Tower Hamlets halts Norton Folgate redevelopment plans: at last, a local authority that is willing to stand against greed

Great news on the  Architects' Journal website this morning - Tower Hamlets' councillors have voted down the application to redevelop a huge swathe of the area between Shoreditch and Spitalfields, "against the advice of their own planning officers".

OK, so the opposition to the British Land backed scheme had some high profile supporters, and the campaign was led very professionally by the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust and historian Dan Cruickshank - but even so, this is a beautiful example of how the power and greed of  property developers can be successfully opposed if people are strong,  well-enough organised and sufficiently stubborn.

Looking at the  scheme, it seems amazing it ever got as far as this - given that Norton Folgate is officially a conservation area.

But you only have to read the account, on the Spitalfields Life site, of an earlier, 1977 attempt to flatten the area around Elder Street to see how desperate the developers are to get their hands on this area

If they really need more office space, please, let them build even taller towers in the centre of the city, an area which can not be made to look any worse with its curious assortment of "statement" skyscrapers.

Anyway, read AJ's excellent article - everything you need to know is there. And then read the story in the Hackney Citizen, celebrating the victory but ending with the dark warning that British Land "will be back". Especially as it seems they have the full support of the owners of the land, none other than the City of London Corporation itself.

Meat ! Murder! (Most Fowl!)

I should not read the Evening Standard. I am developing a town version of the middle-england Mail reader's "disgusted of tunbridge wells" etc.

Yesterday I read a letter by some  posh fellow moaning about the very last remnants of real life near Kings Cross (the bookies' shops across the road). I thought, "Fuck!" They really do want to turn all of London - ALL of London - into a Guardian readers' wet dream of perfectly tasteful, safe, fragrant, "quarters" or should that be "quartiers" or "arondissements".  Please, leave a little of the dirty mucky seedy  London that some of us need as much as we need air and water.

Today I read of plans to "gut" the market halls of Smithfields to build more offices.

"Low-rise", they say.

It makes me love the hulking stumps of  the square mile. London has already lost any battle over skylines and heights. The best recent buildings are the gherkin and the shard, they both have character and intelligence and poise and grace. The worst are those  tastefully scaled excresences around St Pauls, etc. They do not immediately offend the eye, but when you try walking around them you get that sense of gloom, the ghastly touch of HRH Chas his self. The beautiful medieval streets have gone. You  might as well be walking in Croydon, not in what should be absolute heart of the city of London.

If you need offices, please build them super-high, do some more shards, get all those offices up off the ground, shoot them up into massive syringes into the sky. The old meat market?  I would rather die than see it turn into yet another Covent Garden, but that at least seems a way to keep the shape, to feed the greed of developers, and to bring in the spenders. And I am going to die soon anyway!

SO -  leave Smithfields to the meat-men and clubbers and the very rich advertising folk of Clerkenwell who - much as we might not like them awfully - at least want somewhere interestingly blasted to stumble home through after a heavy night out.

For good god's sake, PLEASE don't make Smithfields into yet another Broadgate/ St Pauls/Spitalfields festival of blandness.

PLEASE!