The State Built A Secure Room Above A Shoe Shop. The Lease Explains Why.

MARTLEBURY, England — Appendix C is three pages long. On page two, under Design Criteria, it asks for a sound reduction index of Rw 62 dB between one second-floor room and the party wall, and then says what the figure is for: "sufficient to prevent intelligible speech transmission at the party wall."

The party wall is shared with a bakery.

The room is above a shoe shop, on the high street of a market town of 11,400 people. Appendix F, the electrical schedule, itemises copper mesh bonded to six surfaces, a filtered mains supply and a single-point earth. Nobody leaked any of this. It has sat on a district council's planning portal since March 2024, because planning law required it to.

What we were looking for instead

Our correspondent was reading Wenloe District Council's weekly list for a story about a supermarket delivery bay.

Application 24/01188/FUL is a rooftop plant enclosure at 12–14 Shipgate Street. Four condensers and an acoustic louvre. Forty-one pages. The kind of application an officer approves on a Thursday without reading past the front sheet.

He read appendix C because it was short.

What is in the file

An acoustic report by Harnwell Acoustics, commissioned by the applicant, assessing the plant against its neighbours — and, because the plant serves one particular room, describing that room in order to size the plant.

Rw 62 dB is not a comfort figure. A separating wall built to that standard runs to roughly twice the mass of the party wall it is set against, and the report gives its reason in the sentence quoted above.

Appendix F is the electrical schedule. Copper mesh to floor, ceiling and four walls, bonded and continuous. A mains filter specified at 100 dB attenuation from 10 kHz to 1 GHz. One earth conductor, one termination, no second path to ground.

That is a screened room. There is nothing else it is.

The lease

HM Land Registry sells the register of any registered title in England for £3. Four documents cost us £12.

The second floor of 12–14 Shipgate Street is held on a lease granted in 2017 to a body corporate named on the government's own published list of departmental agencies. The rent is £58,400 a year. The term is fifteen years, with tenant's breaks at years three and six. Neither was taken.

The department described the arrangement internally as a three-year one. It is in year nine.

The other tenants are Corrie & Vane, a letting agency, on the first floor, and Pallister's, which has sold shoes on the ground floor since 1974.

Why it is there

The department sold its regional building in 2017. The replacement was scheduled for 2023, deferred, and cancelled in 2022. In between, a function had to sit somewhere.

The 2017 options appraisal — nine of its fourteen pages released to us — compares four choices. A temporary fit-out inside the government estate came out £1.1m more expensive across the term than the high-street lease, most of it in decant and reinstatement.

So the answer to why is it above a shoe shop is: because in 2017 that was the cheaper of two poor options, and nobody has since been required to decide again.

Three days on Shipgate Street

We watched the street door — one door, serving all three floors — from 07:00 to 19:00 on three consecutive weekdays in June.

Eleven different people used it.

Nine of them work in the shoe shop. One was a courier with a parcel for the letting agency. One was the letting agency's Tuesday cleaner.

We do not conclude that the second floor is empty. We watched a door for thirty-six hours in June and counted eleven people, and we have printed the count rather than the impression it left.

The council's answer, which is better than ours

Dilys Corrigan-Mbatha runs development management at Wenloe. She was not pleased with us, and her objection stands up.

"There is no national-security exemption in the planning acts," she said. "There is a form. Nobody filled it in."

She went on. "You have described us as having published a secret. We published an application. The applicant's own consultants wrote down what the room is for, in their own document, and sent it to us with no restriction on it at all. We are not permitted to guess which of forty-one pages a government department would prefer we redacted, and I would not want to work at a council that guessed."

She also pointed out that Wenloe did not put the acoustic report next to the lease. We did.

What this desk takes from it

Not that the state hid a room above a shoe shop. The state rents a room above a shoe shop, at a rent recorded in a public register, in a building whose specification it published itself by not asking not to.

The duller fact is the load-bearing one. A department sold a building against a delivery date that another part of government later cancelled, and the bridge became the road.

Somewhere there is an official whose predecessor's predecessor signed a fifteen-year lease with breaks at years three and six, who has taken neither, who has done nothing wrong, and who will be there in year fifteen.