outstanding piece of architecture that the entire world could take pride in.

Instead they lay down, rolled over, and allowed a full-scale invasion of the worst kind of idiotic architecture. If not called in by the secretary of state, it will stand as a monument to their weakness for decades to come.

OWEN WARD
Bloomsbury Conservation Area Advisory Committee