rampART losses possesion case but buys two more weeks

20.12.2007
Today the ram­pART social cen­tre lost in court against a claim for pos­ses­sion. A pos­ses­sion order will now be grant­ed although not until the 3rd Jan 2008.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE NEWS ALERTS ABOUT LONDON SOCIAL CENTRES?
Text ‘fol­low lon­don­scn’ to 07624801423 then reply with a name as instruct­ed.

If you are inter­est­ed in mak­ing sure there are new social cen­tres to fill the void, please come along to the meet­ing on the 6th. (more details clos­er to the time).

In the mean­time, in their last newslet­ter, the ram­pART col­lec­tive made a call out for help sort­ing out RAMpart2 (toward bot­tom below)…

The whole out of the blue evic­tion threat smacks of a vin­dic­tive puni­tive reac­tion to the cam­paign of objec­tion against the pro­posed demo­li­tion of the hous­es next to the social cen­ter. It turns out that the so-called new own­ers of the hous­es are in fact a whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of the ‘pre­vi­ous own­er’, the Ram­part Trust Co Ltd that still owns the ware­house which the social cen­ter occu­pies. Even though there is no plan­ning per­mis­sion in place or applied for in rela­tion to the social cen­tre, they claim that they intend to start demo­li­tion in Jan/Feb 2008. Obvi­ous­ly this is impos­si­ble and they know it, so their attempt to have us evict­ed is not real­ly because of any impend­ing work in the new year.

Speak­ing of plan­ning, it is still pos­si­ble to lodge objec­tions against the pro­posed new hous­es on the site of the exist­ing hous­es. The offi­cer deal­ing with the case is cur­rent­ly on leave and so the con­sul­ta­tion peri­od has appar­ent­ly not been closed. If you’ve not yet writ­ten and espe­cial­ly if your address is one in Tow­er­ham­lets, then please write a let­ter per­haps object­ing to the pro­pos­al on the grounds that it involved a demo­li­tion inside the con­ser­va­tion zone and the new con­struc­tion will total­ly change the char­ac­ter of this piece of east end her­itage. You might also men­tion that the own­er is on record as plan­ning to make an appli­ca­tion relat­ing to the build­ing next door and there­fore the devel­op­ment should be con­sid­ered as a whole to real­ly under­stand the visu­al impact that the changes cur­rent­ly pro­posed might have.

As well as pro­vid­ing your name and address, you need to clear­ly spec­i­fy in the sub­ject the appli­ca­tion num­ber PA/07/02707 and the fact that the let­ter is for OBJECTION (eg. sub­ject : Objec­tion to Appli­ca­tion PA/07/02707 — 7–11a Ram­part Street)

All the objec­tion let­ter can be sent to Ben­son Olaseni, who will cir­cu­late the let­ter to Simon Ryan the case offi­cer.

Here is the email : benson.olaseni@towerhamlets.gov.uk

You might be inter­est­ed to know that the solic­i­tors work­ing for the own­er in their claim to have us evict­ed are Brech­er Solic­i­tors who are at Heron Place, 3 George Street, Lon­don ( admin@brecher.co.uk, 02075631000) and give that address as the care of address for the co-claimants, the Ram­part Trust Com­pa­ny Ltd (owned by Mr Wolfe) and RMO Devel­op­ments Ltd (owned by Ram­part Trust Co. Ltd)

While they keep their address­es off the claim, an inter­net search pro­vides the fol­low­ing info.

RAMPART TRUST CO LIMITED (Reg­is­tered No. 00394626)
27 NORRICE LEA, LONDON, N2 0RD

Rmo Devel­op­ments Ltd. (Reg­is­tra­tion Num­ber: 6183351)
Mow­bray House, 58/70 Edg­ware Way
Edg­ware Mid­dle­sex HA8 8DJ

A lit­tle over a year ago, a prop­er­ty com­pa­ny sent some­body called Richard Sel­by to vis­it the build­ings with Mr Wolfe, the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the Ram­part Trust — appar­ent­ly to show a financier around for the pur­pos­es of a val­u­a­tion. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly this Her­itage Group (020 8958 0000 info@heritagegroup.co.uk) actu­al­ly shares the same address as RMO Devel­op­ments Ltd.

The agent act­ing for the own­er in all deal­ings relat­ing to the pro­posed devel­op­ments is Alan Camp Archi­tects ( +44 (0)20 7593 1000 mail@alancamp.com 88 Union Street Lon­don SE1 0NW). They’ve also had the involve­ment of Miller Prop­er­ty Con­sul­tants (17 Hog­a­rth Avenue, Brent­wood, Essex CM15 8BE 01277 233 100 / 07957 544 007 advice@millerproperty.co.uk).

I’m sure that in some coun­tries there would be hordes of angry direct action anar­chist types and cyber hack­ers caus­ing obstruc­tion and dis­rup­tion to the evil ones but here things are usu­al­ly done dif­fer­ent­ly. We are mak­ing a call out for the fol­low­ing…

Offers of vans and dri­vers for trans­port when we have to move out.

Ideas and offers of stor­age space for the resources in the ram­pART

Noti­fi­ca­tion of emp­ties for future new social cen­tres

Mobile phone num­bers of those will­ing to drop every­thing to come defend the space.

Vol­un­teers for peo­ple to rec­cy and access short­list­ed build­ings

Mobile num­bers of peo­ple up for ini­tial­ly hold­ing down a new­ly opened build­ing.

A signup sheet of those up for help­ing clean up and fix up such a build­ing.

A list of those peo­ple either want­i­ng to act as live in ‘care tak­ers’ or those up for being on an occu­pa­tion rota.

email ram­part at mutu­alaid dot org

We are also organ­is­ing a meet­ing which aims to breath new life into open­ing not just one new space to replace the ram­pART but ini­ti­ate a lon­don social cen­tres col­lec­tive which would try to ensure that there are plen­ty of social cen­tres, prefer­able through­out Lon­don on an ongo­ing basis.

It will take place 2pm Sun­day 6th Jan 08
please pass the word and come along if this inter­ests you.