London rant
RIP the Chelsea Barracks plan
The one sure thing about trying to define London is that it will always defy that definition. London is everything because it never remains static. It really is all things to everyone.
I was thinking about this when I was listening to the furore over Prince Charles’ interference in the forthcoming plans by Lord Rodgers for the Chelsea Barracks site. The originally agreed plans for a modern development including houses and commercial premises were withdrawn after Prince Charles had made it clear that he considered the plans to “not be in keeping with the area”.
Not a theme park
Now, aside from the question of the planning process and that it seems that Feudal England is alive and well in SW7, I thought that part of London’s charm is the lack of rigid stylistic barriers. Ancient and modern live side by side, albeit often in an uneasy partnership. That tension is what makes London so dynamic. It is neither theme park nor wrecking ball.
Charles has shown that his vision of London and Britain is a mythical thing; rigid and narrow and exclusive. It is architecture stuck in some mythical bygone era allied to the imagination of a fifties newsreel. At London-RIP we would argue that while we celebrate a disappeared past we also embrace the potential and risk of the new.
Mock Tudor
All too often what has been lost is replaced by what you wish would get lost - shops and pubs displaced and replaced by anonymous mock Tudor and Georgian apartments. If London is to change let it change with the uncharted terrain of the new. Housing that meets social change, workspaces that understand the new ways of working and shops and restaurants that respond to differing lifestyles. Then we wouldn’t simply have an inferior copy of what went before but something new that makes a keenly felt loss more worthwhile.
