The Officers' Report
We now come to March 4, 1959. A Report an the Monico site was submitted on that date to the Town Planning Committee of the LCC by a group consisting of four Council Officers—the Valuer. the Architect, the Chief Engineer and the Solicitor. It declared that the close co-operation between the Council and the developers had, as asked for, been maintained, and put forward certain con- ditions on which final planning approval might be given. Before discussing the conditions on which it was given, however, it will be as well to throw a little limelight on two of the most curious and disturbing features of this whole affair. First, between the outline permission (March, 1957) and final conditional permission (March, 1959), the tip of the triangle-5,472 square feet of the site immediately adjacent to the Circus—was offered to the Council at the remarkably low cost of £80,000, provided that these 5,472 square feet were allowed to count for plot-ratio (even though they were not to be built on, and indeed were to become part of the roadway). If the area was not allowed to count for plot-ratio, the cost to the Council was to be £180,000. To put it crudely, the cost to the London County Council of enforcing its own regulations was to be exactly €100,000. The Officers' Report, on this point, made it clear that the Council would buy at the lower figure and stretch a point.
Second, the Officers' Report raised the question of car-parking facilities for the new building, which it insisted must be adequate. The figure of 100 cars was arrived at (in view of the vast range of functions the new building was to have, includ- ing restaurants, exhibition halls and assembly rooms, this might seem far too few, but the LCC was apparently satisfied with it). There was no provision for a car park anywhere in the proposed building, so to comply with this provision the de- velopers had bought Moon's Garage in Denman Street (behind the site). This already garages cars, but, by discontinuing all the valuable servicing facilities at present provided by this large public garage, space for some fifty extra cars, it is Claimed, can be found; the rest of the required extra car space will be in the top two floors of the building, at present not used for cars at all. The lease held by the present occupant of those two floors (a printer) does not expire until 1971, how- ever, and at the time the Council was formally offered the final approval to pass, it had been impossible for the developers to get him to agree to go earlier. This had not, apparently, worried the LCC officials who had compiled this strange Report, however; nor, presumably, had the ob- vious and well-founded objection by the Commis- sioner of Police to the very principle of having a ear park entirely divorced from the building it was supposed to serve. Nor, it seems, did the fact that, Denman Street being one-way, it would be necessary for a car, having deposited passengers
at the main entrance, to go right round the whole of it, via the Circus, in order to get into the garage at all.
Strangest of all the items in this Report, how- ever, was the apparently complete abandonment of the Council's comprehensive scheme—or at any rate that part of it providing for pedestrian circulation at first-floor level, connecting all the new buildings in the Circus, without which the whole plan must become a dead letter. The Cotton group had refused to participate, want- ing its ground-floor shops, and discussions with other potential developers had, it seemed, produced an impression that they would not care for it either. It was therefore coolly abandoned. And on top of this, the Report cheerfully rejected the main objection that the Royal Fine Art Commission had made to the proposed building (in February), the objection being to the hideous 'slabs' of advertising on windowless walls—in other words, the building of an advertisement hoarding 172 feet high. (The Council's other objection—to the dreadful mas- sing of the lower 'podium' of the building—was `met' by the Council's insisting that the podium be a few feet lower, which as far as one can see has had only the melancholy result of ensuring that a building which was appallingly badly pro- portioned to start with is now even more so.)
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