I received information from Croydon Council yesterday concerning the "Bird House" on Sydenham Road.
I have been banging on about this for almost 4 years, and was told by the council in April of this year that there was planning permission for it.
Unfortunately, the council had given me information relating to the wrong building.
The reality is that the "Bird House" has a history of being owned by a landlord who defaulted on repairs, and could not be traced. Broomleigh Housing Association took the property over and, because a new building could not be built on the site, sold it to Whitstable Investments Ltd of Jersey.
All the buildings in Sydenham Road of this design and date were put on a local list which prevented them from being demolished. This was recently lifted.
Croydon Council have obtained information from the Land Registry and will be contacting the owner to start proceedings to get them to place the properties back into residential use.
I would like to thank the recently appointed member of the Empty Properties Department of Croydon Council for being the first person in the council, in almost 4 years, to actually bother to look into this properly and to state that they will actually try to do something about it.
It is a disgrace that the building has been left to rot and decay over the years. It would have made a fine home for someone, now it seems that it will end up being demolished.
I shall watch developments with interest.
1 comment:
Was any reason given why this building, and other similar ones, had been removed from the Local List? I hope it was not because they had been allowed to deteriorate to such an extent that they no longer met the criteria for listing.
I don't claim anything but the most superficial knowledge of local listing but it seems to me that the Local List only really comes into its own when planning applications are put in that involve alterations or demolition. Local listing can then be used as an argument in the planning decision making process, although it lacks any real statutory power. However when it comes to simply letting the building deteriorate the Local List doesn't seem to help much at all.
Local Listing really does need some statutory power behind it to truly protect these buildings.
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