M&S Hammersmith King Street – historic image – 50’s/60’s

You  may have seen the website https://27kingstreet.co.uk recently created for a consultation related to the proposed redevelopment of Marks and Spencer in Hammersmith.  Like many high street shops, this location has become a little tired in the nearly 100 years of its existence, and our M&S has additionally had a curiously broken roofline for as long as anyone can remember, caused we’re told by partial demolition and the machinations of former planning constraints. The above historic photo shows it as it was before its front teeth fell out.

M&S visualisation 27 King St

Fresh from a dressing-down over the proposed Oxford Street redevelopment with Pilbrow & partners, M&S have unsurprisingly chosen a different group to work with here – Reef Group – and with rather different intents. We were provided a fuller picture of the plans for a welcome refurb at a presentation meeting with the developer and M&S in the first week of July.

The plan, though only mentioned in passing on the above website, is a complete rebuilding of the site to create 400 student rooms in a substantial 10 storey block above the store, thereby we assume funding its redevelopment, which like Chiswick’s, would become a larger, but food-only affair of 15000 sq. ft (currently 6000), and based on a market hall concept developed in Clapham. The façade would be retained, the existing gaps filled sympathetically, and the 10 storey block would sit behind and above the façade.  This would considerably improve the food offering, but other offers, such as clothing, would become click-and-collect only.

M&S visualisation with the proposed Landmark House some way behind (22 storeys). The proposal is 10 storeys + podium.

Unfortunately the website visualisation provided (reproduced above) is at such an extreme angle as to mostly hide this substantial building, which is higher than the Broadway buildings, and about the same as the striped glass-clad office building next to the Hammersmith & City Line station, known officially as ’10 Hammersmith Grove’.

We were provided with the adjacent visualisation, still at a rather unsatisfactory angle, and over the long hot weeks since, we’ve been pondering the developer’s coyness at showing the scale of the student blocks, and their effect on the streetscape, light and the Lyric. We’ve asked for ‘Verified Views’ or ‘Accurate Visual Representations’ (AVR) more than once now.

With time passing and the requested visualisations unavailable, we had little option but to use the above information to project our own approximation overlaid onto a Google Earth 3D view of King Street, which is shown below. It uses the above visualisation to project the view at an appropriate angle, showing the approximate scale of the proposal.

With the Lyric on the North side, predominant light from East, West and importantly the South, is not blocked.  By contrast, this proposal would cast a substantial shadow over the street, Lyric and particularly Lyric Square, significantly reducing it’s appeal.

Marks and Spencer proposed redevelopment – approximate 3D overlay onto ‘Google Earth’

The proposal promises to ‘… deliver key elements of the Hammersmith Town Centre Masterplan’. However, there is no actual Town Centre Masterplan or agreed SPD as yet.  LBHF circulated a brochure labelled ‘LBHF and Grimshaw ‘Restoring the Heart of Hammersmith – Delivering a Fly-Under’, illustrating aspects of a ‘Masterplan vision’ that might one day be built.  But as TfL can currently barely afford to run the buses, and much is dependent on their land and finance, it remains an aspiration, complete with the vexing architectural ‘game of greenwash’ applied to every new horizontal surface.

Here we should review how much purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA in the jargon) Hammersmith can or should provide, given the large site under construction at the former West London Magistrate Courts providing 730, and bearing in mind that there are already several student accom. buildings nearby. These include those in Shepherds Bush Road (Palais: 430), Paddenswick Road (234), The Royal College of Music’s accom on Goldhawk Road (400), and a little further afield at Chapter (Savoy Circus: 306), and of course all the developments – built and yet to be built – around Imperial itself at White City, all of this ignoring the overbearing towers nearby in North Acton, for much the same purpose.

A crude, but illuminating search of the LBHF planning portal for “student accom” provides over 60 results. A developer’s argument says that PBSA reduces pressure on other rented housing locally, but then where will students get their character-building  Young Ones experience ?

PBSA is definitely the developer’s plat-du-jour, after the pandemic scotched the previous fashion that we half-jokingly referred to as ‘Hotelsville W6’ in 2019 when every vacant plot seemed to bear a hotel proposal, notably including Landmark House, West London Magistrates Court, 2 Queen Caroline Street (beside the Irish Centre), behind 26-28 Hammersmith Grove; and the hotel conversion of Brook House on Shepherd’s Bush Road. The latter was the only one to proceed, just appearing now, the others went dormant or fell by the wayside, and it would not surprise us to see some or all reappear as PBSA, as has half of the West London Courts redevelopment already. Caveat hotelier.

This project makes perfect sense to a developer, and presumably M&S, and if it were not for the overbuilt nature of the proposed student accom. blocks and factors described, we could agree, especially given the tough economics of high-street trading.  Please let us know what you think.