THE HORNET PLANS TO FLY HIGHER

In the absence of any worthwhile local paper there are just two ways residents can find out what goes on behind their backs.

There is the Dame's blog and there is This Is North Kensington. LINK

Both serve different audience: both are on the side of the angels!

With all this self-isolation Dame has been a bit slack of late but, despite that, her unique readership is now a daily 1000 plus and climbing.

Her ambition is to drive readership to a daily 2000 and beyond.

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RBKC HOMELESS GET SHORT END OF THE STICK

Dear Dame, 

This THINK blog post on our council's  housing and homelessness  strategy is doing the rounds on social media.
You can read it HERE

Residents have until Sunday June the 28th to fill in the survey.

Please share this so other local residents can fill it in and ask why our council is not fully committed to ensuring that local residents get priority for council housing in the borough. 

The council is still dumping residents who have been here for years in Dagenham and Peterborough. 

A. Resident

WHAT 'PULL' DOES SWISS BASED HARRY 'BIMBO' HART HAVE IN RBKC?

The preferred John Simpson design

The Dame was about to do something on a planning team member with a very close relationship to Peter Bingle. 
Bingle is a friend of ex Cllr 'Danny Boys' Moylan and specialises in getting planning approvals on behalf of developer friends. 

The Dame decided to drop that for the moment and turn her attention to a couple of shadowy Swiss-based entrepreneurs. 
One goes by the name of Harry 'Bimbo' Hart and is the offspring of David Hart. 
Hart, liked to think he was some sort of James Bond and was enmeshed with the Tory Party of Margaret Thatcher's day. 
He was also a good friend of ex Kensington MP, Michael Portillo...
Hart Junior and his partner run over eighty companies from their Swiss eyrie and one of their assets, Avon House in Allen St is causing great distress amongst Kensington folk. 
Bizarre when you think Bimbo was once a Church Commissioner.

Like his papa, Bimbo likes to play around with Deep State organisations....read about it HERE

This planning application has been a tortured process with the site changing hands and now part of Bimbo's Melford Capital LLP.  
Melford has now created KYN- an "ultra-luxury" care home provider with, so far, no one to care for! 

The building was given permission in 2016 for a double basement contrary to RBKC policy as it was meant to include a neurological care centre. While the developers dropped this plan they still want to build this double basement despite this being a conservation area

Nearby residents have been misled on so many fronts by Bimbo and his friends and have very little confidence in the planning process and the committee. 
The planning officer, Sarah Gentry, seems well out of her depth.

The developers' PR company ran a public consultation based on a design by John Simpson Architects which gained good support. 
The design was then changed completely, adding significant mass with a new architect whilst claiming support from the consultation. 

The impact on light was assessed by their surveyors yet includes no overshadowing analysis. 
Any planning officer would have picked up on this and many residents will now have significant light reduction.

The revised proposal is for a massive monstrosity of a building quite unsuited to the area.

There are multiple issues with this scheme yet RBKC seems over-willing to help the Bimbo Hart and his partner: we have to ask why?

Residents have no objection to the redevelopment of the site into a care home with a single basement (unless there is a good reason for double basement) and in keeping with the environment. 
But an ultra-luxury care home for the profit of a politically connected and mysterious Swiss-based financial investor which will negatively affect many residents and stakeholders is not acceptable.

STOP PRESS!

Cllr Elnaghi will be Charing the new Adult Health and Social Care Committee on July 2nd .
Councillor Elnagi has never been to an Adult Health and Social Care Committee!

Should be an interesting watch ......

A HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND

Cllr Ian Henderson is perceived by all councillors as level headed and effective. 
This is especially true on matters relating to housing so it came as a surprise to all that he and Cllr Press had been relegated to the backbenches and kicked off the Housing and Planning committees
What extraordinary folly at a time when all focus should have been on a Labour response to RBKC Housing SPD-the most important housing document since Grenfell.
When the chair of the Housing Committee, Cllr Kasmin Ali was asked by a resident about the document he replied, "I will get my committee to look at it". 
He must have been embarrassed when told by the questioner that it was now statute in RBKC

Ali, one-time adviser to a Somalian president, waffled on in his election address,“housing is the top of everything, housing fit for human habitation.” 



What a bullshitter!

