OLD BERMONDSEY
OBNF
NEIGHBOURHOOD FORUM

NOTICE OF MEETING 
More on Quill ++ & update on our Judicial Review
6.30pm Wednesday 23rd May
Globe House | Corner of Bermondsey Street & Crucifix Lane

Local Elections  

Quill ++

Tanner St. Heritage Assault

The colour of the Council since May 4th election

Voting postponed in our ward:

London Bridge and West Bermondsey

Now cast your vote on 14th June

The final composition of the council will be determined by the delayed result in our ward. It is set to be closely contested between Labour and the Lib Dems. Labour have already increased their large majority from the 2014 election. Click here for details of the results as reported by SE1.

For the first time since 1965 Southwark Council has no Conservative councillors and the Lib Dems have lost their East Dulwich seats, giving Labour a clean sweep south of Elephant & Castle.  With such weak opposition the run-away gentrification, social-cleansing and heritage-insensitive planning policies of Labour leader Peter John are only going to be emboldened.  The only prospect of a modest improvement of the feeble opposition in our remaining poll is success for the Lib dem candidates.

If you are registered to vote in London Bridge and West Bermondsey ward and did not attend any of the hustings you can see what the main ward candidates and local party leaders have to say with some of the videos available online:

Southwark Leaders Hustings (click here)

Southwark Planning Network Hustings (click here)

OBNF Local Ward Hustings (click here)

Questions left unanswered by Labour

Labour’s Peter John did not answer the questions – despite, for example, the great disparity between his claims about on-site affordable housing and the reality on the ground.  We are inviting John and his local ward candidates to the meeting to answer the questions and state their position on planning and new development issues: on-site affordable housing, meaningful local consultation, heritage, and neighbourhood planning.

OBNF Supplementary Questions (click here)

Leaders Responses (click here and scroll down below the video)

We hope you will be able to attend this important meeting ahead of both the local ward vote and the close of consultation on the Quill++ application (details below).

Forum meetings are open. Everyone is welcome and we encourage you to invite anyone along who you think might be interested. We always need help to challenge the Council’s entrenched resistance to local participation in the planning process

Meet your proposed new 517ft high neighbour: Quill ++

Comments can be made on the Quill++ Planning Application 18/AP/0900 until 27th May. Please click here for full details.

The below truncated images (to which we have added the cropped out bit) are taken from the “Townscape and Visual Built Heritage Assessment” section of the submitted documents. The application contains one hundred and thirty six files in total, sixty four of which constitute the Environmental Statement alone. The upcoming meeting will give an opportunity for a full discussion of the proposal, it’s potential impacts upon the area and how we can best mobilise to resist such anti-social development – and the domino effect of similar schemes that we know are being cooked up with the Council for St Thomas Street.

Height and Appearance 

At 45 storeys and 157m high the tower represents a 50% increase in height over the site’s previous fantasy student scheme, the Quill Mk.1.  It ups the proposed student population of the building from 500 to over 1000.

The proposal affects the backdrop of St Pauls as seen from Parliament Hill (a supposedly key view in the ‘London Views Management Framework’) to a much greater extent than did the previous permission. This is clear to see from the image below. We are currently seeking clarity from the GLA over the advice they gave the applicant on this subject. Click here to see informal comments from an (as yet) unnamed officer which we recovered recently through an FOIA request.

“Hi (xxxx) – some brief obs below for this one… haven’t gone into any detail for the LVMFs, doesn’t look like there should be any major issues though.” …

“The proposed height is supported subject to further townscape views testing (both existing and cumulative) in terms of how it will contribute to the form of a future cluster around the Shard.”

“The proposed height at 153.03m cannot be supported as it would have a significant and harmful impact on views from within the Bermondsey Street Conservation Area and protected views from within the Tower of London. Furthermore, it is considered that the height of the building would be excessive, particularly in views westwards along St Thomas’s Street whereby the building would be oppressive and overly dominant as a direct result of the excessive height. Officers have expressed these concerns from the outset and consider that the height of the building should be significantly reduced.”

Affordable Housing

“Officers accept that in this instance that providing affordable housing off-site would be a suitable alternative”

In the same letter the council waived through the proposal to provide 0% affordable housing on site. This is contrary to policy 4.4 of the Local Plan and Policy 3.12 of the London Plan and indeed in direct contrast to the passionate claims and pledges made by the recently re-elected leader of Southwark Council, Peter John, during the local elections.

In doing so the council planners were passively swallowing an extremely questionable argument put forward by the developer (and their architects), hinging on the idea that the proper functioning of the proposed Migration Museum at ground floor level would make it impossible to provide an entrance to anything but one thousand and twenty eight student rooms above.

This argument is summarised in the Planning Statement (please click here pages 35-40) however the pre-app advice letter from the council referred to some recently submitted “further detail”… typically this does not appear to be included in the application, however we found it to comprise (also recovered through FOIA) a study by KPF Architects and an accompanying letter from planning consultants DP9. We can discuss this at the upcoming meeting however anyone interested can click here and have a quick look at pages 123-157 inclusive.

This key study by the architects was not available when we requested to see it at the developer’s “consultation” exhibition in January – even though on-site affordable housing was already well off the table. Please click here for the page on Greystar’s website where you can view the exhibition boards. If you search for “affordable housing” you will find it appears once, towards the bottom, preceded by the word “off-site” and followed, almost unbelievably by the phrase “for local people”.  Everyone knows, most of all Peter John, that they can’t make the kind of money out of the desecration of the historic environment in London Bridge that the developers want in order to offer a good share of the booty to the Council.

Greystar, DP9 et. seem to have disregarded the Council’s request at pre-app that a “full Viability Assessment and a separate Executive Summary is submitted in accordance with the Councils Development Viability SPD”. The Executive Summary included in the application – which points to a “circa £14m towards affordable housing” – appears at a quick tally to have a £30m hole in it.

Environmental Impact Assessment

The council are still out for consultation (and refusing to comment) on the EIA Scoping Report that was submitted by Greystar before the planning application was made. Please click here to view this report which (in a table on page 43) asserts that the proposal could have either a moderate adverse “—” or moderate beneficial “++”  affect on the Wind Microclimate! Fortunately they are clearer on Daylight and Sunlight Etc which gets a simple moderate adverse label. In socio economic terms, despite the wonderful migration museum, a “net loss of employment floor space can be expected” (page 34) – so much for local jobs and businesses in the ‘Central Activities Zone’

To report to the meeting any avid reader with an appetite for scrutiny of the Environmental Statement documents and its (invariably specious) justifications would be greatly appreciated. The images below are extracted from Appendices 16.1 Daylight and Sunlight Drawings.

Greedy suffocation of outstanding Victorian Warehouse

47- 49 Tanner Street  

Consultation Closing Thursday 17th May      

Please look at and comment on the current application, 18/AP/0896. Brunel Planning (sic) on behalf of Jersey-registerd Cetza Trustees are proposing to demolish the historic fabric including the whole of the characteristic floor structure of the building, retaining only the main facade and building up to 7 storeys behind, over and around it. The overwhelming new-build element will create an architectural nonsense: A caricature of the prevailing Council attitude to heritage announcing that they can’t quite get away with total demolition but very much wish they could.

The Jersey-based owners usually means they are looking to avoid capital gains tax when, having got planning to jack up the site value, they sell it on unbuilt. A subsequent buyer will then be able to go to the Council with the argument that the original facade alone is a comic token retention that is incongruous and historically meaningless now robbed of its context and interior.  The planners will agree and the next proposal will complete the total demolition of the original.

Click here to see the existing building as it is presently being used by short-term tenants, Ugly Duck.