Nomination for a Nancye Goulden Award, 2025.

Bradmore Square is a small space tucked away behind Bradmore House on the Broadway, with which we and the Historic Buildings Group have a long history. The back entrance to Hammersmith tube and bus station, and the increasingly popular Broadway shopping centre is conveniently adjacent.  Recently the public realm has been noticeably improved.

Bradmore Square 3

Bradmore Square 2

Bradmore Square 1

The nomination notes that “it’s additionally impressive that the pots continue to be green and watered, even throughout the dry weather that we have been having”.

Mogden sewage works [photo : eight2O]

With the recent boat races having brought with them the annual hand-wringing over river pollution, providing the Mayor with an opportunity to remind us of his 2024 pledge to make London’s rivers swimmable within 10 years, it seems an appropriate moment to review the status quo in this long running saga.

In addition to the annual boat race related news, there have been a number of stories in the wake of the recent Thames Water TV documentary and the related Tideway Tunnel or ‘Super Sewer’ completion, after more than a decade of construction.  The programme revealed a team of people battling the odds to keep an overstretched system working, and not always winning. It must be disappointing for those working on the project to have so much of the news created by the things they were working for years to fix.

There’s the small matter of the automatic outfall monitors now mandated by OFWAT which, connected directly to Twitter, became an effective way to allow the public to beat the water companies with their opprobrium.  It may be that there were plenty of spills before these monitors, but that nobody could put a number on them, and the increasing heavy rainfall episodes have clearly not helped.

Original Super Sewer plans

Notwithstanding the connection to the Super Sewer at Hammersmith under the watchful eye of our own Capability Brown, and at Fulham on Carnwath road, there have been quite a range of related stories that help illustrate the causes, effects and work being done – or not – to address them, here’s a roundup:

Nancye Goulden Award Winner, 2025.

The replacement of the bus lane in King Street by a temporary cycle lane during the pandemic was not without it’s critics, including in this parish, given its impact on public transport – particularly with the problematic ‘floating bus stops’ pictured, plus the effect on the public realm – two of our top concerns.

But the recent creation of rain gardens, together with gravel replacements for a significant number of tree pits on both sides of the western end of the street represent very significant improvements. The hard landscaping and tree pits were done by Conway under the council’s mandate, paid for by the Green Investment Scheme, but interestingly, the planting was undertaken by HCGA under contract to the council, partly by local volunteers.

King St rain gardens

King St rain gardens

King St rain gardens

The gardens are already maturing after only a few weeks and will surely only get better in time. The adjacent gravel tree pits are a perfect example of what the society has campaigned on for well over a decade, awarding wooden spoons to the council in successive years for failing to improve the ‘asphalt situation’ around the borough’s trees. It didn’t seem to take Conway very long to dig out the old asphalt in around a dozen pits, and replace it with permeable and attractive real gravel. These represent what we’d like to see by default everywhere – of course in creative cooperation with guerrilla gardeners such as the award-winning Askew in Bloom, and The Green Project where they’re planting too. 

Olympia 2nd February 2025

Olympia 2nd February 2025

Olympia entrance

Olympia Hyatt Hotel

Conference Centre entrance

Olympia Music Venue

Music Venue looking towards stage

Olympia Theatre – looking towards proscenium

Olympia Offices

Glass canopy: restaurants, looking East

The Olympia project is approaching completion after over seven years of planning and construction, and has been holding ‘sneak peeks’ for locals to see in and around selected parts of the building in recent weeks. We were fortunate enough to join one of these tours.   As has been fairly longstanding policy, no independent photos were allowed, but a set of Olympia’s own photos were provided instead. We saw many of the views shown here.

The scale of the whole development is immense as we’ve said before – remembering that we didn’t go anywhere near the existing (open) parts of the site – the main exhibition halls, areas such as the Pillar Hall, or the Maclise road car park – AKA Hyatt hotel and school, or indeed the Hotel being built above the Hammersmith Road frontage.

The most complete part of the building that is not yet open is the music venue, billed as The Olympia Music Hall , cleaned and ready for imminent fit-out by the tenant AEG – the same organisation that runs the existing O2 Arena in Greenwich. The capacity is in excess of 4000, slightly more than the Hammersmith Apollo, but the number here is an ‘all standing’ one with a relatively small gallery and VIP area – shown with a couple of people standing in it in the photo looking towards the stage. The equivalent ‘standing’ for the Apollo is 5300.

By contrast, the 1500-capacity theatre is the least well advanced of all the areas, though right next to the music venue, simply because it was started last in the programme, and had to be built entirely from the ground up. Photos show the underside of the raked seating structure (in white), and the size and substantial height of the backstage area can clearly be seen. In fact so cavernous is the backstage area, that they unusually plan to build a couple of floors of office/theatre administration on top of the fly-tower. There’s an orchestra pit provided for this conventional proscenium-style auditorium, allowing for musicals. When the shell/core construction is complete, this will be fitted out by well-known CharcoalBlue consultants, for the selected operator Trafalgar Entertainment.

