Carpenters Arms regulars say closure ‘will be the end for another community asset’

• SOMETIMES I wonder why I haven’t lost the will to live. Week in, week out, we read and hear about developers making a mockery of well-informed council decisions and wrecking social lives (‘Property firm shut our booming pub’, February 24).

There is still a ray of hope for the King’s Cross community while the planning inspector absorbs the evidence, but I find it so depressing that arrogant, insensitive, offshore companies like Mendoza feel comfortable with their disgusting approach to the law and citizens.

The council could not have made things clearer when it protected the whole of the Carpenters Arms building by declaring it an ACV (asset of community value) and when it firmly refused permission for the hostile plans to gentrify the pub and its upper floors.

But this did not stop the developer from pressing on regardless. For me, the last straw was the request for the planning inspector to  reschedule his site visit to fit around the tenants living in the pub’s function room. Mendoza has raised the bar for audacity to a spectacular level.

It could be argued that Mendoza’s agents are simply playing the game in regard to planning laws.  But let’s spare a thought for the real victims of this game and it becomes less funny. An entire community has been robbed of its meeting place. A trendy lock-up bar will never be a substitute for a proper, well-run community pub where the landlord treats the whole building as his home and the customers and adjoining shops as his friends and neighbours.

No matter how hard Mendoza’s agents try, they will never be able to sustain this building’s status as an ACV unless they reverse their anti-social conversion.

IAN SHACKLOCK
Monsell Road, N4