A Brighton social club and café wants to fit an electric shutter to protect its shop front from people sleeping in its doorway.
The Cowley Club, in London Road, Brighton, said that staff regularly opened the doors to find human waste and drugs paraphernalia after people sheltered in the recessed doorway at night.
But Brighton and Hove City Council officials have published a report advising the council’s Planning Committee to refuse to grant planning permission for a shutter at a meeting next week.
The club said that it installed wooden boards on the shop front to protect the windows after a series of attacks on the venue.
Club secretary Ian Bros said that the club wanted the same treatment as Oxfam, in St James’s Street, which was granted planning permission for a roller shutter for its recessed doorway.
Mr Bros said: “All too often volunteers having to open up the premises have had to try to move rough-sleepers or, more frequently, their discarded bedding or other abandoned property before they could gain access to the front door of the club.
“Or they have had to call an ambulance because someone has collapsed in the doorway and is unable to move due to the consumption of drugs.
“We are also regularly confronted on arrival by pools of urine and even deposits of human faeces or discarded drug paraphernalia.
“Club users and café customers should not have to enter the building via a doorway that stinks of piss and our volunteers should not have to face the health hazards of repeatedly having to clean up human excreta or pick up discarded sharps.
“In addition, a significant number of our volunteers have a disability of one sort or another and are simply unable to take on such tasks, never mind be physically able to put up or take down the heavy plywood boards that we are so desperate to replace.”
The application states the club is not “insensitive” to rough sleepers even though it wants people out of the doorway.
Since installing the boards three years ago, the club has experienced little graffiti on its shop front.
The proposed electric roller shutter would be painted with grey graffiti-proof paint in a barbed wire design breaking up to free birds.
It would include wording related to the Cowley Club’s commitment “for a social system based on mutual aid and voluntary co-operation against all forms of oppression”.
The design is similar to the boards already in place.
A report to the Planning Committee said that the shutter would “harm the appearance of the building”.
It said: “The shutter would obscure the shop front and window display when down, creating an unsightly, passive appearance to the frontage, harming the visual amenity of the building and surrounding area and the vitality of the wider shopping street.
“Furthermore, the shutter housing would be poorly located and would fail to respect the architectural features of the shopfront resulting in an unsightly feature even when the roller shutter is retracted.”
The Cowley Club said that many shops along London Road had roller blinds and those with graffiti-style paintings did not experience tagging.
A neighbouring business has provided one of 23 letters of support although the council redacted the corroborative details on its website.
The business said: “We had similar troubles with the back of our shop until a security fence was erected and it is a much pleasanter environment for myself and volunteers to work in.
“I imagine the same would be true for the Cowley Club, which is purely staffed by volunteers who should not have to deal with cleaning up human waste before being able to open the premises.”
The Planning Committee is due to meet at 2pm on Wednesday 4 May to decide the matter. The meeting is scheduled to be webcast on the council’s website.
The homeless are a problem all over Brighton. We have had the same issues at Sussex Heights. It’s not becoming of a prestigious apartments block to have to remove homeless from the entrance in the mornings. The council do nothing to help. Where does our money go?
It goes on cycle lanes, confusing traffic layouts, and useless, expensive, vanity projects, while not forgetting to pay their staff to remain at home.
The price of inclusiveness and sanctuary. Nuff said ?
Walking around the Lanes area yesterday, I noticed a beggar (one who is frequently there), not only annoying passers by, but also pestering people eating at tables outside cafes and restaurants. I doubt if they will be in a hurry to eat there again.
The council and police need to get a grip. You don’t need to live amongst junkies in any other city close to here. They should be forced to take hostel places and fined and moved under the vagrancy act if they choose to blight the lives of other people like this
Some hostels won’t take them if they will not abide by the regulations regarding drugs, alcohol, smoking and anti-social behaviour.
The Planning Committee said that the shutter would “harm the appearance of the building”. Can we get a taxi for this homeless guy to go sleep in the doorway of people on the Planning Committee? Wonder if they will change their mind.
Shoddy “Journalism”
This article attributes a series of quotes to me that are in fact lifted from a collectively written document sent to B&H Council’s Planning Department as part of our planning application. I have never spoken to the journalist in question and the only contact that the Cowley Club has had with the publication was the exchange of an email with Ms Booker-Lewis in which it was requested that: “If anyone is speaking and has prepared a speech, I would like to have a copy in advance to check against delivery for the meeting follow up story.”
Given that I was in fact due to be giving the three minute presentation generously allotted to applicants speak at the Planning Committee meeting, I agreed to forward the text. However, that was before seeing this article and, given the shoddy journalism on display here, I personally will not be co-operating with the Brighton and Hove News until a full correction and apology has been published by them.
The planning application is a public legal document. It is clearly signed by Ian Bros as secretary of the Cowley Club. Here’s the IRL for anyone who wishes to check the facts rather than believe cheap and baseless insults.
https://planningapps.brighton-hove.gov.uk/online-applications/files/88AAF1D8870CA9A7935458521B5245FB/pdf/BH2022_00749-APPLICATION_FORM-18603976.pdf
There is a legal declaration on the final page of the application form in the link above which said: “Any facts stated are true and accurate and any opinions given are the genuine opinions of the person giving them.”
It is immediately followed by the signature box containing Mr Bros’s name.
The story does not say that Mr Bros was interviewed. It quotes properly and accurately from a supporting document that he enclosed with his application. Again, anyone can look at the link below to check the supporting document submitted by Mr Bros, which said: “Despite our desire to stop rough sleepers using our doorway, we would like to emphasise that we are not insensible to the city’s NFA population.”
https://planningapps.brighton-hove.gov.uk/online-applications/files/534062870E06C394DCF27608EA2C7B46/pdf/BH2022_00749-PLANNING_STATEMENT-18604056.pdf
Whatever spin Mr Bros may wish to place on it, the headline and story are an accurate reflection of his planning application as secretary of the Cowley Club.
Thank you for your interesting piece of sophistry. If, as you say, you had gone through the planning application you would have seen that I was acting as the agent for the application, not as the applicant itself (irrespective of my position as secretary of The Cowley Club Ltd.). The fact that I signed the application as an agent for the applicant (The Cowley Club Ltd.) does not make any opinions included in the documents submitted by me on behalf of the applicant legally attributable to me any more than it would if I had been a solicitor submitting documents as part of an application on the behalf of their client.
I reiterate that it is wholly wrong for you to attribute those quotes to me and any reasonable person reading the article would assume that they had in fact come directly from an in-person interview. To quote the IMPRESS Standards Code Section 1. Accuracy:
1.3. “Publishers must always distinguish clearly between statements of fact, conjecture and opinion.”
You have clearly failed to do that and have instead chosen to double down on your mistake.
Anyone who goes to the council’s planning portal – https://planningapps.brighton-hove.gov.uk/online-applications/ – can look at the application form for themselves and see that on page 2 you answered “No” in response to the question, “Are you an agent acting on behalf of the applicant?” On page 1 you give your name and the club’s name in the section headed “Applicant’s details”. There is no sophistry on our part. Our story reports information that you submitted on a public document and it makes clear that your comments were made in your capacity as the club secretary.
This is absolutely outrageous and a real shame. Used to really believe in the Cowley as a space that genuinely cared about communities and destroying hierarchies. Cleaning up the shop front is a small inconvenience compared to sleeping rough. It’s not a safety issue if the volunteers use common sense when clearing up. The anarchist response to something like this should be to fight structural inequalities that cause homelessness, not displace rough sleepers with these draconian measures.
I wont be going back to the Cowley until something is done about the current volunteers classist attitudes