Tate director objects to Hampstead redevelopment: Sir Nicholas Serota says demolition of former family home would be "overdevelopment"

Tate galleries director Sir Nicholas Serota has made a fresh bid to stop the demolition of his family’s former Hampstead home.

Its new owners have enlisted architects Sergison Bates to draw up plans for a larger, three-bedroom home built with a new arched entrance. However, Sir Nicholas, the Arts Council England chair, has appealed for the £2.9 million property to be protected, claiming proposed designs are an “example of overdevelopment”.

His family has not lived at the house for more than a decade but he clearly still feels passionately about it and has written to Camden council urging planners to refuse consent. He said his family had enjoyed the “scale and elegance” of a home designed by Ted Levy, the Sixties architect who built iconic modernist homes across north London.

Last year, he made a similar objection before the council blocked building work on an earlier scheme. The property was formerly owned by Serota’s late mother, Baroness Serota, a minister in Harold Wilson’s Sixties Labour government.

Planning officials are reviewing the designs after a consultation survey closed last week.