The Encyclopaedia Berennia Part 1: 'Refurb' Or Ruin?

I wrote this in the week when plans for Stables Market’s refurbishment were revealed. I saw the pictures: they wouldn’t have looked too bad had they been for a new development, but they weren’t. A place of great historical and cultural importance is to be covered in thick glass and metal, which seems to be the staple diet for any new constructions at the moment.

‘At least,’ I hear you shout, ‘it’s not green glass! And they haven’t put those nasty black painted metal balconies everywhere!’ No, thank goodness, but the unusual, original beauty of Stables is being taken away. The owner of the market insists there will be no chain stores, just room for more stallholders, but beware – these days new buildings often have a Tesco Express shoved underneath them. 

It’s not just Stables Market where this is happening. Take Wembley Stadium. Can we really say that we now have an attractive landmark in comparison with the old Twin Towers? It’s a crime that old Wembley was demolished, leaving nothing but brochures of a few pictures of the 1966 World Cup and Live Aid as a memento.

Modern ‘architecture’ is steadily spreading it’s tentacles into every town, village and hamlet in London – god forbid that a disused house is brought back to it’s former glory, or a shut-down petrol garage turned into a good old-fashioned house. Instead, a building firm steps in and erects a billboard in front of the site, displaying quite a desirable artist’s impression of what the apartments never actually look like in the end. Such ‘affordable’ apartments are great for people who have both money and a penchant for plastic-framed windows and cheap metal.

We the citizens have no say in this. With plans in the pipeline to build rows and rows of high-rise flats along the Thames, it seems many slapdash builders will be able to branch out from paving over the driveways of those with little aesthetic taste into creating whole mega-structures of awfulness.

Property developers and people in power are falling over themselves in a competition to build the ugliest building possible; a new development in South East London opened the other day named Rivington Place. Its colour was bleak, its shape looked sharp enough to poke out an eye, and its modern twist is the fact it looks like a tower of Jenga that’s been through half of a game. Marvellous.