Brunswick Life

Stuart Tappin has sent a note about an interesting series of talks taking place during the year at St Pancras old church – which is well worth visiting, if you haven’t been there. Although little is left of the original building, you can sense the history of the site, which is believed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England. The graveyard also has an interesting history: the novelist Thomas Hardy worked on the exhumation of graves when Victorian railway works cut through the site – a forerunner of the Channel rail link – and the remaining graves include the impressive family mausoleum of Sir John Soane, which inspired the Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s design for the famous red telephone box.

The talks start on Saturday May 11, the eve of St Pancras Day, and are in aid of  an appeal to raise funds for the fabric of the church, as ancient drains are threatening this picturesque Grade II* listed building. All money raised will go towards building new drains and securing the cracks in the stone walls. Entry to the talks costs £10, and they are given by leading historians and authors including Roger Bowdler on the tombs, Gillian Darley on John Soane and St Pancras, and Simon Bradley on St Pancras Station.

For more information see this leaflet St Pancras lecture series 2013 or email: st.p.appeal@gmail.com.

Residents should have received the consultation on Controlled Parking Zones this week. Camden is asking for feedback on whether to extend the hours during which the parking controls operate. Currently, these are 8.30am to 6.30pm on Mondays to Fridays and 8.30am to 1.30pm on Saturdays, with no restrictions on Sunday.

It is obviously tricky to balance the competing needs of residents and those visiting them or the shops, restaurants and cinema in the Brunswick, and there is also the general desire to minimise traffic in the centre of town. Personally, I can see both sides of the argument: tranquility is very important to me but I do worry that if controls are increased it will create a barrier for my visitors. At the moment, my brother and his children can come down to see me and play in Coram’s Fields at the weekend, but they are unlikely to do so if they have to pay for parking or use public transport (a bus and tube journey with three young children and two bikes: any volunteers?).

What do you think? The consultation is also available online at https://consultations.wearecamden.org/ and is open until Monday 11th February.

Isobel alerts me to the fact that the Brunswick Singing Group are singing again! The group meets on Wednesday evenings from 6.30-7.45pm in the BTRA Community Room, 10 Foundling Court. New members are warmly welcomed and no prior experience is necessary, so do go along and join in.

Not content with getting us singing, Isobel is also involved in the set up of a new reading group, which sounds like a great idea. It meets on the last Wednesday of the month, from 3.30-5.30pm in the BTRA Community Room. The next meeting is Wednesday 28 November and the book they are reading is Animal Farm by George Orwell. There will be no meeting in December, so the date after that will be 30 January.

Enquiries about both groups to Isobel on isobel.mcmillan@phonecoop.coop or call 0207 837 0008.

Singing and reading – what better way to while away these long dark evenings!

There will be an Open Forum Meeting on Leaseholder Representation on Monday, 22nd October 2012 at 7pm in the Council Chamber at Camden Town Hall. Peter Wright invites leaseholders to discuss leaseholder representation with members of the new Leaseholders’ Forum, councillors and senior Camden officers:

“This is the second open Forum meeting of the summer. The first (on service charges and management charges) fed directly into a scrutiny panel of councillors investigating them; panel members, the Director and the Cabinet Member came to hear what was said. I know the meeting had an impact and affected thinking about leaseholders, which will be reflected in the panel report.

This meeting will do two things. First, it will feed into another panel on resident involvement; two councillor members of the panel will be coming, as well as Councillor Julian Fulbrook, the Cabinet Member. Secondly it will guide the new Forum. There are ten new members; five from the last Forum, one from a previous one and four previously came as observers. I think this a good result, which confirms that we should continue to have a Forum, and that it will be fresh and active. But, even better (and something new) was considerable interest from others who did not stand, but wanted to be included in some way. I therefore propose a discussion about how a new Forum might operate and relate to this wider group, and beyond that to leaseholders as a whole. I assume there will be ideas on what subjects the Forum might consider and how it might involve and relate to the wider leaseholder community.

This open meeting will be minuted.  A session for new Forum members to meet officers will follow.  Then, the new Forum can adopt a constitution, elect officers and start to work for you, informed by your views from the two open meetings.

So please come, say what you want from the Forum; how you want the Council to support it; and how you would want to be involved.  I hope this  meeting will set a direction and ethos for your new representatives.  Discussion will be led by Christine McConnachie a Consultant from the Tenant Participation Advisory Service, which is working with the resident involvement panel as expert advisers on resident participation.”

