THE CONTROVERSIAL planning application to demolish Greenwich Market has been delayed and will not now be considered until at least the end of August or later, greenwich.co.uk has learned.
According to the council’s planning website, which gives a “target date for decision” of 8 July, the decision was supposed to have been taken by now. It had been expected that the application would be considered at next Wednesday’s meeting of the council Planning Board.
However, the item is not on the agenda for this meeting and many preliminary steps to the decision have not yet been taken either.
There has been no official site visit by council planning officers – a necessary prelude to their producing their report to councillors setting out their recommendation.
After that recommendation is produced, there also needs to be a further official site visit by councillors on the planning committee.
All three steps are part of the process for major and controversial applications in advance of any decision being made. None has yet taken place.
David McFarlane, spokesman for the developers, Greenwich Hospital, said he expected the application would be heard at the Planning Board’s meeting of August 26. However, Greenwich Council refused to confirm this.
“The idea is that both the application for the demolition of the market and the application for the temporary market [in the grounds of the Naval College] will be heard on the same day,” McFarlane said.
Both the council and the Hospital have said that any demolition of the market will not happen unless planning permission is also granted for a temporary market, intended to occupy the corner of the Naval College grounds nearest the pier for a period of two years while the main site is redeveloped. It may therefore make sense for the two applications to be heard together.
However, this raises the possibility of further delays. The Hospital’s planning application for the temporary market only went in three weeks ago and the statutory consultation with affected parties only started last week.
The council’s website gives a target date for a planning officers’ recommendation on the temporary market as 4 September – which would miss the August meeting, raising the possibility that the whole issue would be delayed further.
The temporary market application (see it here) is itself difficult and controversial. As even the council admits, in bold capital letters on its consultation letter, it is “a departure from the Unitary Development Plan,” the definitive statement of its own planning policy.
It involves, as the Hospital concedes, an “exceptionally sensitive site,” the grounds of the Grade I listed Naval College. It will cause the loss of metropolitan open land, on which there is a presumption that there will be no development, temporary or permanent. It will require the chopping down of trees and the diversion of cycle and other paths. It will spoil one of London’s most important officially-protected views, the so-called “Canaletto View” of the Naval College from Island Gardens. Anyone wishing to object to the applications needs to email the planning officer concerned, louise.thayre@greenwich.co.uk, by 28 July.
It is worth remembering, too, that a planning application to put a giant wheel on the same site a few years back was rejected by Greenwich Council – and only approved on appeal to the Planning Inspectorate.
I will write more about the specific detail of the temporary market application next week – but the Hospital’s hope that a decision can be made on it by the end of August is, at best, ambitious.
It is, therefore, perfectly possible to imagine the whole process slipping well into the autumn – which in turn will seriously jeopardise the Hospital’s ambition to start demolishing the market in January and to open its brave new mini-Bluewater by the time of the Olympics.
Because the Greenwich council stages are not the final word. The decision also has to be approved by the Mayor, who recently delighted campaigners by saving another threatened market, Queens’ Market in Newham. It could also, I think, potentially be called in by the Secretary of State. “If Boris has serious concerns, all bets are off,” McFarlane admits.
Nobody should relax – the fight to save Greenwich Market from the Hospital’s blandly awful proposals continues. But the delay could work in our favour.
I am getting as many people to send emails to louise thayre as possible by the 28th July, unfortunatley the email address for her in Andrew’s article is incorrect, it should read louise.thayre@greenwich.gov.uk and people need to send their full address as well.
Well spotted – sorry about that.
Just got Louise Thayre’s out of office – she’s away until August 3. So I presume objections sent to her email address won’t be read until after the July 28 deadline.