Not content with bringing you the best leisure planning analysis stories, Diary likes to keep readers up to date with the latest quirky housing applications too.
This week, plans to convert a light industrial unit in Watford into 15 flats under PD rights have been granted. A good way to repurpose stock, right? Maybe not.
It turns out that seven of the proposed flats (which would sit on a first floor, within the gable roof), are void of windows.
Undeterred by a severe lack of illumination, the flats have been given the green light, despite a planning inspector saying “it would not be a positive living environment.”
Not only would prospective tenants be denied sunlight but also a view of intu’s new shopping centre, which sits adjacent to the site. Diary knows there is a housing crisis, but think about all the drapers who are going to lose out on curtain sales.
The pleasure zones
As retail’s metamorphosis continues and millennials continue to change the goalposts of what an experience actually is, Diary thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to check the pulse of the property market and find out what new leisure offers are coming through the planning portal.
Among some of the more humdrum applications for fitness studios, gyms and, frankly pedestrian plans, for climbing walls, go-kart tracks and trampoline parks, we found some more exhilarating changes of use.
For those seeking an ethical approach to real estate, a change of use from redundant meat processing unit to children’s gymnastics facility.
Or for adrenaline junkies, a change of use and conversion of agricultural land and outbuildings to provide an outdoor activities centre providing archery, air rifle shooting, axe throwing, combat archery and zombie training.
Despite property’s unrivalled ability to reinvent the wheel when repurposing redundant stock, even real estate agents have no hiding place from this onslaught of fun. One estate agent’s office is even being converted into an escape room.
Diary eagerly awaits some well-placed PR invitations to see what a zombie training facility is really like.
A Collective NFI?
Anyone else have to console themselves with a double G&T as they sat in the office in their glad rags having been cruelly stood up (sort of) for The Collective’s grand preview party for its newest property at Canary Wharf?
Diary cleared its outside-of-work social diary to attend a property do on a Friday evening and then PING! in pops an e-mail from The Collective at 5.33pm (an hour before the party was meant to kick off) saying it had to be postponed “due to unforeseen circumstances”.
However, Diary was later told by The Collective that “The Collective Canary Wharf hosted 200 friends and family at its preview party on 5 July”.
Err, what? I thought the party was cancelled? Apparently not. It was just oversubscribed (and the building not quite ready. Ahem), hence the last-minute “postponement”.
Could this be the cruellest possible NFI or just a serious faux pas by The Collective’s events department?
Why big doesn’t always mean best…
In the week that London mayor Sadiq Khan refused the Tulip in London, the Twittersphere has reminded us why it’s important some towers get refused with this image of what London’s skyline could have looked like. Like most things in life, bigger doesn’t always mean better. Thanks @benatipsosmori
Here’s London with the skyscrapers refused planning permission…. thankfully pic.twitter.com/zalSTjsvlc
— Ben Page, Ipsos MORI (@benatipsosmori) July 17, 2019
Discreet street
Diary loves an online portal. Purely because week after week after week they continue to deliver diary fodder in their vain attempt to get some column inches (it’s working. Well done.).
This time the team at Vyomm give us some sick (see what we did there?) information on who owns what on one of London’s most expensive streets.
Now, Diary might be wrong, but if it was a punter looking to buy a prime or super-prime property it would probably want an agent who was a little discreet and perhaps didn’t push out press releases telling the world (everyone reads Diary of course!) about the discreet and secretive deals they are involved in.
But that aside, guess who lives on Kensington Palace Gardens, apart from Kate and Wills, of course?
Foxtons found Jon Hunt, It girl Tamara Ecclestone and Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich to name but a few. If you need to borrow a tenner, it’s the street to visit.
Up in smoke
Diary has never smoked and is one of those awful people who tuts and coughs when it sees others sparking up. #sorrynotsorry.
But if Diary’s tutting can’t persuade you to quit, what about a financial incentive?
Not only is it a horribly expensive habit – how much is a pack of 20 these days? – but those clever chaps at One 77 Mortgages have done some mathematical wizardry and discovered that smoking not only damages your health but the value of your home too.
It found an 82% difference between the average value of a house in areas of the UK with the lowest percentage of smokers and the highest percentage – £335,716 versus £184,878. Holy smoke!
