THE ASSAULT on the Hackney skyline continues. Work is to start this spring 2015 on a 15-floor building at the former Peacocks store site next to Dalston Kingsland rail station.
The site’s owner, Rothas, run by businessman David Pearl, will not develop the property, which will not surprise readers of Loving Dalston. The site has been sold to developer Taylor Wimpey.
In its many updates on this story, this site has pointed out that despite the claims of the investment company’s big-fee publicists, Rothas had no history of building anything.
As long ago as 2011, when this site broke the news, a Rothas spokesman told Loving Dalston: “Should we succeed in securing planning, we are committed to starting the scheme in 2012.”
Two Hackney councillors were working for Four Communications, the publicist-lobbyist Rothas was then using.
Property speculators can make millions more with planning permission.
The Rothas proposal, however, did not fit with Hackney council planning stipulations: the council’s building-heights “strategy” says that new development “should generally respect the character, grain, vertical rhythm and existing scale of Kingsland Road/High Street”.
That “generally” is the kind of get-out developers, planners and planning subcommittees love and, after several changes of design, including a reduction in height from the always-unlikely 17 floors, and with glossy publicist-crafted presentations to local people and planners, Rothas won permission for a cigar-case-shaped structure that will rise to 15 floors.
No planning gain to make the adjacent Dalston Kingsland accessible to wheelchairs was specified nor was any real effort made to improve the station’s appearance and accessibility.
Taylor Wimpey, which styles itself as “a responsible developer”, will use the Jestico and Whiles design to build 83 private and 15 so-called affordable flats and shops. Flats in the £50 million FiftySevenEast will start at £470,000. That’s off-plan – for a one-bedroomer.
David Altheer 230115
* Completion of the Taylor Wimpey tower at 51-57 Kingsland High Street, Dalston E8 2JS is due in 2017.
* Backstory (some of it): Kingsland Station plan on wrong lines; Latest tower plan to replace Dalston Peacocks; Kingsland ecotower? Will it ever be built?; Little light shines from an E8 Chinese lantern; Another tower over downtown Dalston
* Emboldened underscored words in most cases indicate a hyperlink, a reader service rare among websites. If a link does not work, it is probably because the site to which the URL refers has not been maintained.
The problem is that Dalston has Town Centre Status in terms of planning, meaning that in the long run it will end up looking like nondescript urban sprawl with a load of 1970s-esque tower blocks and serious congestion as people pour in to our supposedly trendy area.
We are already halfway there.