The door of a listed building in the Cotswold town of Chipping Campden has been at the centre of a High Court dispute this week.
Keene J has rejected a challenge by local resident Anne Kissel to Cotswold Councils decision to permit the replacement of the old entrance door of “Little House”, Chipping Campden High Street, with a modern version.
Kissel complained that the new door “looked awful” and jarred with the architecture of the area. What was more, she claimed, it was a breach of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990. She accused the council of failing to have proper regard for the desirability of preserving the building and its setting, and said their decision to allow the door was “perverse or verging on the absurd”.
But Keene J ruled that the council were within their rights to consent to the installation of the new door. He said that the planners who gave the go-ahead had not acted unreasonably and he found there had been nothing perverse in their decision to give permission without having received drawings.
The judge said the members of the planning committee were well aware of their statutory duties under the Act and there had, in his view, been no legal flaw in the way they reached their decision. He considered that “they did not fail to exercise their discretion or to perform their statutory duty”.
PLS News 18/10/00
