Press+-+Haringey+Independent+-+No+say+on+Wards+plan

=No say on Wards plan= Haringey Indepedent (Thursday 6th December 2007)

Your report on the campaign to save the former Wards Department Store building and the Latin American market at Seven Sisters quotes a spokesman for Grainger, the developer for the council's preferred scheme, as saying that it "had conducted a consultation with residents and traders" (Traders start petition to save their building', Haringey Independent, November 16).

The spokesman will know perfectly well that Grainger's so-called consultation was restricted to seeking comments on the three options for the treatment of the pavement area by the entrances to the Underground station. It asked no questions whatever about the two eight-storey tower blocks and the anonymous shopping mall that Grainger is proposing for the site, and which it clearly wanted residents to accept as given.

To describe its questionnaire as a full public consultation on the scheme is just ridiculous.

Elsewhere in your report, Councillor Kaushika Amin is reported as saying that while some people have signed the petition to save the former Wards Department Store building, "there are others who clearly believe this site needs to be redeveloped". But redevelopment should not mean the wholesale destruction of the existing architectural fabric and, in fact, the petition expressly calls for the building to be preserved and restored as part of the redevelopment.

The history of previous redevelopment projects shows that regeneration succeeds when it builds on what is already there, and that projects which ignore an area's history and culture in favour of razing everything and starting again deliver only dreary post-modernist blocks and low-quality McJobs.

Yet this is exactly the approach Haringey Council is taking, and if it thinks the resulting strip of betting shops and fast-food outlets really will provide the "landmark gateway" it says it wants for the area, then it clearly has no imagination whatever. Joseph Nicholas Secretary, Tottenham Civic Society