There was a similar lack of reaction from Cllr Bahktiar, Labour spokesman on planning( though in his case there were extenuating circumstances) or indeed from any other members of the planning committee...Emma Dent Coad, Sina Lari or Kasmin Ali


.

BORIS, THE SOFT PORN MAGNATE AND A PARODY OF A GOVERNMENT

A PM & a soft porn publisher

Here's our PM with the one time publisher of soft porn Asian Babes, Richard Desmond. 'Dirty Dick' is currently involved in an email relationship with Boris's other friend and Cabinet colleague, the seedy-looking and hapless, Robert Jenrick- and it's all about money. With people like Jenrick, it always is.

Mr & Mrs Jenrick

Jenrick is a 'person of interest' for residents of Notting Hill. 
He has just shattered their dream of defeating the developers of the monstrous Newcombe House.
You can read the bad news HERE




The Jenricks had their own little planning issue but unlike the residents of Notting Hill got it sorted to their great advantage HERE

Going way back to the Darius Guppy saga it's very clear our PM loves the company of very dodgy friends.

EARLS COURT SITE TO DOUBLE IN SIZE TO 40 ACRES

Hawkins Brown and Studio Egret West have won an international competition to replace Farrells as master planners of the vast Earls Court redevelopment project.

The 25-acre (10ha) site changed hands in December last year and the project was taken back to the drawing board.

New owners Delancey and Dutch pension fund manager APG said they want to almost double the size of the site to 40 acres.

COMING TO YOUR KENSINGTON FRONT ROOM SOON!

A Chelsea 'Front Room'

The Council's gruesome efforts to appear 'edgy' and 'street' so as to appeal to the North of the Borough just make it look ridiculous....no one is taken in for a moment.

It's as an unattractive as the 90 year old Dame wearing leather 'hotpants'

We have had Dizzy Lizzie looking terribly serious as she pontificates on Black Lives Matter.....

Now we have 'Cultural Supremo' Cllr Emma Will using taxpayer's dough to bring Notting Hill Carnival(sans the knifings etc) into our 'front rooms' as she quaintly calls them!

It's all the fault of Doc Quirk and his PR chappie who are both very Sarf East London and don't 'get' our grand ways!

RBKC’s culture supremo, Cllr Emma Will, said: “Kensington and Chelsea Council is committed in(sic?) giving logistical and financial support to turn alternative plans for carnival this year into reality. There is no reason why we cannot all bring the true spirit of Carnival into our own front rooms.”

Cllr Will in her Chelsea 'Front Room'

The Dame being an old parvenu snob cannot believe Emma has a 'front room'! 
The Dame is sure her old friend, Emma Dent Coad doesn't have one of these 'front rooms'!

What on earth could it be? We should be told.

The council’s director of public health, Houda Al Shariff, added: “Many events around the UK have found a digital or ‘own home’ alternative – it won’t be the same of course, but a Carnival in our own living rooms is something I would support.”

And what on earth has this to do with you, Mr Al Shariff? 

Get on with your work.

CLLR LINDSAY? THE DAME SAYS NO!

 
The Dame was looking for an accounts chappie to run her complicated financial affairs when up on Linked In popped Cllr David Lindsay.




Talk about using the Council to blow one's own dented and tarnished trumpet! 
According to Cllr Lindsay, the supposed cultural sea change post the Grenfell tragedy was more or less down to him!
One resident in the north countered his self promoting garbage by saying, " worse chairman ever; barked at and upset traumatised residents at last summer's admin meeting.
Oh, and what cultural change exactly do you claim responsibility for?"

The Dame decided not to shortlist this blowhard for the £350k a year position.

Click to be amazed!

Click to read Dave's panegyric

COUNCIL TAKES OVER POLICE!

click to enlarge

An Irritated and overtaxed resident has sent the Dame a letter from a Mr Stephen Brown who describes himself as Director for Public Protection. 
Mr xxxxxx always thought that it was the police who provided public protection: it seems the Council has usurped the role!
When will local government learn to stop inventing non jobs.
They moan about not having enough council tax revenue yet always seem to find money for pointless jobs of which this is one.

