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Many of you will have been to the exhibition at the Lyric recently to view the proposals and displays. We exhorted the development team to show full elevations, but the best we achieved at the time were partial CGI images. They have now come forward with North and East elevations, which are on the consultation website, along with the exhibition boards, and above / below, and appear to be part of a pending planning application. The large towers in the background are the proposed Landmark House, as yet unbuilt, and we believe subject to change of ownership, and therefore possibly design change too.
As you can see, our very approximate CGI in the earlier article was reasonably accurate dimensionally, if not aesthetically, and at 47m, this undistinguished proposal is of alien scale, substantially higher than the Lyric, and a large intrusion on the King St. horizon. The 15m setback from the street helps reduce this intrusion only marginally, which you can see below.
More importantly, acceptance at this dimension would set a bulk and height precedent along King St., much as we’ve recently seen used in the 66 Hammersmith Road proposal, especially in the continuing absence of an issued Town Centre Masterplan, or planning brief, a subject on which we repeatedly remind the council is nearly 5 years overdue. We haven’t even mentioned a likely West-East prevailing wind tunnel, increased if others were to follow suit.
The developers have been keen to promote their public realm offering since the first meeting, with the pocket park alongside, joining King St. to Blacks Road, and some interesting CGI’s – adjacent example. While public realm improvements are always welcome, we feel that this offers a crumb of comfort in a generally bleak Blacks Road landscape that sorely needs a more ambitious treatment, and could so easily be improved from a set of loading bay extensions, into a small park and cycleway with convenient town-centre cycle parking, kick-starting the vision of the town centre masterplan, such is it exists in draft and incomplete form. This would allow cyclists to bypass Lyric Square and the busiest parts of King St, reducing dangers to pedestrians, and improving the public realm both sides, with rather less concrete deployed.
Lowering the building to something more human-scale and appropriate for a high street could be achieved by using this and adjacent marginal spaces, and by repositioning the loading bay to the basement, the only reason for not doing so given as the apparent unreliability of M&S’s lifts!
We remain disappointed that we have had to drag these elevations kicking and screaming from the developers post-exhibition, when at least dimensionally accurate views were obviously available at the time. We have been consulted – yes – but have we been listened to ? Not really. Substantive changes are not evident since we first met 4 months ago.
Marks and Spencer are a valuable high street institution, but when you realise that their retail part is the barely visible sliver, only on the ground floor of this substantially overbuilt proposal, it, and the equally inappropriate Oxford Street proposal, announces that they may have been captured by The Property Lobby, as Bob Colenutt puts it, these kinds of proposals demeaning it from national treasure to potential planning pariah. Under any valid viability calculation, it cannot possibly need this scale of development to pay for a single-level retail refurbishment, resulting in something more in common with the West London Magistrates Court project than a high street location – M&S are not a charity after all.
We’ve drafted a letter of objection, that further addresses details of a number of planning policy issues, attached below. As a result, we hope to see a more reasonable proposal emerge for this important site.
Letter of objection to LBHF planners
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