Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum

Neighbourhood Plans, recently introduced in the Localism Act, are designed to give local people a much greater ability to decide the future of the places where they live and work. This leaflet gives more information about the Neighbourhood Planning process for Kentish Town. Over the next 3 days this Neighbourhood Planning Event will identify your ideas for Kentish Town. The aim in the long term is to produce a “Development Plan” for Kentish Town that will become a statutory planning document once it has been accepted by Camden Council. Anyone wishing to carry out development within the boundary of the Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum area will be required by law to follow the aims and ambitions of the Plan.

The first main Neighbourhood Planning event will take place over the next 3 days and will be facilitated by The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment that is providing support to the Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum under a scheme funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government. As part of this process, you have been invited to attend two public sessions: Stage 1 on Tuesday 3^rd July at 6.30pm and Stage 2 on Thursday 5^th July at 6.45pm.

The Prince’s Foundation and Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum will also hold a Stakeholder Day on Wednesday 4^th July. This will involve representatives of various community groups, Kentish Town councillors and senior officers from The London Borough of Camden, relevant landowners, and technical advisers. They will look in more detail at the issues and aspirations identified for Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum at the meeting of Tuesday 3^rd July, and how these can be translated into proposals for change. These proposals will be presented on the evening of Thursday 5^th July.

The findings that will be presented on Thursday evening are the continuation of a consultation with people who live and work in Kentish Town. There will be a lot more to do, including further consultations before Kentish Town Neighbourhood Forum is able to finalize the Neighbourhood Plan.

We hope that you find the evening sessions on Tuesday and Thursday interesting and informative. Your views and contributions are extremely important to enable the drawing up of a Kentish Town Neighbourhood Plan.

If you have not done so, please register when you attend the public sessions or email your name, address and phone number to secretaryatktnf@yahoo.co.uk.

As a step towards forming a Neighbourhood Plan we held a series of walkabouts in April. We divided the Forum Area into 4 and repeated the walks 4 times over a weekend. The aim of the walkabouts was so that all of us could look closely at the Forum area – to see where there might be suitable sites for development, open spaces and buildings that we want to be retained and Locally Listed, and places that could be improved. There was a Leader for all of the 16 walks and the Leaders walked the areas in groups beforehand to plot out the routes and to note down places of special interest. It had been raining almost non-stop for days and the weather forecast for the weekend was dire. By some miracle the sun shone all weekend until the last quarter of an hour on the Sunday. Over 70 people took part and everyone enjoyed it hugely. We were all amazed about how, even in areas we thought we knew very well, we saw things we had never noticed before. Walkers were given record sheets and these resulted in the map you can see on the website under Neighbourhood Plan Area.

A New Plan for Kentish Town

A Weekend Of Kentish Town Walkabouts: 21 & 22 April 2012