"Richard J." wrote in message
. ..
For those interested in more detail of the Great Portland Street case,
there is a .pdf file at
http://tinyurl.com/s7m6u . English Heritage supported the application
but the 20th Century Society objected. (Some of the tiles date from the
1920s.)

My interest in this area is as a member of an ecclesiatical Listed Buildings
Advisory Committee (which takes the place of the local authority under
Ecclesiastical Exemption), so my knowledge is not of railways in particular.

However, if an application like this had come before our committee there is
no way we would have thought of considering this without a site visit.

It is often the case that an amentity society has more specialist knowledge
than a hard pressed relatively junior EH case worker.

When it came back to the committee we decided to refuse the
application.

As it is now not possible to put the original tiles back, this
normally means that whoever was responsible for removing them gets
prosecuted for damaging a listed building without permission.

And how would that help the travelling public - your electors? The
application was actually trying to recreate the original look of the
tiling, which is currently a mixture of original vitreous enamel and
later ceramic tiles, some quite modern. It would revitalise a "tired
public transport facility" in the words of your officers. Your decision
appears vindictive to me. What do you actually want LU and Metronet to
do now?

Helping the travelling public is irrelevant in this in stance. the purpose
of Listed Building control is protect Listed Buildings from inappropriate
changes. In this case the kind of tiling has no effect upon the use of the
building. The rules about not carrying out work without consent apply just
as much as to whether the work was "accidentally" or deliberately done.
Having read the file attached, I would think that a refusal was not
unjustified regardless of the issue of the work having been done.

Michael