Here is a brief summary by a resident showing his opposition to the Planning Application No. 09/0561/FUL re the proposal to excavate below 30 Montague Road and extend the building into the garden in order to provide two further flats.
BEWARE! Those garden-grabbing, tree-felling enemies of the environment have Richmond Hill back in their sights.
Let me relay a personal experience – although a number of other similar "projects" are threatened in the area. My wife and I are lucky enough to live in one of the town’s nicest streets – Montague Road in the St Matthias Conservation Area of Richmond Hill. Like our neighbours, we do our best to keep it that way. It has always been a peaceful street and a most attractive one too. Despite many home improvements being carried out, good taste has prevailed and builders have in the main been hard working, clean about their work and considerate.And then along came the developer from hell.
The house next to ours has been unoccupied for a couple of years. As far as I am aware it is the only house in the road which, in all the forty years I have lived here, has never been occupied by its owners. In a move totally out of character with the road, it was split into five flats. The work has been hideous: the "developer" has not even used skips for the huge amount of rubbish which has been brought out of the house and dumped in the front garden until it was piled high enough for a grabber lorry to come around and haul this mess away. Just imagine the dust and dirt that this created – only a low wall separates it from our property. At one stage plastic bags full of every conceivable kind of rubbish were being emptied out of upstairs windows into the garden – well, several gardens in effect. Many of our garden plants were choked, our cars had to be cleaned three times a week and it was impossible to have any of our windows open without the house being filled with dust.And then the nightmare got worse.
In post apparently sent out before Christmas but not received until early January – close to the deadline for objections (and many of the neighbours were away for the holidays, anyway) we received notification that the "developer" planned to excavate beneath the house and create two further flats which would also protrude behind the building grabbing a chunk of what was once a very green and pleasant garden. A nice pink blossoming apple tree at the front of the house was there when we went to bed one night, but gone the next day.Thankfully all the neighbours (including many of those who live behind the house in Onslow Road) share our horror at what has been going on and have been galvanised into action. At one point the "developer" withdrew his application and – presumably hoping that our guard was down – slipped in a new one which we are vigorously opposing.Like many other streets in this lovely town, parking is at a premium and the thought of the car-owning occupants of seven flats in one house adds to that particular nightmare. But the
"developer" has thought of that: he has told the Council planners that the proposal is "car free due to the close proximity to (sic) the town centre and the good public transport connections". Oh to be a fly-on-the-wall when he tries telling that to his tenants!But perhaps the cheekiest part of this whole application is to describe the hollow area beneath the ground floor of the house as "the existing basement". It is nothing of the sort: my dictionary describes a basement as "the lowest inhabited floor of a building". This area has never been inhabited and one report points out that serious excavation would be required even to allow headroom for anyone intending to move around in this subterranean hollow. And at what cost will that be to the hill’s water table and subsoil, to say nothing of the dangers to all our foundations. Seven flats in one house built for single occupancy? Perhaps the phrase ‘Pile it high and sell it cheap’ didn’t die with Woolworths after all.