In his review in the TLS of Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s new book The London Square, just published by Yale, A N Wilson takes the author to task for not mentioning the Brunswick, which he praises as being close to an ideal square:

“Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson designed the Brunswick Centre, or as it is now called “the Brunswick”, on the site of the run-down Georgian houses adjoining the old Brunswick Square. “The Brunswick” got off to a rocky start, with a withdrawal of funds, and it was never completed. In the 1980s it seemed like a woebegone bit of outdated brutalism, but in recent times, it has undergone a rebirth. Martin and Hodgkinson drew some of their inspiration from the uninspiring Dolphin Square. Determined not to build higher than five storeys, and not to soar over the remaining eighteenth-century and Victorian squares and terraces of the neighbourhood, they created a living space for several thousand people. It contains sixteen different housing types “from luxury and professional on to hostels for young medics and nurses working close by, which would have been a good mix for a central London village”. Bruno Schlaffenberg, an inspired planning officer for London County Council, believed “people should be able to live close to their places of work, and disapproved of wholly residential communities such as Hampstead Garden Suburb, the model estate built in 1906 without shops or places of employment”. The Brunswick is that very rare thing in Britain today, an urban success story. Its ziggurat shapes, its greenhouse roofs, its surprising views and its intelligent layout all remind Bridget Cherry, the reviser of Pevsner’s London, of Sant’ Elia the Italian Futurist, and by the end of a rapturous paragraph on the scheme she even manages to get in a mention of Piranesi, which I shall meditate on the next time I park in the underground car park there. The Brunswick, with its cafés, shops, cashpoints, pharmacist, and well-proportioned flats, its central piazza, its art house cinema and its classy supermarket, is very close to being my idea of paradise on earth.

It deserved a mention (which it did not get) in Longstaffe-Gowan’s survey, not least because Schlaffenberg at planning, and Martin and Hodgkinson (but chiefly Hodgkinson who was sole architect after 1963) managed to achieve what so many of the post-war architects failed to do: namely, the sort of living space which would be provided by the ideal square. It combines the qualities of Inigo Jones’s sunny piazzas and the domestic intimacy of Canonbury or of the Lloyd Baker Estate.”

Nice to hear such warm praise for the Brunswick!

Peter Ward of the Camden Community and Police Consultative Group emails to invite residents to attend a public consultation about crime and antisocial behaviour at 7pm today, Wednesday 3 October Camden Town Hall, Judd Street.

The main focus of the meeting will be the community safety priorities for Camden. Mark Lavender, the Head of the Partnership Information Unit, will be explaining how they will be achieved. You will have your opportunity to contribute to the debate and influence priorities. Chief Superintendent John Sutherland, the Borough Commander, will be presenting the Policing Report, and Alison Griffin, the Assistant Director for Culture and Environment who is in charge of Community Safety, will be presenting the Partnership Report.

The agenda and papers for the meeting can be downloaded from the our website http://camdencpcg.org.uk/publice-meetings/. We have also just uploaded a report on the crime trends in Camden over the past two years.

There are still spaces available on the Crime and Antisocial Behaviour Focus Groups taking place on: Monday 8 October, 12.00 to 1.00 pm, in the Euston Road area for people living or working in the Bloomsbury area. Email Peter Ward on admin@camdencpcg.org.uk  if you would like to book a place.

Dawn Allott of Camden’s Community Liaison Office, invites members of the Brunswick Leaseholders Association to attend a meeting about the proposed redevelopment of the student halls just north of the Brunswick:

“Hughes Parry, Canterbury & Commonwealth Student Halls, bounded by Cartwright Gardens, Leigh Street, Sandwich Street and Hastings Street, WC1H

I am writing to invite you to a meeting of the Camden Development Management Forum on Tuesday 9^th October at The Chancellors Room, Hughes Parry Hall 19-26 Cartwright Gardens WC1H 9EF. Doors will open at 6.15pm for a 6.30pm start. The meeting will finish at 8.30pm.

At this meeting developers will present proposals for the redevelopment of Hughes Parry, Canterbury & Commonwealth Student Halls, bounded by Cartwright Gardens, Leigh Street, Sandwich Street and Hastings Street, WC1H which is in your area.

The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the proposal before a planning application is made. After a presentation by the developer there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions and to give your views on the proposals as they stand at this stage.

The proposal is:

Redevelopment of site, involving the demolition of Canterbury and Commonwealth Halls and the retention and refurbishment of Hughes Parry Hall in order to provide a single student accommodation complex, including 5-9 storey buildings and comprising approximately 1300 bedrooms, with associated alterations to access and landscaping.  

We think the meeting will be helpful in identifying and focusing planning issues and that it will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the proposal and give your own ideas.

A planning application has not been received from the developer for this site. If one is submitted in the future Camden Council will carry out statutory consultation in the normal way and determine it in accordance with our duties as the local planning authority.

The meeting will not be making decisions about the development proposal, nor are the developers required to take account of the discussion in any future application, which the Council must determine on its planning merits.

If you need any further information or help about the Development Management Forum you can contact me by phone on 020 7974 1797 or by email at dawn.allott@camden.gov.uk. You can also find more information about the Development Management Forum in the Major Developments section of our website.

We want to make sure that all sections of the community are able to participate in the Forum so if you require an interpreter (for a language other than English or for British Sign Language), need information in other formats or have any special needs please let me know.

I hope you are able to attend and look forward to seeing you at the meeting.”