THE DAME DOES DEMOLITION

Beauty

The Royal Borough has had some colourful and dodgy leaders but none so rogueish as Nicholas Freeman- a name memorialised by his sycophantic followers with a civic award and the Freeman Suite at the Town Hall.

Beast

Freeman was an oddball in many ways.

In today's more censorious climate he would probably be the subject of police interest....but the past is schmarst .....

Saturnine 

Our Town Hall owes its hideous genesis to Freeman’s criminal act in wrecking the beautiful Victorian Italianate old Town Hall just days before it was to be listed.

Today, he would have been detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for such vandalism.

The site blood money allowed him to commission Sir Basil Spence to build that blot on the landscape....the Town Hall!

The brutalist windswept Town Hall sits inelegantly in the midst of historic and elegant Kensington. 

Ironically today’s Planning Department would have politely rejected it as ‘contextually inappropriate’ or, in layman’s language, ‘sticking out like a sore thumb’.

What has been noticeable in the days of the pandemic is how successfully the Council staff have coped with home working.

That begs the question as to whether we actually now need this waste of space.?

The Town Hall sits on a site of around four acres so in value terms...multi-billion pound

Let’s do a Nicholas Freeman and send in the wrecking ball and flatten this monument to the rotter’s ego and let the land be developed to provide much-needed housing – low cost and social. 

One of the Dame's good friends suggest a new utilitarian Town Hall.

How about near Grenfell Tower as a permanent reminder of what happens when petty little councillors get too big for their boots and forget who empowers them.

THICK AS THIEVES....

It was a proud moment for The Dame when she heard her ruthless campaign against the one time leader of K&C had cost him a much lusted after peerage. 

When the Dame found out about Sir 'Pooter' Cockell's extraordinarily greedy expense claiming she used every cunning artifice to ensure the gentlemen of the press exposed him. The net result was that Pooter got a K  and no chance of perching his fat behind on the red leather benches of 'not the other place' with its £370 a day tax free. 

Pooter was one of local government's true 'entrepreneurs' gathering as many profitable sinecures as he could...not bad for a man with no education but a great streak of opportunism.

Bob

Pooter

One of Pooter's great mates is the spherical Bob Neill, MP. They used to work together: the Dame is too indolent to find out if they still do. 

She hopes Pooter will be lending moral support to Bob as the Parliamentary Watchdog looks at some of Bob's very Kentish extramural activities...

"A former Conservative planning minister is under investigation by the Parliamentary watchdog for failing to declare his links to companies behind a luxury hotel development in his constituency, the Telegraph can reveal.

Sir Bob Neill did not disclose he was a paid consultant for a company involved in the planning application in a letter urging the council to approve it.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards launched the investigation in May after receiving a complaint about Sir Bob’s role in securing permission for the Royal Bell hotel redevelopment in Bromley, Kent."

LEADER DOES VOLTE-FACE UNDER PRESSURE FROM CHELSEA

It seems that the Council has come to its senses....
But why are outsiders giving advice on what is good for Chelsea?
Most odd....

RBKC has now decided to appoint a nominee of The Chelsea Society and a nominee of The Kensington Society to the Quality Review Panel to provide advice on new buildings and major alterations in the Borough.

This is a welcome development, which resulted from expressions of surprise and concern by both Societies at the lack of transparency and consultation by the Council in making appointments to the Panel.

RBKC responded by requesting a meeting on Zoom with The Chelsea Society, which was held on 11th June. It was attended by 41 people including the Leader of the Council, Cllr. Elizabeth Campbell,  the Lead-member for Planning, Cllr. Thalassites, and four other Councillors.

The Chelsea Society’s position is that a Panel established to advise the Council on architecture will, of course, have regard to the well-established principles of architecture applicable anywhere, but Chelsea is a special place, and we considered that the membership of the Panel was too heavily weighted toward architects.  We have had occasion more than once to express the view that a design proposed by an architect which might be an adornment to some other place, is quite wrong in Chelsea.

New buildings and major alterations will have a visual impact on Chelsea for many decades, and we are still living with some bad examples which the Council has permitted over the years. The greatest care is, therefore, necessary to ensure that their appearance is right not only for Chelsea but for the particular place in Chelsea where they are located.  This requires a “feel” for Chelsea which people who do not live in Chelsea cannot be expected to have, and it was for the very purpose of assisting the local authority on these matters that The Chelsea Society was established 93 years ago.

