Brent Civic Centre, or Quintain billboard?

This weekend (22 and 23 September) it’s the annual London “Open House” *. One of the buildings you can visit and tour as part of this event is Brent Civic Centre, but if you rely on the outside view of the building shown on their website, you may be in for a disappointment. 

 

The reality of the view, as shown by this photograph taken by a local resident earlier this week, and shared with me (thank you), is rather different. Parts of Brent’s highly praised Civic HQ may not be the most picturesque architecturally, but do they really need to be covered up with a huge advertisement?

The advertisement, for Quintain’s Tipi Rental flats, makes a striking addition to the area, but is this what public buildings are meant to be for? For some reason, it makes me think of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Is that an appropriate image for our Civic Centre to project?

You may, like me, wonder how this use of a prominent Wembley Park landmark was allowed to happen. The answer lies in application no. 17/4177, which was dealt with by Brent’s Planning Officers, not its Planning Committee, in October 2017. This was an application for advertising consent, for the ‘installation of a non-iIlluminated advertisement banner to the side elevation of the Brent Civic Centre.’

The application drawings showed that the proposed banner would be 30.25 metres high and 9.45 metres wide. They also included an elevation drawing, showing what the proposed banner advertisement would look like:-

 

I have researched the law on advertising consent recently, in connection with the adverts which have covered the tile murals in the Bobby Moore Bridge subway, at the Wembley Park Station end of Olympic Way, since 2013. The law is set out in the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007.  Regulation 3 says that:

By inviting visitors to the Civic Centre for Open House week-end, Brent Council would appear to claim that the building is a feature of, at least, architectural interest, but this does not seem to have carried much weight when it exercised its powers ‘in the interests of amenity’.

That does not come as a surprise to me, however, as when it considered a similar application LINK , it failed to take into account the historic and cultural interest of the tile murals, a major piece of public art welcoming visitors to Wembley Park, which it allowed to be covered with adverts! I may write more on that subject, another time.

The decision letter of 20 October 2017 on application 17/4177, was addressed to a Mr Welbourne of Leeds (who I presume was acting as agent for Quintain) and signed by Brent’s Head of Planning. It granted consent for an advertising banner on the side of the Civic Centre for a period of 5 years. The reasons for giving consent were:

Brent’s Development Management Policies (and)
Council’s Supplementary Planning Guidance 8.’

I have not checked through all of those planning policies, so can’t say whether or not I agree!

You may think that at least Brent Council is getting some income from allowing this advert to be displayed on the side of the Civic Centre. But perhaps not. I have heard (unofficially) that the part of the building with the advert attached actually belongs to Quintain, as part of the deal with Brent for building the Civic Centre. Can anyone confirm whether that is true or not? Is it our Civic Centre, or just a Quintain billboard?