In an utterly predictable yet highly-depressing move, the owner who has (for what ever reason) let a gem of a civic building in Cambridge become derelict and run down, is appealing to ministers to get Cambridge City Council’s planning refusal overturned.
TL/DR: How can you contest the appeal? Go to the planning portal here, click on the ‘Make a representation’ button and you’ll see a screen like this for: Case APP/Q0505/W/25/3365274
For those of you who want the full file links to quote the councillors’ and council officers’ reasons for refusal, see the links in my earlier blogpost here.
In particular, see p5 of the printed minutes here if you want to quote the reasons given for refusal and explaining that you support the reasons – especially those that state the application is contrary to the Cambridge Local Plan 2018, and National Planning Policy Framework statements.
Furthermore, see the briefing from Cambridge Past, Present, and Future here.
If you want the city council to host an informal meeting to enable councillors and the public to have their say on the appeal – and also to raise the public profile of this case in the media, email your city councillors via https://www.writetothem.com/
In terms of wider background…
I cannot recall receiving a letter from the city council that so infuriated me as the one I received this morning – having to take medication just to calm the f–k down.
I have a ***long history*** with this building
Have a look at these videos:
- 16 March 2016 when we were still in the EU
- 30 August 2016 – being rebuffed by the building owner’s agent
- 07 December 2016 – Public Q to Cambridge City Council
- 25 June 2017 update
- 19 April 2023 protesting against the applicant at a public consultation
When the developer was interviewed fairly recently on BBC Cambridgeshire, I wrote this blogpost.
My words even ended up on the front page of the Cambridge News.
…which I included in an article moaning about Cambridge’s bland new buildings
It’s literally blander than communism!
Above – Klaus Bernsdorf’s propaganda poster for the 35th anniversary of the old East Germany which has far more colour and variety in it than many of the CGIs of new housing developments proposed for (and since built in) Cambridge
And it didn’t have to be that way.
Here was one more imaginative design by Jonathan Gimblett that preserves the front of the cinema.
Above – Hobson Street Cinema when profit is not the main driver
As the former leader of Cambridge City Council, Cllr Lewis Herbert said:
For those of you wanting a full-on case report, see the video of the planning hearing at The Guildhall on 06 Nov 2024.
No City Council meetings to discuss this before the deadline – could they organise a one-off meeting at The Guildhall?
Normally the public could raise this issue in a Planning and Transport Scrutiny Committee meeting, but none is scheduled in their calendar before the Planning Inspectorate’s deadline of 24 June 2025.
I’ll leave it here for now and let more influential and expert people take this on.
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