Myddelton Square Gardens – Major Concerns remain
January 17th, 2012 by George AllanComment?
A well-attended public meeting in St Mark’s Church last night (16th January 2012) heard Labour Cllr Paul Convery give his assessment of the bizarre Myddelton Square situation. (New readers see the end of this post for the story so far.)
Cllr Convery was careful to air-brush away my role in getting the issue publicly debated, but a little information emerged which will be new to readers of this site. A summary would be these:
- the Council is likely to go ahead with some works to the Gardens, such as re-turfing and path improvements, in defiance of the freeholder’s attempt to ban them, because the lease also requires the Council to maintain the gardens. (Download a copy of the lease below). Go figure, m’Lud!
- the Labour administration will not however commit to spending the full £238,000 (previously allocated by the Lib Dem administration) from the Angel Centre s.106 agreement because this would arguably go further than could be allowed under (1). This is a major concern – see below;
- The Council will “consider” compulsory purchase but only after other avenues, notably the normal lease-renewal process under the Landlord & Tenant Act, have been pursued;
- Cllr Convery is trying to use his influence over Derwent’s plans for future development in Islington to get Derwent to make amends for its astonishing – and so far unexplained – decision to sell the freehold of the Gardens in 2008 without offering them to the Council. Cllr Convery is meeting David Silverman, a board member of Derwent London, on Friday (20th January).
Meanwhile, Robert Rayne, Chair of Derwent London, has not so far answered my request for an explanation of this – sent on 23rd November 2011. I look forward to his response.
Bolt Cutters not required!
There were a lot of questions from residents about whether Mr Cooper would try to lock the gates to exclude the public when the lease expires next year, and whether local residents would have to resort to wielding bolt-cutters to get in.
The answer is no. Under the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954, the lease continues until the procedure under the Act comes to an end, whether or not its expiry date has come and gone. So as long as the Council lawyers serve the relevant notices requesting an extension to the lease in 2013, no-one need invest in bolt-cutters.
Mr Cooper can’t oppose the renewal of the lease unless the leaseholder (ie the Council) has committed serious breaches of the lease – notably failure to repair or failure to pay the rent – or where he wants to redevelop. None of these is likely to apply to the Gardens.
What the Act doesn’t do is impose rent control. If the freeholder and leaseholder can’t agree, the Court decides the rent, on the basis of various assumptions set out there. That could keep our learned friends, their surveyor witnesses and the judiciary arguing for a long time.
See the facts for yourself here!
If you want to see the basic documents, here they are. Download the Council’s Myddelton Gardens Lease, and the Angel S106 here. The effect of the London Squares Preservation Act 1931 and the Planning policies can be viewed here.
Major Concerns remain
Cllr Convery’s gave his “commitment” to “identify” alternative resources to be spent on the improvement of Myddelton Square, if the council should be obliged to spend £238,000 s. 106 money from the Angel Centre elsewhere before a “sunset” clause allows Derwent to ask for it back in 2015. But just how cast iron is such a “commitment?
Cllr Convery has ”previous” on this. In the 1980s, he was part of the Labour administration which raided the s.106 pot from a development in Cowcross St, near Farringdon station, intended to improve local amenities – and used it to build the Archway leisure pool, at the other end of the Borough. Local people have never forgotten this.
The danger is thus that the money is spent on something else – and the Council then goes through the motions of “identifying” other funds before – amid much wringing of hands – it announces that it hasn’t suceeded, times are hard, the Government has tied its hands etc – and then reneges on Cllr Convery’s “commitment”. No-one can commit Council capital resources years ahead like this.
My other concerns are more technical. What good will re-turfing do if the grass doesn’t grow properly under the trees? Will the money be wasted?
What Cllr Convery should do
I have asked Cllr Convery to request Derwent to remove the “sunset” clause in the s.106 agreement, whereby – if the money isn’t spent by 2015 – Derwent can simply ask for it back. (It’s clause 1.2 on page 18). That is one thing which Derwent can do which will cost it nothing and nevertheless avoid the need for us to depend on a somewhat dodgy “commitment” by the Labour administration to “identify” alternative sources of £238k for improvements to the Gardens.
New readers start here!
In about 2008, Derwent London, mega-property developer, owner of the Angel Centre and successor in title to the New River Company, the company which built London’s water supply, quietly sold the Gardens in Myddelton Square – probably for a few thousand pounds – to an aggressive property developer, Marcus Cooper, who regards the gardens as being worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, despite their protection from development, and is determined to extract this from the Council, either as an equivalent in rent or as an offer for the freehold, under threat of terminating the Council’s lease which notionally expires in 2013. Meanwhile he is refusing permission to the Council to demolish a dilapidated former gardener’s hut currently surrounded by unsightly hoardings and preventing the expenditure of the full £238k in improvement money.
The Gardens are heavily protected from any development by the London Squares Preservation Act 1931 and innumerable Planning policy documents (see above). The Council’s lease can be renewed, if necessary under a court order, but potentially at a higher rent.
In December I went house-to-house round the Square gathering signatures for a petition demanding an immediate start to compulsory purchase proceedings unless negotiations were promptly successful, and on 8th December I presented this to the Council, which had a full debate on a motion I put down. See my previous post about this elsewhere on this site.
Community Rid to Bid – a suitable case?
An intriguing possibility was raised at the meeting by a resident. The Coalition Government’s Localism Act gives any community the right to apply to the local authority to list any building or land as an “asset of community value”. If accepted, this puts a brake on the freeholder’s ability to sell or lease the land to anyone else, without giving the community time to mount a rival bid.
I am examining this possibility closely to see if it could add anything to the already formidable protection the Gardens already have. It is likely to come into force in April.



