The Abbey Road recording studios could be listed within a week as part of a move by English Heritage to ensure that they are not turned into flats.
Currently the building has a value of x.
By listing the building so as to remove possible uses the value is now x minus something.
It must be x minus otherwise the listing would not be being sought to exclude certain possible uses. If the uses being exluded were not higher value than the uses still allowed there would be no need for the listing to exclude them, would there?
That difference between x and x minus something is the amount that is being stolen by bureaucratic fiat from the current owners.
You might like those current owners, you might not: not all that many have much sympathy for Guy Hands this is true. But theft is theft, stealing heroin from a junkie is theft just as much as raping a prostitute is rape.
If you, the National Trust or anyone else wants to make sure that Abbey Road isn\’t turned into flats then stump up your money, buy the place and make sure of it. But don\’t steal the property of others through manipulation of the law.
Theft really is theft.
Not qite outright theft, perhaps. Did the current owner buy it WITH planning permission? In which case retrospective listing without compensation is theft. If he is seeeking consent in the normal run of things, i.e. to change the use from unecononic to economic, then listing is a shot across his bow and he will (may?) be able to find some use within the listing. If he paid a price with some element of ‘hope value’, well, he may have his hopes dashed. That’s a gamble lost.
Actually Nick, they were *originally* apartments, which were converted into a studio by EMI (or rather its earlier precursor) in 1931.
Thanks for the heads up! If this is the case, the ‘studio use’ might be considered temporary and a reversion to residential is long over-due?
And what do English Heritage or whoever they are want done with the building? You can bet “recording studio” is not amongst their plans. The buggers just want to turn it into yet another pointless museum, funded by the taxpayer and visited by a tiny number of tourists per annum.
I have a great respect for history and believe in preserving the important parts of it, but one of the great lessons we seem to forget is that we only got to where we are by changing stuff. Forests in England became fields, flats in Abbey Road became a record factory.
If everything in Britain is preserved as a museum nothing will ever develop and in a hundred years the countr will be nothing but a shabby tourist trap for people bored of Eurodisney..
A bit like declaring a building now has an LVT tax of X+Y instead of X, forcing the owner to sell at a lower price that factors in the higher tax rate.