“A future London development that could house the first Apple Inc store in the City financial district has become the latest scheme caught up in a legal wrangle over neighbouring properties’ rights to sunlight,” Tom Bill reports for Reuters.
“The plot’s current owner, the City of London local authority, has asked its transport and policy committees to approve powers that would enable it to override laws that allow neighbours to stop developments that block their sunlight,” Bill reports. “More important is the economic benefit the scheme will bring to the area, the City planning officer and comptroller and City solicitor said in a report to the committees, which appears on the local authority’s website.”
Advertisement: Limited Time: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
Bill reports, “The proposed 10-storey development at 100 Cheapside has planning permission for 87,000 square feet of offices and 13,000 square feet of retail. U.S. developer Hines is in talks to buy the site for under 25 million pounds and Apple is interested in taking space there, a source close to the process told Reuters.”
Read more in the full article here.
It is not 100% clear if the “neighbours” are residential properties, or other commercial properties. It just says it’s in the financial district, but that doesn’t preclude apartments and condos.
If it’s residential, there’s a legitimate concern and I’d probably side with them.
If the neighbours are commercial, then I lean towards “too bad.” What kind of business operates in downtown London and expects to get sunlight at all?
What kind of person lives in downtown London and expects to get sunlight at all?
Sunlight? In London?
I was contracted by a neighborhood group to make an “artist’s rendition” of a proposed new building. Computer 3D was still pretty new at the time, and I took some area photos from a huge parking lot across from the empty lot where the new building would go. (If you’re thinking this was already a wide-open and somewhat under-developed city area, you’d be correct.) I also took views from either end of the street. The 3D model, built from blueprints, was properly set to scale and various views rendered. When the neighborhood group found the building was not quite as imposing as they thought—and actually a little shorter than several nearby buildings—the neighborhood rep asked me if there wasn’t something I could do to make the building uglier and more imposing? (Laundry hanging off the balconies of the condo complex, maybe throw in some barefoot hillbillies sleeping outside?)
If you tap ‘100 Cheapside, London’ into Goigle Maps and select StreetView, you can clearly see that sunlight is something only certain sides of the streets get, what with the multi-storey buildings all along both sides, something that anyone with passing knowledge of the UK’s capital city would be familiar with. These complainers are clearly “ ‘avin a laff”, as we sometimes say in these parts.
If they approve one of the Apple designs that are basically glass cubes, there won’t be any issues about the sunlight!
Just to be correct, engineering-wise, glass absorbs most infrared, and if it is 2 inch thick glass, you can bet it absorbs most all the infrared.
The headline is misleading. It’s a building in which there will be an Apple Store. So the outside isn’t glass. It’s a regular building. Still, I find it astonishing that they have a law preserving sunlight.
We have laws about “ancient lights” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light
(what’s a condo? 😉