Save Little Green Street!

Everything you could ever want* to read about Little Green Street is now at the all-new one-stop solution www.littlegreenstreet.com

Go there right now and read all about it. Thank you!

*including everything that was once here. This blog will close soon, so please un-bookmark it. If you had bookmarked it.

(The last blog entry, that is). On reading it again, I suppose so. But in this righteous war with greed and stupidity, sometimes I feel a bit let down and don't mind letting it show. Right will win, of that I'm sure, but seeing how the system appears to 'risk failing' people is enough to make one want to go into politics... Almost.

The law is an ass, I hear. Possibly. The much-vaunted Human Rights Act you'd think would have a lot to say about this sort of thing. Nah.

This particular ass is similar to the experience we've had with the HSE, English Heritage and other institutions which one might imagine are there to take the burden off little people like us*. Not their job.

Put not your trust in princes.

*which is all we are, even if we've got impressive sounding jobs and own houses, because (as we've pointed out countless times before) if we, with all our connections and efforts can't stop this lunacy, pity the less well-connected, funded or determined.

"I know this street. I once tried to drive up it. Never again. This development strikes me as crazy. Find other access, work on another scale, or don't go ahead with the development."

Got in one, pal.

Add your own thoughts http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/littlegreenstreet/signatures.html

The planning condition requiring the CMS and its approval by Camden also requires that the development "shall then be implemented in accordance with the approved statement" (condition 5). This means that if the developer (including any successor to the current developer who may seek to implement the planning permission) fails to comply with the CMS, Camden could serve a breach of condition notice on the developer requiring them to comply with the CMS. The developer could then be prosecuted if they did not comply with the notice. There may be a question mark over how effective this enforcement mechanism would be, as it requires Camden to take action and actually serve the notice (and then prosecute). In considering whether to approve the CMS, Camden should therefore not have regard to any weak/vague promises that cannot adequately be enforced by way of breach of condition notice. It may be appropriate for Camden to enter into a section 278 highways agreement in relation to any works to LGS, requiring the developer to pay for Camden to carry out the works (including providing a bond as protection in the event the developer became insolvent) and indemnifying the Council against any claims for compensation, costs etc in connection with the section 278 works.

To put it another way "The developers have to play nice or they'll be prosecuted by Camden". Who believes that is going to happen? Precisely.

We're lucky that we have engineers, architects, lawyers and more living in the street. All with calculators and a sense of moral outrage. They've been doing the numbers. Using the developers' figures, its now clear that a truck will pass the front doors of the houses EVERY THREE MINUTES all day every day for at least the first fifty eight weeks. That will mean that trucks will have to be queued up on Highgate Road all day every day, too. All it took was to check their figures. Not that they'd be uh, optimised or anything like that.

The men from Camden Housing have been to plasticise (not paint - I'd mentioned that we've become quite the amateur highways experts) have reclaimed the bit of road that isn't road, but is private road owned by them and painted EMERGENCY ACCESS and KEEP CLEAR (we wish) markings on the road.

Yes, the tiny aperture is how the twenty houses, ten flats and underground car park are to be build and accessed. Down Little Green street. Incredible.

The Evening Standard and The Ham & High. Side by side. Just to prove its now. Like people who've been kidnapped, or something.

Noted comedian and activist Mark Thomas with artist Tracey Sanderswood undertake a legal demonstration (assuming Big Ben was fast) in Parliament Square on 4 September. Not exactly that margarine (or was it biscuit?) about which questions were asked in the Australian parliament, but close enough...




Ah, but what exactly did they protest, I hear you ask? The script said "Save Little Green Street! www.littlegreenstreet.com What do we want? Nothing to happen? When do we want it? For another two hundred and thirty years!"

Snappy, huh?

Its not as if we weren't going to read it, 270 pages or not, but guess what? The so-called Construction Methodology Statement is NW5's very own dodgy dossier, full of untruths, half truth, omissions, exaggerations, 'Don't mention it - they won't notice it' fingers-crossed moments and more. Oh, well. Full details in due course.