Since 2022 Conservative administration, Harrow Council has produced several Supplementary Planning Documents (SPDs) – including four* recent ones – that raise troubling questions about both process and purpose. Chief among them are doubts about the value of ‘consultation’ and the extent to which public input genuinely shaped the final policies.
These SPDs are highly technical documents, requiring specialist knowledge, which only makes the role of public engagement more uncertain.
[SPDs are non-statutory documents that provide detailed guidance on specific issues (e.g. design guides, affordable housing requirements, developer contributions) and sit beneath the Core Strategy, the statutory part of the Local Plan setting out long-term spatial planning policies]
Harrow rightly prides itself on being a borough of diversity, where many communities live side by side. Yet the council’s approach to Conservation Areas and Article 4 Directions risks undermining that unity. By issuing separate SPDs tailored to individual neighbourhoods, the council may be reinforcing social divides rather than safeguarding shared heritage.
Affluent areas are effectively protected as “heritage enclaves,” while deprived neighbourhoods risk being frozen in place, unable to evolve or improve. This is not conservation – it is entrenchment.
Planning policy should indeed preserve what is historically or architecturally significant. But it must also address the living needs of residents today and help improve their quality of life. Above all, it should close the gap between communities, not widen it. Queensbury, South Harrow, Rayners Lane and Wealdstone are no less important than Harrow Weald, Pinner or Stanmore.
The Tall Buildings SPD illustrates the problem. The document seems uncertain whether it wants to prohibit or cautiously encourage tall buildings but by implication the rules allow taller developments in areas that already have tall buildings, where denser suburbs are opened up to more high-rise construction – while the more affluent parts of the borough, where tall buildings are rare, are safeguarded from such change. The result is not balanced growth, but selective protection that privileges some neighbourhoods while overburdening others.
Viewed this way, ‘conservation’ begins to look less like heritage protection and more like division. Different rules for different postcodes risk locking in inequality rather than celebrating diversity. Worse still, they create the perception that the council has shifted to the right – stoking exclusion, favouring privilege, and overlooking the borough’s real social and cultural fabric.
When planning dictates different futures for different communities, the outcome is not conservation but segregation. Harrow needs a planning vision that builds a shared sense of place – one borough, one community – rather than a patchwork of privilege, neglect, and exclusion.
It is time to rethink Conservation Areas and Article 4. Harrow-on-the-Hill, Hatch End, and Stanmore deserve recognition, but so too do every other neighbourhood. No area should be set apart by special rules. True conservation should bring people together, not drive them apart.
* Conservation Areas and Article 4
These SPDs are highly technical documents, requiring specialist knowledge, which only makes the role of public engagement more uncertain.
[SPDs are non-statutory documents that provide detailed guidance on specific issues (e.g. design guides, affordable housing requirements, developer contributions) and sit beneath the Core Strategy, the statutory part of the Local Plan setting out long-term spatial planning policies]
Harrow rightly prides itself on being a borough of diversity, where many communities live side by side. Yet the council’s approach to Conservation Areas and Article 4 Directions risks undermining that unity. By issuing separate SPDs tailored to individual neighbourhoods, the council may be reinforcing social divides rather than safeguarding shared heritage.
Affluent areas are effectively protected as “heritage enclaves,” while deprived neighbourhoods risk being frozen in place, unable to evolve or improve. This is not conservation – it is entrenchment.
Planning policy should indeed preserve what is historically or architecturally significant. But it must also address the living needs of residents today and help improve their quality of life. Above all, it should close the gap between communities, not widen it. Queensbury, South Harrow, Rayners Lane and Wealdstone are no less important than Harrow Weald, Pinner or Stanmore.
The Tall Buildings SPD illustrates the problem. The document seems uncertain whether it wants to prohibit or cautiously encourage tall buildings but by implication the rules allow taller developments in areas that already have tall buildings, where denser suburbs are opened up to more high-rise construction – while the more affluent parts of the borough, where tall buildings are rare, are safeguarded from such change. The result is not balanced growth, but selective protection that privileges some neighbourhoods while overburdening others.
Viewed this way, ‘conservation’ begins to look less like heritage protection and more like division. Different rules for different postcodes risk locking in inequality rather than celebrating diversity. Worse still, they create the perception that the council has shifted to the right – stoking exclusion, favouring privilege, and overlooking the borough’s real social and cultural fabric.
When planning dictates different futures for different communities, the outcome is not conservation but segregation. Harrow needs a planning vision that builds a shared sense of place – one borough, one community – rather than a patchwork of privilege, neglect, and exclusion.
It is time to rethink Conservation Areas and Article 4. Harrow-on-the-Hill, Hatch End, and Stanmore deserve recognition, but so too do every other neighbourhood. No area should be set apart by special rules. True conservation should bring people together, not drive them apart.
* Conservation Areas and Article 4
Harrow Monitoring Group 