Confessions of a Nimby: The talk show

How wrong can you get? When news first dropped through the door of the proposed residential/school development to be built opposite my block of flats, I thought I would probably have to spearhead the campaign to stop it. In fact the fight has been so well organised and has come from so many directions that I’ve had trouble keeping up.

The internet is a great campaigning tool and we now have our own campaign site that holds all the important documentation – expert reports, responses from the architect and planning officer, template objection letters, a skills base – as well as lively ongoing discussion.

The standard of people’s letters of objection has been remarkably high. Here’s an extract from one a neighbour of mine wrote: ‘We consider that, as detailed above, the application as it stands fails to satisfy paragraphs (B) - (H) of Policy EQ1 of the UDP – in respect of appropriate materials and design, protection of important views, height compatible with neighbouring buildings, safe access, cramped internal layout, obtrusiveness in relation to adjacent properties, adequate sunlight/daylight to adjacent buildings and land, detrimental effect on the reasonable use and enjoyment of adjacent buildings… It also fails to satisfy Strategic Policies ST1 & ST2 and, in particular, runs contrary to justification paragraphs 11 (detrimental impact on local amenity) and 12 – 14 (erosion/dilution of distinctive local character of established residential areas) for these two policies.’ Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The residents of the flats where I live have paid for a planning consultant’s report and he has come up with a document that makes you wonder how on earth such a scheme could even have been conceived of, let alone got as far as a planning application. I read it both thrilled that it was so thorough and robust but also horrified by its bleakness – it was the first time that I’d realised how bad things would be if the development went ahead.

The application comes over as sneaky

The applicants, Aiha Ltd and housing association Agudas Israel, have not done themselves any favours by failing to consult the local community. Only now that the application has been submitted has the architect Peter Currie held a meeting to try to address residents’ concerns. As a result the application comes over as sneaky. The chief executive of Agudas Israel was at this meeting and managed to astonish pretty well everyone there by shouting her belief that anyone who was against this development was anti-Semitic. ‘Well,’ shouted back a friend of mine, ‘I’m Jewish and I’m against this development!’ But the CEO was already storming out of the hall, her work done.

The lack of consultation with neighbours prior to the application is indicative of the social remoteness between us and the adjacent Orthodox Jewish community. They have their own neighbourhood, their own schools, their own businesses and shops.

There is a lot of talk about tolerance towards minority groups – an attitude I have always found terribly patronising: I don’t want to tolerate anyone; I want to actively engage with them. I suppose there are good reasons why they keep themselves to themselves – and they’re hardly unique in this respect – but I find it regrettable that despite living within 5 minutes’ walk of an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, the only one of their community that I know is the Rabbi I chat to at a Turkish baths some distance away in Canning Town. I challenged him about why his community kept itself so removed from others and he told me it was so they did not come to suffer the ills that afflict our society – ‘we don’t have your schools, or your television, or computer games or websites – our children are protected.’

Well, maybe, but this unwillingness to engage on a local level contributes to the creation of a planning application of this kind, grotesquely overdeveloped and having no regard whatever to the neighbouring community that will be most affected by it. Call me old fashioned, but I think if I was wanting to build a school for 200 pupils and homes for 216 residents, I might spend just a little time going around asking my neighbours how I could do this with a degree of sensitivity to their concerns. Communication is a wonderful thing.