Council’s brick pillar ends 40‑year parking arrangement, leaves residents with an £8,000 bill.
At 7 a.m. on 5 November, six contractors arrived at 4 St Gabriels Road in Willesden Green and began building a brick column in the middle of the communal driveway. The work was carried out by Brent Council, which also sent a bill of £8,222.40 to the owners of the four flats that share the space.
The residents, led by 69-year-old Steve McCormack, had never approved the structure and instantly described the action as an abuse of authority.
The driveway sits within the Mapesbury Conservation Area, a zone where any alteration must preserve the historic streetscape.
In the 1980s the Edwardian house was divided into four separate flats and the original driveway was widened, with planning consent, to create two parking bays. Over the following decades the two-car width functioned without incident, becoming an integral part of residents’ daily routine.
Background and planning constraints
In 2019 the flat owners repaired a cracked front wall and repaved the driveway, believing the work to be a routine refresh. The plan did not include a formal application for planning permission, a step the owners later termed “naïve”. Because the works increased the entrance gap to more than three metres and omitted the required amount of soft landscaping, they fell outside the limits set for the conservation area.
2019 repaving and missing permission
The redevelopment was carried out without consulting Brent Council’s planning department. Photographs taken before the works showed a modest driveway; after the repaving the new surface spanned a width that breached the three-metre threshold imposed on Mapesbury properties. The lack of shrubbery or grass, the so-called “soft landscaping”, further violated local guidelines.
Retrospective application refusal
When council officers flagged the breach, the owners submitted a retrospective planning application. The Planning Service rejected the request, citing the same deficiencies: excessive width and insufficient soft landscaping. The owners argued that the widened driveway had existed since the 1980s, but the authority maintained that the current configuration was a new, unauthorised alteration.
Enforcement notice and appeals
In August 2021 Brent Council issued an enforcement notice demanding that the driveway be altered to meet the three-metre limit and to add appropriate landscaping. The notice stated that non-compliance would be a criminal offence. The owners appealed to the Planning Inspectorate, asserting that the two-car arrangement had served the neighbourhood for four decades.
The Inspectorate dismissed the appeal in January 2023, upholding the council’s amended notice. The decision required the residents to install additional soft landscaping and to reduce the driveway width, with a compliance deadline of July 2023. No remedial work was undertaken, prompting the council to move directly to enforcement.
Pillar construction and resident response
On the morning of 5 November the contractors erected a brick pillar right in the centre of the driveway, effectively eliminating one of the two parking spaces. Steve McCormack described the action as “riding roughshod over considerations of natural justice, fairness and common sense”. He emphasised that the two spaces had been used independently for 40 years and that the pillar now prevented a car from passing behind the wall.
Neighbour Phillip echoed the frustration, noting that the council’s focus on a minor parking issue ignored broader planning violations in the borough. He argued that the driveway improvement had actually enhanced the street’s character and that there was no demonstrable harm to public amenity.
Brent Council defended the operation, stating that the unauthorised works had damaged the conservation area’s character and that an independent inspector agreed with the finding. The council clarified that the cost of the brick pillar and associated administrative fees would be borne entirely by the flat owners, with no expense passed to taxpayers. It also reiterated that ignoring an enforcement notice constitutes a criminal offence.
