Harry upsets locals with plans to turn pub into a home

Harry Enfield is set for a run-in with the well-heeled residents of London’s Primrose Hill, after submitting plans to turn a pub into a luxury family house.

The comic brought the Queens Tavern in Primrose Hill last year and had planned to turn it into a restaurant. However, those plans fell through, and he now plans to covert the property into a £3million home, to the dismay of former locals.

He wrote a letter to neighbours, stressing his links to the area where he previously lived, and where his father was born.

He said: ‘We bought the pub with the idea that we might one day live in the top floors and let the bottom floors to a friend of ours who was keen to run it as an all-day restaurant. Sadly, he has now decided he thinks it is too small to make financial sense for him to take it on.’

He said there are lots of pubs nearby, so its loss would ‘not to be too great, the compensation being greater tranquility’.

But he added that if he didn’t win planning permission, he might look to find tenants to run the bar as a gastropub, but pointed out it was ‘a task that has so far proved to be not easy in these difficult times’.

Former landlord Tony Peters, who ran the pub for 32 years before it closed last summer, told the Camden New Journal, he was dismayed by the plans.

‘This is a great little street with a sense of community,’ he said. ‘People know each other and everyone would like it to remain a pub. It should not be changed into a house. It plays such an important role in the area: where are people going to meet, socialise, hold their celebrations, their wakes? McDonald’s?’

Published: 10 Jan 2013