The closing date for bids from interested parties was 16th June.  Residents living directly round the site, in Brewster Gardens, Dalgarno Gardens and Highlever Road have formed themselves into the Nursery Lane Action Group.  The group submitted an offer to Knight Frank, before the deadline, to acquire the site as a shared garden.  They have been assured that this bid will be passed on to the Legard family, owners of the land.

Meanwhile the StQW Forum has advised Knight Frank, and the planning consultant acting for the Legard family, of the planning obstacles that we see to proposals for residential development on the site.  In summary these are:

• there have been two previous proposals for housing development on the site, both of which were rejected by Planning Inspectors at appeal, in 1972 and 1982.  The grounds for the Inspector’s decision in 1982 remains (in our view) as valid today, in the context of the current RBKC Local Development Framework, as they were then.
• On subsequent occasions when the owners of the site have approached the council for a view on housing development, they have been told that this would be refused.
• There is a very clear statement in the Oxford Gardens Conservation Area Proposals Statement that this and other original ‘backland’ sites in this part of the St Quintin estate should not be developed as housing.
• RBKC Core Strategy Policy CR5(iii) states that the council will resist loss of private open space where this space gives visual amenity to the public
• The RBKC Core Strategy document shows this land (in the map on page 441) as a ‘Garden Square and other Green Space’.
• RBKC has designated this site as an Ecologically Sensitive Area, reflecting the wildlife on a site which has always remained as open space, with fine mature trees (to which a TPO applies)
• the site lies directly a tributary of Counters Creek, one of the main ‘underground rivers’ of London, and hence has a very high water table.
• the Draft StQW Neighbourhood Plan proposes designation of the site as Local Green Space (a new designation which has to met criteria set out in paragraph 77 of the National Planning Policy Framework).

We have kept the Council’s planning officers informed of all the above.  The council has confirmed that no one (neither Knight Frank, their planning consultant, nor any of the bidders) has yet asked the council for planning advice on the site.

Any developer putting in an offer for the land will therefore be making their own assumptions on the likelihood of planning permission for residential development being granted.  Unconditional offers will carry a high level of risk.  Will residential developers have made themselves aware of the extent of the problems they face?   We will now have to wait and see.