Jimmy Page hits a sour note with his other neighbour!
After long-running feud with Robbie Williams, Led Zeppelin star complains about next door’s plan for new garden trellis
HE was locked in a five-year row with Robbie Williams over the pop star’s plans to build a basement swimming pool next door.
Now rock legend Jimmy Page has made himself another enemy on the street after entering a planning war with his other neighbour over a trellis.
The Led Zeppelin guitarist, who has lived in his spectacular Grade I-listed home for nearly 50 years, formally objected to his millionaire tycoon neighbour’s plans to build the wooden lattice in his back garden.
Former Prudential chairman Sir Harvey McGrath, 67, who is said to be worth £100million, proposed a red cedar trellis ‘in a screen form’ on the three boundaries of the garden at his £13million home.
In response, Page, 75, who lives in the Gothic-style Tower House in Holland Park, west London, with girlfriend Scarlett Sabet, 30, fired off a letter through a specialist planning law firm, claiming his property ‘would be directly and adversely impacted’ – but his objection was shot down by the council.
The letter raised concerns about the trellis being fixed to his Grade I-listed garden wall, adding: ‘The application documents fail also to address heritage issues.’
The Tower House, built between 1875 and 1881, was designed by revered architect William Burges, who created Cardiff Castle’s Gothic interiors. The sprawling home is lavishly decorated with carved fireplaces, stained glass and ceramic tiling, and each room is designed with a theme in mind, such as ‘time’, ‘love’ and ‘the sea’.
The letter claimed the proposed trellis would cause ‘substantial harm’ to the house’s ‘special architectural or historical character’.
Page, who is thought to be worth £125million, bought the house for £350,000 in 1972 after the release of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, which featured the hit Stairway To Heaven. It has been estimated The Tower House would be worth at least £20million today.
Despite Page’s objections, planners at Royal Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council granted planning permission for the trellis on Monday.
But they reminded Sir Harvey that Page’s house is ‘Listed Grade I, which means that any development in its vicinity... must be sensitive to its importance and setting’. This means the trellis has to be positioned around one foot from the boundary wall of Page’s property and cannot exceed the height of any existing trellis.
It comes after Page’s five-year planning battle with pop star Williams, 45, appears to finally be nearing an end. The musicians reached a compromise when Williams was granted permission to build his underground pool on the condition that a ‘special meeting’ was held to discuss the plans.
It was also suggested that workers might have to only use hand tools to construct the basement at Grade II-listed, 47-room Woodland House, which Williams bought for £17.5million in 2013.
In an interview with the Daily Mail last year, Page described living between Sir Harvey and Williams as like being ‘caught in a vice’.
He has previously objected to another planning application by Sir Harvey to make his basement bigger, claiming the work could cause damage to ‘the high heritage value of the interior finishes to Tower House’.