Save our Victorian heritage!!!!

I really was hoping to blog every day when I started, but in case children, work, housework weren’t enough, husband and I have been very busy trying to stop a large building in our neighbourhood (which is a conservation area) from being demolished and substituted for a mock Victorian pastiche with lots of small flats. I am writing just before a council meeting that is a last chance for the building and where a vote will be taken. And right now, there is nothing else we can do, other than start thinking about what to do if the councillors vote for demolition.

It all started about two years ago, when the building, which had not been cherished by its owners and was beginning to look a bit shabby, was sold to a developer who applied for planning permission to demolish it and build lots of flats instead and a couple of houses in the garden. The council turned down the proposal and most of us thought that would be the end of the matter. But then, in March this year the developers presented a new set of plans that the council officials had helped shape. And this, inexplicably, was approved, with six councillors voting against and eight in favour. But it turns out that all they approved were the new plans, not the demolition of a building in a conservation area. My husband spotted that and wrote a letter that has forced the council to take a new vote…

But the council has not told any of the local residents about this new vote, but thanks to husband and other committed people we’ve been gathering evidence of local opposition to the plans, as well as a letter from the Victorian Society that completely rubbishes the scheme… now we wish we had started the campaign earlier and had been more organised about it, but we never really set out to run this as a campaign, it was just a series of spontaneous acts motivated by outrage. We did leaflet the local neighbourhood this weekend and that alone generated at least twenty letters of objection, if we’d done this at a bigger scale, or a bit earlier maybe we would have had more letters.

Fingers crossed...