Smithfield Saved!
Good news doesn’t often come quite like this. On 6th August, Hazel Blears handed down a landmark decision to stop the City Corporation demolishing the west end of Smithfield for a massive redevelopment.
This development - feet away from the Clerkenwell border - would have swept away a number of characterful Victorian market buildings, dating from the 1880s and later, which were originally built to replace a street market. The pretext was the alleged need to renew the roofs of the Thameslink railway tunnels which run underneath them.
This was disproved by engineers acting for SAVE, which mounted a vigorous campaign against the proposals, and even Network Rail admitted these roofs or “lids” are not unsafe and are in no worse condition than many others. So the case for sweeping away a whole Conservation Area to repair them looked pretty thin.
The design of the new scheme was horrendous. See for yourself at Building Design’s coverage of the story.
For the Corporation, surely Britain’s most backward public body when it comes to conservation, this is just another in a whole series of defeats in its attempts to flatten distinctive historic buildings in pursuit of wall-to-wall office building and road-widening.
It was in 1986, when I ran the local conservation group the Smithfield Trust, that I campaigned successfully to get the west end of Smithfield designated as a Conservation Area, which was done by the GLC at the last-ever meeting of the its Planning Committee.
The Corporation must now act quickly to appoint new developers capable of seeing the conservation opportunities of the area. In its relentless pursuit of redevelopment, it had rejected offers from other developers who wanted to repair and re-use these distinctive buildings.
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