The Regis Road recycling centre would be replaced – but there are environmental warnings against demolishing the retrofitted Holmes Road depots

THE Town Hall has been negotiating an exclusive deal with a company aiming to turn a large swathe of Kentish Town into London’s “film quarter” – with the movie industry’s biggest names potentially lured to NW5 with new studios and a “destination” venue, the New Journal can reveal.

The mini-Hollywood project could include the demolition of the Regis Road tip and the council-owned depots in Holmes Road, where the council recently spent £8million on retrofitting measures.

Full details are hidden in what are known as “pink papers” at the Town Hall – private documents designed to protect commercial sensitivity.

But it is understood that Camden has agreed provisional terms on a deal worth more than £110million with a big name investment company which is already working on other high profile redevelopment projects in the capital.

Behind closed doors, council chiefs have been attracted to the “film quarter” idea; it likes the use of “quarter” in labels, having embraced the so-called “knowledge quarter” around King’s Cross.

The New Journal has been told that the prospective buyer is big enough to attract the globe’s most important movie-makers and the site will include “stacked studios”.

There will also be broadcast TV studios, hospitality spaces and what has been described as “a destination exhibition centre”.

The deal will see refuse and recycling facilities replaced. A rough blueprint for 1,000 new homes, with a pledge to make half of them affordable, is also included.

Any scheme will still need planning consent and compulsory purchase orders for some of the wider site not owned by the council, but regeneration chief Councillor Danny Beales said this week that Camden needed to be looking at people living “more densely” in areas like Kentish Town in the future.

Cllr Danny Beales has said demolishing the depots cannot be taken off the table

Labour councillors this week rebuffed a “call-in” review on the deal after the Liberal Democrats – the official opposition at the Town Hall – and the Climate Emergency Camden group warned that retrofitting should come ahead of the prospect of demolition.

Councillor Tom Simon said Camden should be demanding that the retrofitted depot is not bulldozed as part of the scheme for environmental reasons. It has not been ruled either way whether it would be demolished but he said the strategy made it “possible if not likely”.

Cllr Simon said: “We thought: ‘Hang on, we’ve just spent all this money on making this building more efficient and yet now we’re thinking that it should be demolished before there’s been an opportunity for those carbon savings from the retrofit to really work out.”

Liberal Democrat councillor Tom Simon, the leader of the opposition, has questioned why recently retrofitted depots could now be bulldozed

Cllr Simon said that climate change concerns were even more important than housing, even if he believed they were both pressing issues for the Town Hall’s decision makers.

Another opponent, architect Tom Young, said that “all public scrutiny had been blocked” and that Camden were allowing “too many trade offs”, telling the committee: “Instead of outsourcing the town planning of Regis Road to a private developer, Camden should do it itself and keep the Kentish Town depots.”

He said Camden was “executing the business plan of a multinational company,” adding: “It’s time Camden took responsibility instead of handing the family silver and everything else to a private developer.”

But the panel, which has a majority of Labour backbenchers, voted to support the council’s existing approach.

Cllr Beales had told the meeting: “We’ve got an opportunity as a council to make the best use of our land to generate significant new housing, new jobs, better council facilities of all types than we currently have.

“So I don’t see why we would remove the Holmes Road depots from the masterplan.”

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