Brent Cross 2 - an eco calamity

With the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen looming, the UK - the first country to introduce legally binding carbon emissions reduction targets - should be showing strong leadership. Yet here in north London plans are afoot to drive a coach and horses (and cars and trucks) through the spirit of the Climate Act. In Barnet a glossy greenwashed blueprint drawn up for a controversial £4.5bn Brent Cross-Cricklewood ‘new town’ has gained outline planning permission. It is shaping up to be an eco disaster.

The regeneration scheme, which has already been rejected by Camden, will generate 29,000 extra car journeys per day. A more light railway is not only not paid for as part of the plan but, incredibly, is ruled out by it. Whereas Canary Wharf has attracted both the Jubilee Line extension and the DLR, this is a 1980s car based recipe for gridlock. Given that we are at or near the peak of global oil production, and therefore at the end of the era of cheap oil, it is hard to see how a car-based solution can possibly make sense.


Residential buildings will only achieve level three (out of six) under the Code for Sustainable Homes. That’s pathetic when you think that all buildings are supposed to be zero carbon (level six of the code) by 2016. The scheme fails to comply with the Mayors’ Planning Guidance on Zero Emission Developments as developers say it is not “technically or commercially viable” for the entire scheme to follow the rules.

Many believe the current scheme is simply a way of extending Brent Cross Shopping Centre, a proposal that was strongly opposed and thrown out by Judicial Review in the late1990s. Do we really need more retail expansion on this scale? The recent reduction of other elements of Phase One, but leaving the doubling of the shopping centre untouched, seems to support this view. No other phases are guaranteed to be built by the developers.

The adverse impacts arising from this scheme (the large increase in noise, traffic congestion and air pollution) extend beyond the London Borough of Barnet boundary. It should not be left to Barnet councillors alone to decide on these plans. As one of the largest developments in Europe it will impact across London.

I support the increasingly vocal calls of the “Coalition for A Sustainable Brent Cross-Cricklewood Plan”, Friends of the Earth, politicians, residents and other campaign groups across Camden, Barnet and Brent for this project to go to a Public Inquiry. Let the experts decide. I doubt they would decide to build anything grotesquely unsustainable as the current plan.