Interlinking the back of these venues, and the offices / conference centre is a substantial open elevated walkway, the size of a road, which sits above and between the two existing exhibition halls, and leads to the glass canopy restaurants (pictured), and then eventually to the large stairs and escalators down to Olympia Way and the railway. There was some discussion about a huge video wall – or rather video ceiling – along this walkway, which given the contrast between the open Eastern end, and the somewhat subterranean feel to the other end, will be welcome. The glass canopy area is open, and the part-covered roofs of the restaurants are also planned to be used for further hospitality, though a number of us, on a cold February morning tour, felt that here, optimism had triumphed over the realities of the British weather.

Olympia Sneak Peek

We had the opportunity to see an office floorplate (pictured above), which was as unremarkable as office floorplates typically are, apart from it’s size and the vista from it’s windows and balcony, on which were also able to stand. There’s a excellent uninterrupted view all the way across to Crystal Palace and the South Downs, via Earls Court’s Empress State Building from these private (for the office’s use) balconies, which will surely be a big pull factor.

Andy Slaughter MP at HACAN AGM 2025

We attended the HACAN AGM at the Irish Cultural Centre last week where our MP Andy Slaughter was guest speaker. Those attending our 2023 AGM will also recall mention of the third runway in his speech, but only in passing. It has of course never left Heathrow’s agenda, though it must have come as a surprise that this government, with its green ambitions, would put Heathrow expansion on its to-do list quite so quickly. 

Andy was bold enough to suggest that Heathrow expansion may have been swept up as part of an overall positive economic growth agenda, and might be as easily dropped should it fail the government’s tests for noise, air quality, carbon and economics. That’s the straightforward narrative, but not the whole story. There may be rather more to it, as HACAN clearly outlined.

There was much incredulity in the audience as to how the various tests might be, or have now been met, with or without the magic ingredient of 2030’s proposed 10% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) rising to 20% in 2040, and indeed Andy suggested that the proof will lie in the proposals that Heathrow bring forward later this year.  It’s no secret that he has long been an objector. together with many civic and other societies blighted under the flight path, and potential paths, such as ourselves.  As we’ve reported, the chair of parliament’s Transport Committee is now Ruth Cadbury MP, another noted local opponent. Her committee is examining this proposal.

Better Plan making – an engineered view
Click on the image to open the pdf

Under the banner ‘Taking a View’,  from time to time, we’re pleased to publish articles by members on a subject of their choice, which they believe will be interesting to the wider membership.

With both the London Plan and Hammersmith’s Local Plan due to be rewritten shortly, and with all the noise being made about ‘The Planning System’ in recent months, here, our Chairman takes an engineered view. How can we write better planning documents to improve the ‘planning system’ ?

With the help of established methods, perhaps a dash of modern AI, this piece shows how plans can be substantially shorter and more precise, illustrated with a couple examples from the London Plan, and in a specific case, how loose wording is being taken advantage of at Earls Court.

If you have an article you would like to be considered, please contact .
Articles are unedited personal viewpoints, and may not always represent the views of the Society

The planning system has become the whipping boy of our new government, blamed for many of the country’s economic ills. The government wants to to ‘cut red tape to speed up growth’, and with the right tapes cut, that could definitely help.  There can be no doubt that in some cases planning applications are frustrated (in the legal sense), when objections are piled up, and the usual suspects marked down as NIMBY. But nationally there’s been a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ for over a decade in the NPPF, and it’s even less of an issue in dense urban areas such as London because of the additional regional level represented by the Mayor’s London Plan.

Plan hierarchy

In this article, we dare to suggest that many of the problems lie closer to government, where the ‘red tape’ appears strongest, with recent announcements suggesting that they may have realised. A background can be found in A Brief History of Bureaucracy, while remembering that Einstein said ‘Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work’.

With the London Mayoral prerogative automatically mandated for projects of any size, supported by the option of call-in,  plus the largely unaffordable cost of (legal) challenge, there are actually vanishingly few opportunities for NIMBYs to stop a development blessed by the Mayor.  In extremis, this leads to Mayoral Opportunity Area developments like Nine Elms, Stratford, North Acton or indeed more locally, White City, where planning controls are more lax, especially on tall buildings, and locals haven’t been much considered. Earls Court is the next such Opportunity Area to be developed, and one in which we’re been actively engaged with several neighbouring societies.

Nine elms

Stratford (GLA)

White City Living

White City 2021

North Acton OPDC

Earls Court phase 1 proposed

A thoroughly unscientific review of preferences expressed on our Instagram feed over the last five years shows what real people like, and it’s not the images shown here, it’s rather closer to the CreateStreets or new urbanism view of the world, to the possible chagrin of some (male) architects.

Despite the government’s belief, with the NIMBY option already unavailable where housing demand is greatest, lining the barricades won’t work as a way to contest a poorly thought-through development.  But to improve them, we can and do suggest to developers, planners, local and Mayoral administrations, that they should be using the enormous accrued experience and skills freely available across the civic movement – help they claim to desperately need – and are required to properly consider under the 2011 Localism Act.