AGM 2025 report

On 22 May, 71 members of the Society, as well as guests, attended the 58th Annual General Meeting of the Highgate Society which was held at St Michael’s School in North Road.  The formal business of the meeting was transacted first, including the presentation of the accounts by William Britain, which showed that the Society is in very good financial health under his stewardship as Treasurer. 

The Chair, Andrew Sulston, reported on an unusually busy and successful year, in which important work included coordinating community engagement on the ‘Dartmouth Park Healthy Neighbourhood’ proposals, which had eventually been ‘sent back to the drawing board’ by Camden, and arranging for community representation at the workshops about the proposed Highgate School developments, which had achieved some good results, but there was much more still to be done.  Educational, social and artistic activities were flourishing, as well as close involvement in the continuing campaign against the proposed 27-storey Archway Campus development.  The membership had been steadily increasing and was now at 1,400.  The Chair’s and the Treasurer’s reports will be published in the next edition of buzz magazine.

This was followed by an illustrated talk by Griff Rhys Jones, actor, writer and broadcaster, who among other roles is the President of Civic Voice, the national organisation for civic societies.  He spoke without notes for 45 minutes and threatened a further hour, but the deadline of 9pm had been reached. 

He described his day which had begun at 6am with Breakfast Television, then the Today programme where he had talked about the ten most endangered Victorian buildings.  Later he went to Liverpool Street Station, to discuss a proposed development which would involve the demolition of the current station, before his evening in Highgate. 

He described himself as a HIMBY – protecting the heritage in my back yard, and encouraged people to be NIMBYs, the important thing being for communities to show what they will do with buildings to be saved.  He praised the Kings Cross development for preserving its Victorian heritage, and Bury St Edmunds which had no large scale redevelopment and was better for it.  He was against zoning with some parts of the centres of cities being for shopping, some parts for offices, and so on.  Zoning requiring large scale demolition is not the future and the successful cities are those in which there are mixed uses so that the built heritage contributes to the quality of urban life.  This is a constant battle in which we all need to become and stay involved.

24.5.25