Broken Barnet: "A concept of place making, and the promotion of well being: the West Hendon Inquiry begins"

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"The Holiday Inn Brent Cross is placed in perhaps one of the least attractive locations imaginable for any hotel: surrounded on all sides, as it is, by a stranglehold of motorways, high rise flats, an ageing, brutalist style shopping centre, a small industrial estate - and an abandoned rubbish dump.

"The River Brent, once an idyllic retreat, and the favoured subject of pre- Raphaelite Victorian artists like Maddox Brown, now runs through an ecologically barren concrete conduit, full of rusting supermarket trolleys, and plastic bags, waiting for the long promised restoration accompanying yet another 'regeneration' scheme, and serving as another psycho-geographically perfect metaphor, perhaps, for Broken Barnet, where the preservation of environment, if not of community, must accompany the profiteering of property developers.

"Yes: to the Holiday Inn, then, yesterday, for the opening day of the West Hendon Housing Inquiry, instigated by the Secretary of State for the Department of Communities and Local Government, in order to hear objections to the compulsory purchase of residents homes, in the council owned estate, next to the Welsh Harp, before demolition makes way for a development of luxury housing by Barratts."