One of Britain’s most high-profile movie and TV sound recording studios failed in a High Court bid to stop potentially noisy building works from taking place next door to them.Grand Central Recording Studios, based at 51 to 53 Great Marlborough Street in London’s Soho, challenged a decision by Westminster City Council to allow the redevelopment of numbers 54, 55 and 57.
In a decision made in April, the council allowed developers to convert the addresses into apartments, a change of use from office to residential. The planning application involves the demolition of the existing buildings and redevelopment behind street facades.
The new building will have a basement and seven above-ground floors, with the ground floor to become shops and restaurants, and floors above converted to apartments. Construction is expected to take 28 months.
“The key concern of the claimant is that of ground-borne vibration,” Mrs Justice Patterson, the judge ruling in this case, said in her ruling today. “This could make it impossible for the claimant’s business to function at all as ground-borne vibration would bypass sound insulation in the studios thereby rendering it difficult to make voice recordings which are very sensitive to any interference and background noise.”
At a hearing earlier this month, lawyers for Grand Central argued that the change of use from office space to residential was in violation of the council’s policy, and that it hadn’t considered properly how noise and vibration would affect Grand Central, and that it also hadn’t imposed on the developers a condition to protect against adverse changes caused by the sound of Tube trains.
Even so, in her ruling Patterson J said that no errors of law had been made, so all of Grand Central’s grounds of claim were “not arguable”.
Grand Central Sound Studios Limited v Lord Mayor and citizens of the City of Westminster and Marlborough House Limited (interested party)
Administrative Court (Patterson J) 20 October 2016
James Maurici QC and Richard Moules (instructed by Sharpe Pritchard) for the claimant
Sara Kabir Sheikh QC (instructed by Tri Borough Legal Services) for the defendant
Rhodi Price Lewis QC (instructed by Banker & Mackenzie LLP) for the interested party
