Plans to turn the historic Limehouse Library into a block of student flats have been approved by Labour councillors on Tower Hamlets Council’s Development Committee.
The library, gifted to the people of Limehouse in 1900, was shut down by a Labour-run council in 2003. Back then, the council recommended it should not be sold unless re-opened as a community facility.
But in 2012 Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman sold it off to a restaurant chain for a cut-down price. The chain submitted plans to turn the site into 67 student flats—and Tower Hamlets Labour councillors waved through the plans at a planning committee meeting on May 7th.
Limehouse’s Conservative councillor Craig Aston spoke in objection to the plans at the meeting. Commenting Cllr Aston said “In the last four years, Labour councillors on the council’s planning committee have approved tens of thousands of new houses in the south of the borough, with no provision for new schools, or doctors surgeries, or extra buses or DLR trains.
“Another 67 units may seem like a drop in the ocean, but it’s yet more over-development of our area with no thought given to infrastructure.”
Conservative candidate for Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Chris Wilford, said “Our borough’s development plan needs a thorough overhaul. We can’t go on dumping thousands of new housing units on our area without building the facilities we badly need. As your Mayor I would work for sensitive development in the right places, not dumping thousands of houses without thought.”