What memories does the Earl’s Court exhibition centre hold for you? Andrew took me to the Royal Tournament, Richard was a regular attender at the Boat Show and, once, to an opera when he was feeling distinctly ill. I think it was Turandot. Well, it is no more.
It opened in 1887, was re-built in 1937 in the iconic Art Deco style that you remember and has been demolished. The plan agreed by the, then Conservative, Hammersmith council and the Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, more than two years ago was to develop the site around the exhibition centre. By including car parks, some TfL land and buying up some council properties it is a seventy-seven acre site. Sir Terry Farrell won the job of delivering the dream, although many of the locals woke up and realised it’s a nightmare. Here is how Sir TF imagines it.
You are looking at 7,500 new homes, of which 1,500 will be “affordable” housing. (I’m guessing that means about £750,000 for a small flat.) The other 6,000 homes will be extremely expensive. There will be twenty-seven acres of garden squares, communal gardens and green space. This does not include the thirty-nine acres of Brompton Cemetery nearby.
It looks to me, and I don’t have a dog in the fight, that it is going to become a soulless, bland, drab bit of London (probably with wind tunnels that will blow umbrellas inside out) that will have shed all its character and look much the same as the developments in London’s docklands. There will be more chain restaurants, chain stores, supermarkets and fewer independent shops and eateries; high rents will see to this.
However, this is not the end of the story. Last year Hammersmith elected a Labour council. They are trying to wriggle out of the commitments entered into by their Conservative predecessors as far as they are able. This week there may be a Labour London mayor, Sadiq Khan. If elected, he has pledged to review the development plans. Shares in the developer, Capco, have fallen from £4.70 last summer to a low of £3.20 this year because of this uncertainty.
There is now a new worse nightmare for local residents. They may end up with a dogs’ dinner of a development where Terry Farrell’s plan is only partially built. This will be the worst of all worlds.
http://youtu.be/b6BpC1uL1Kk