The developers' letter

1 min read

Author: Cyril Richert
On the 26 March 2009, the developers (MSF) replied to the question raised by Mark Hunter, the Town Planner in charge of Clapham Junction redevelopment proposal on the 23 January 2009 (see our previous article here – you can also read Network Rail justifications following a similar letter from Mark Hunter).
You might not have noted this event (I bet few did) as we received in the post a letter dated 4th April asking for comments to be sent up to 18th April. It is interesting to notice that the developers took more than 2 months to reply, sent a 20 page letter (amongst other documents available on the Council website) and the residents are expected to make their mind within 2 weeks. I am actually very curious to know how many people read the developers’ submission and whether it persuaded them to include new arguments in any presentation they sent to the Planning department. Feel free to comment below this article.
In a previous article, Kate Williams listed the main concerns of the Planning Officer.
As a reminder, Mark Hunter stated right at the beginning of his letter :

On the information received, I do not consider that the Officers are in a position to provide your application with a positive recommendation at the present time.

I can unveil part of the mystery right from the beginning: you will have difficulties to find the changes, as the developers write:

“[…] we have made a number of changes to elements of the detailed design of the scheme. Although each of the changes are relatively small, together they affect a large number of the submitted plans.

{05/05/2009: this part of the article has been amended and a full and final submission is being made by the Clapham Junction Action Group available in this article here}
We will be publishing reactions in further articles, including Kate Williams’ answer to the developers referring on “those objecting to the applications have chosen to refer to only a small number of these images and indeed to publish their own deliberately distorted and misleading images“, along with other resident comments.

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CJI editor and Clapham Junction Action Group co-founder and coordinator since 2008, Cyril has lived in Clapham Junction since 2001.
He is also funder and CEO of Habilis-Digital Ltd, a digital agency creating and managing websites and Internet solutions.