We were very concerned about the complete lack of any local representation on the panel. While it seemed to contain a good mix of skills, it is noteworthy that none of the members was based in the Royal Borough – they seem concentrated in Camden or Boroughs south of the river.

We noted that on the Hammersmith and Fulham Panel there are not only a number of local architects both large and small but also representatives of the Hammersmith and Fulham Societies.

The Chelsea Society considered that it should have been invited to nominate a member of the Panel when it was established, but we were not even consulted.  This implied a lack of respect for the Society and the thousand residents of Chelsea whom it represents. We did not think that the Coronavirus could be accepted as a reason for this, for if there was time to consider establishing the Panel at all, there was time to consult with the Society.

We did not find it acceptable that the matter might have been considered in a review of the Panel in September, whether or not the Panel had applications to consider in the meantime.

We gained the impression during the Zoom conference that Cllr. Thalassites thinks of the two great Amenity Societies of the Borough as just residents’ associations.........

A VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE TO KENSINGTON & CHELSEA RESIDENTS

Dear Member    The Chelsea Society has expressed its concern to RBKC about two matters: The failure to include a representative from The Chelsea Society and another from The Kensington Society in the Quality Review Panel which they have established to advise the Council on the architectural quality of new buildings and major alterations  See https://chelseasociety.org.uk/quality-review-panel/ and The failure of the Council to consult The Chelsea Society before deciding to carry out street works in Chelsea.  See https://chelseasociety.org.uk/street-works/ The Council has responded by requesting a Zoom meeting with The Chelsea Society, to be attended by Cllr. Elizabeth Campbell, Leader of RBKC and one of the Councillors for Royal Hospital Ward, and Cllr. Johnny Thalassites, Lead Member for Planning and Transport. The Society invites its members to participate in this meeting at 6.30pm on Thursday 11th June.  There will be a question and answer session. 1) To join Zoom Meeting by computer, click the link below: https://bain.zoom.us/j/96654084516?pwd=bXRzb01TczMzT0FrZEtJeFo0d204dz09 Then click "Open Zoom Meeting", "Join with Video", "Join with computer audio" and also "Test Speaker and Microphone". Meeting ID: 966 5408 4516 Password: 346152 2) To join by phone only (you will not see the speakers) ring +441314601196 and then dial 96654084516# and if you are asked for a password it is 346152. For those of you who have not used Zoom before, you can log in after 6 pm and will receive help in using basic controls. Best wishes James Thompson Chairman

SLAUGHTERING THOSE GOLDEN EGG LAYING GEESE

The pandemic has wreaked havoc within the Borough's small business community.
For reasons of cost and flexibility most use co-working offices to start and run their businesses.

In the south of the Royal Borough, there are just two such co-working spaces offering basic facilities at budget rents of around £300 a month. 
One, the  Chelsea based Refinery, has closed leaving more than thirty tenants 'officeless'; the other 21 Ellis St is now considering its options as it faces a massive Business Rates bill and other overheads.

The loss of these spaces will be a massive blow to the Borough's entrepreneurs. 
Without a business base, many startups will leave the Borough.
Does that matter? 

Yes, is the answer and here's an example of their importance.

Leconfield, now one of the Borough's major employers started life at 21 Ellis Street with just three employees....today, it employs over one hundred and thirty and through its downstream activities provides hundreds of jobs.
The Government shortsightedly gave a Business Rates holiday to retail, leisure and hospitality but ignored co-working spaces so essential to the vibrant economic life of the community.
https://saveourlocalcoworking.co.uk

WIN A WEEK ON THE DAME'S STEAM YACHT

We all have heard them....the supercar drivers and their wannabee emulators rending the air with the thunderous roar of their multiple exhaust pipes.
Most used to be from the Middle East but they have been joined by dimwits from the peripheries of London and the Home Counties. 
Imagine how their neighbours would react if forced to ensure this auditory torture.
The noise late at night is especially disturbing for the young and elderly.
The Dame is now inviting residents to take photographs of known offenders and submit them to her for consideration.

First up is this crystal-covered monster. 
When asked by an annoyed resident why she needed to disturb the peace by hard acceleration the idiot replied, "it was the car's fault!"