Pimlico Resident Takes Council to Court Over Montenegro Embassy Next Door

The conversion of a five-bedroom family home in Pimlico, central London, into the embassy of Montenegro has set off a neighbourhood dispute that has now reached a high court judge.

Trouble first surfaced this spring in submissions to the council. One resident said the embassy's flagpole and flag "stick out like a sore thumb" among the Grade II-listed homes of Cambridge Street. Another called the red and gold flag "gaudy" and said the embassy was "out of keeping with the quietly dignified" late-Regency frontages designed by Thomas Cubitt.

Some critics were annoyed that no planning application had been made before the flagpole and plaque went up. They were partly soothed when the chargé d'affaires of the west Balkans state hosted a drinks party. "Perhaps it would have been diplomatic to have done that at the start," one resident remarked drily.

Not everyone was won over. Diana Simpson, 35, a Stanford graduate who lives with her parents next door, is suing Westminster city council and is applying for judicial review and potential damages. She argues that when the embassy belatedly sought permission for its change of use and flagpole, the council failed to consider the effect on her mental health of having Montenegro, a country that has had recent scrapes with Russia, as a neighbour.

Simpson, the daughter of a former US diplomat, has lived on the street for more than three decades. She receives disability benefits after being diagnosed with clinical anxiety, long Covid and a functional neurological disorder. In her statement of grounds she says her nights are regularly disrupted and that she often feels the need to sleep somewhere other than her lifelong bedroom. She described fearing an intruder from the embassy after hearing a creak, while knowing the response is mostly irrational.

Citing breaches of the human rights and equality acts, she said she has considered whether it "remains tenable" to stay in the house, and that leaving would take her from a "local tight-knit community". She told the Guardian she was confident in her case, which alleges the council ignored her conditions, acted irrationally and ran a flawed consultation with a closed mind after the Foreign Office gave its permission.

Westminster city council denies the allegations. Its defence states: "There is no plausible interference with the claimant's home or her private and family life." The council is seeking summary judgment without a hearing, and the case is before Justice Mould.

The case is unusual, but it points to a more common clash between smaller countries and residents of affluent London streets. Many lower-tier states want to be near major powers in areas such as Belgravia, South Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair, but without paying comparable rents. Turkmenistan recently opened an embassy in an adapted family home on Victoria Road in Kensington, 1.4 miles from France's embassy opposite the Natural History Museum.

That move also drew complaints. One local told a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea consultation she could not understand the lack of courtesy shown to neighbours. Approached later, she said the Turkmen staff had turned out to be "actually quite quiet" and there had been no problems "so far".

North Korea has kept an embassy for two decades in a seven-bedroom 1920s home off the A406 in Ealing, west London. Colin Flood, a retired solicitor who lives two doors away, said they never hear a peep from the occupants.