JUST before Christmas, on December 23, Kogarah Council approved a development application to demolish Halstead House. The house is considered to be the oldest in the Penshurst Heritage Conservation Area.
In its place there will be two Torrens title houses, each two storeys high and one with a secondary dwelling.
This has caused anger as many people believe the house in Penshurst Avenue should have been preserved as a heritage item.
Halstead House was designed and built by architect Charles Herbert Halstead.
He was the mayor of Kogarah from 1893 to 1894 and from 1908 to 1911.
Although the council had identified Halstead House as a heritage item back in 1994, it was removed from the list in 1999.
Efforts were made to list it again in 2004, but nothing came of it.
David Sant, a resident in the same street and owner of one of the Halstead houses, said that many people were convinced that by making this decision Kogarah Council had paved the way for more destruction of heritage in the conservation zone.
He believes this could have a domino effect, with other homeowners attempting to overturn their classifications in favour of similar demolition and development.
The Sant family bought their house in 1987, long before the area became a conservation zone, but Mr Sant is not keen to be living in a heritage house.
The stringent controls, he says, can be detrimental to house values.
However, he believes that if a council identifies and lists a heritage area, then it should be made consistent.
"Given the fact the council is destroying its own heritage related to previous mayors, why do they persist making residents of the Penshurst Conservation Zone adhere to strict heritage guidelines?"
DEVELOPMENTS
The Penshurst Conservation Area reflects two waves of development. The original large land grant holdings were divided to establish the Victorian Estate subdivisions (circa 1885) that emerged with the construction of the Illawarra railway line.
The second wave was the development of the ‘‘progressive suburbs’’ of the 1920s and ’30s, including McRaes Estate, which saw building covenants applied to development in the area and reflects the move of the middle class from the denser inner suburbs.
COUNCIL RESPONSE
A council spokesman said that independent assessments over the years had found Halstead House not worth keeping as it did not measure up to several criteria which marked the Penshurst Heritage Conservation Area.
Interference by owners before the area was recommended for heritage conservation had ruined the house’s imposing facade, which faced King Georges Road, by subdividing the land and building villas.
Consequently the original front of the house faces a fence with villas on the other side while the side of the house which faces Penshurst Avenue has no ‘‘streetscape integrity’’.
Also structural problems were too costly to rectify.
The spokesman said the council had no legal framework to compel homeowners to maintain old houses.
But a well-defined process in the heritage guidelines applied to everybody.
‘‘Everyone has to go through the same process — there are principles which are consistently applied.’’
