While this Telegraph piece praising Prince Charles' intervention in the Chelsea Barracks saga is superficially very depressing ('Chelsea Barracks: Thanks to Prince Charles for meddling', don't read the comments), what's most annoying is the way in which the piece doesn't bother to engage with the real driving forces behind the highs and lows of the now-abandoned Rogers Stirk Harbour scheme; the economy.

When the sale of the Barracks was first mooted in 2005, the stakes weren't quite as high: according to BBC News, 'The 13-acre prime building land could raise as much as £250m from residential or retail development.' The actual price realised, claimed to be £900m in April 2007 (£959m in January 2008), making it 'the UK's most expensive home property deal.' This put a tremendous pressure on the new owners to maximise the site to get any sort of return on their investment.

Initially, this didn't seem like much of a problem. The property firm that brokered the deal and subsequently (and probably fatally) lent their very slightly louche image to the whole project was Candy and Candy, then on the ascendance as purveyors of absurdly OTT apartments, houses, yachts and helicopters. One Hyde Park, developed in conjunction with RSH, is generally considered to be the apogee of hedge funded architectural hedonism. As was noted back in 2007, the Barracks sale was proof that London's 'housing market has hit a new high' (the original whizzy flash site to publicise the sale is here). The C+C moolah factory merely stirred a heady dose of schadenfreude into the mix.

But then the market plunged, and the ire aroused by the site and the plans inevitably rose. The economic need to fit on large quantities of housing to cater to both C+C's high-end clientele and the affordable quota demanded by Westminster resulted in a fairly dense bit of architecture, with tall blocks crowding apparently dark, gloomy streets. Arguably, RSH didn't handle the presentation terribly well, with a relatively bland set of documentation that failed to stress the improvements to the townscape beyond superficial rendered imagery. Instead, the CADs unfortunately emphasised the rather more dominant issues of massing and facade treatment. A second submission seems to have solved these issues, but we'll never know.

There are many rich paradoxes in the whole saga. The rather austere image at the head of this post - the sort of thing that induces twitches in any good urban explorer - is a picture of the original barracks, built on open fields east of the Royal Hospital. Undeniably hefty, as all good Victorian buildings should be, they were designed by George Morgan and demolished in 1960, replaced by an undistinguished piece of early 1960s banality, since flattened, by Tripe and Wakeham (which would be a fabulous name for a firm of undistinguished 1960s architects if they weren't still around). T+W crop up elsewhere around the country, in Stockwell (via urban 75) and also in Liverpool (via infinite thought), where they designed the marginally more interesting Royal and Sun Alliance building a few years later (another image, by Aidan O'Rourke). The only bit of Morgan's original 1863 building to survive was the chapel (pdf), turned down for listing and not retained in the RSH scheme.

In opening up the site with an expansive parade ground, Tripe and Wakeham gave this bit of London back some open space, yet the return to hefty terracotta facades was one of the key bones of contention. In very basic terms, Modernism opened up the closed Victorian city, but objectors, from HRH downwards, believe it would be far better to have a bit of opened-up-neo-Victoriana-Georgiana rather than a 'brutalist' and 'communist' piece of contemporary design. The site is also right on the edge of Kensington and Chelsea, the Royal Borough with one of the country's most vociferous planning departments. RBKC objected to the scheme's proximity to Wren's Royal Hospital (which, according to the report, had no objection to the scheme).

Given that the RSH scheme has been binned, you have to pity the poor case officer at Westminster Planning who wrote up the 121-page document for the planning meeting on Thursday 18 June 2009 (download the pdf here). In it, the council is broadly supportive of the scheme, concluding:

'Officers consider the scheme in terms of both the masterplan and detailed design to be one of exceptional high quality. They are mindful, however, that the scale of the development and design approach has been contentious from the outset. Whilst CABE and Westminster Society are generally supportive, there remains strong opposition to it from some consultees including English Heritage, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the Belgravia Residents' Association and many residents, either individually or through the Barracks Action Group [of 496 letters received, 435 were letters of objection]. Further, following the recent interest in the proposal shown by HRH the Prince of Wales there has been much debate in the national and technical press and there are divergent views amongst the architectural profession on the design merits of the scheme. There has also been a growing groundswell of public opinion against the design.... It is considered that when compared to the inappropriate and disjointed collection of 1960s buildings on the site and the austere appearance of its Victorian predecessor, the proposed development, by a combination of its architecture, generous open space and treatment of spaces between buildings, will significantly enhance the immediate townscape.'

Oh well. The whole thing was scuppered from the start, a combination of class envy, conservatism and politics. Ironically, the Duke of Westminster's comments last year were probably more troubling to the site's owners (Qatari Diar Real Estate), especially given his position as owner of the neighbouring Grosvenor Estate, a role that keeps him in the top spots of the rich lists. Charles's property holdings are small fry by comparison.

One can only hope that Quinlin Terry's [sic] back-of-envelope scrawl (a piece of theatrical underdogism that played well with the Luddite) has been worked up slightly more than as presented to the world (via, and actually drawn by Francis Terry). Major pieces of neo-classicism are relatively thin on the ground in Britain, but with each new commission the stakes get raised a little higher. As Terry Jr recently wrote, while reviewing the Royal Academy's Palladio exhibition: 'with most great architects, say Le Corbusier, Lutyens or Mies, their own greatness is indisputable but their followers are an embarrassment.' We watch the site with interest.

Labels: architecture, London

posted by things at 22:25 / 0 comments