Plans for a new Chinese embassy to be developed opposite the Tower of London have come up against opposition from the local council.
Tower Hamlets councillors voted unanimously to reject the scheme at Royal Mint Court at a meeting on Monday, December 9, arguing that it could present a security risk due to the size of the protests it could attract.
The council’s verdict was only advisory rather than binding, as the power to formally approve or reject the proposal has been taken out of their hands by the Government. Instead, Communities Secretary Angela Rayner will decide whether to grant permission or not, following a Planning Inspectorate hearing in the new year.
It comes after counter-terrorism officers in the Metropolitan Police objected to the plans, saying the embassy would cover “a substantial footprint impacting the immediate vicinity and potentially attracting significant protest activity”.
Speaking at Monday’s meeting, Met Police chief inspector Dave Hodges said: “In the event that more than a relatively small number of protesters attend the location, they will highly likely spill into the road.
“This iconic junction of Tower Hill and Tower Bridge Road has over 50,000 vehicle movements per day and is of critical importance to the Tower Bridge river crossing.
“It is a major arterial junction, where any demonstration would have a serious and significant effect to not only the local area, but also wider London.”
China bought Royal Mint Court six years ago but has so far failed to gain planning permission to build a new embassy there. If built, it is thought it would be the largest embassy in Britain and would be China’s largest diplomatic mission in Europe.
Similar plans were rejected by Tower Hamlets Council in 2022, claiming on similar grounds that the development would bring “adverse impacts on safety and security which would place increased strain on local police resources”.
In a letter attached to the new plans, the embassy’s agents argued that the 2022 rejection had been “without merit” and had “no basis in planning policy”.
Sue Hughes, chair of the Friends of St Katharine Dock, told Monday’s meeting that as well as the risk of protests causing a traffic “standstill” across much of east London, she was also worried about the closeness of residents’ homes to the site.
The plan proposes to make use of an existing service road running between the site and the boundary of a residential development on Cartwright Street.
“All the [service and delivery] vehicles going into the embassy drive up that road,” said Ms Hughes. “They’re going to put a security [air] lock, that the cars will have to go through, to be searched for explosive devices.
“Should they miss one of those devices, as the car comes out of the security [air] lock and travels further up the service road, it will be nine metres from the windows of the flats in St Mary Graces Court.”
She later added: “It keeps me awake at night, worrying what the residents are facing, particularly the two estates in Cartwright Street.”
Unmesh Desai, the area’s local London Assembly member, had also written to the council urging it to vote against the scheme.
The Labour member, who has represented Tower Hamlets at City Hall since 2016, said there had been “insufficient mitigation around the security and safety factors raised by local residents, who will have protest brought to their streets and their daily lives heavily disrupted”.
Many residents, he wrote, are also “rightly concerned about the reported use of Chinese diplomatic missions to act essentially as outposts of the Chinese police force abroad, policing Chinese-speaking communities across the globe and having a chilling effect on their ability to fully participate in democracy here and elsewhere”.
Granting permission for the project, he concluded, “could intimidate and silence” the borough’s diverse communities, “and all of us suffer as a result”.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy last month told the Times newspaper: “The submitted planning of new Chinese embassy premises has taken into full consideration the UK’s planning policy and guidance as well as opinions of all relevant parties. This is a high-quality development scheme.
“Host countries have the international obligation to support and facilitate the building of the premises of diplomatic missions.
“The Chinese embassy is committed to promoting the friendship between the Chinese and British people and the development of bilateral relations between the two countries. Building the new embassy at an early date would help us better perform such responsibilities.”
