Nomination for a Nancye Goulden Award, 2024.

The elevations of this Shepherds Bush Green landmark have been renovated in a sensitive and attractive manner that contributes to the street scene. Furthermore, the rear extension and remodelling has created an interesting semi-external space to the rear.  The newly tiled façades should be effective in maintaining the appearance of the building in future years.

The Defectors Weld 2024

The Defectors Weld 2024

Nomination for a Wooden Spoon, 2024

Sindercombe Social 2024

The Sindercombe Social has had an interesting makeover for 2024 with a Ziggy Stardust-inspired “youth club vibe”.

Ziggy Stardust 1973

It’s rather a contrast to the work undertaken to The Defectors Weld to improve their façade on the opposite corner of the green, nominated for its improvements. Ziggy famously shocked his fans by falling to Earth with his ‘Spiders from Mars’ in the nearby Hammersmith Odeon, on 3rd July 1973.

Shepherds Bush Market proposal

The council held a planning committee meeting on 5th December, as noted in our Hammersmith Weekly email, with the majority of the agenda devoted to the market redevelopment proposal. Officers have recommended consent.

After a short speech by one objector, following on from a rather longer exposition of the proposal by the planning officer and daylight consultant, the meeting was spectacularly derailed by protesters related to a group called ‘Protect Shepherd’s Bush Market’, and then cancelled.

We first engaged with the developers in October 2020, and most of the committee has been to one or more of the four exhibitions in various locations in the market over the last three years. The development hasn’t changed significantly over this time, it was born as a large set of buildings, somewhat awkwardly dropped into the Old Laundry Yard. We made our observations public back in April.

We followed up with a letter to the planners in August when the plans had been published and we’d reviewed them, detailing a significant number of issues that need to be addressed before any consideration of consent, these being:

• CGI views: roof plant enclosures/29 Pennard outlook after dark/views with the site
• Roof plant enclosure on HS6 diagram
• Mitigation of intrusion on Pennard Road houses
• Daylight conditions in the Market area
• Concrete panels finish
• Playground provision
• Individuality of stalls
• Market paving
• Damp-proofing railway arches
• Landscape maintenance
• Design of passage at 42 Goldhawk Road
• Independent scrutiny of daylight report.

We were pleased to hear the independent daylight specialist’s review at the start of the planning meeting, addressing one of the concerns. This shows that there are some daylight issues, but they appear fairly modest for neighbours. However one or two locations will be significantly affected in and around Pennard Mansions, and mitigation needs to be provided, in addition to proper consideration of the likely limited daylight in the market, due to the size of the proposed overshadowing building – point 4. The meeting ended abruptly before we’d heard answers to the other equally important issues that we’d raised.

Askew in Bloom – Award nomination 2023

Jane Mercer Award Winner Olena O’Leary (Askew in Bloom)

Robert Iggulden discusses proposals for increased engagement with our affiliates

Vice Chairman describes Nominations

Chairman’s address – Royal Masonic Hospital

Members at the 2023 AGM

Andy Slaughter MP with Nina Jindal – treasurer

Andy Slaughter MP discusses electoral boundary changes at the 2023 AGM

Olena O’Leary of ‘Askew in Bloom’ celebrates her Ukrainian heritage

AGM 2023

Committee member Annabel Clarke with Elizabeth Ryland at the 2023 AGM

Committee member Annabel Clarke with members and former committee member Julian Hillman

Chairman presents a token ‘Grenfell Crimp’ to a slightly bemused Andy Slaughter MP

Hoxton hotel – Environment Award winner 2023

The team behind the Hoxton Hotel – winner of the 2023 Environment Award

Askew in Bloom – Award nomination 2023

Andy Slaughter MP with ‘Askew in Bloom’ winners of the Jane Mercer Award 2023

(AGM Photos: Franco Chen. Click for full-size versions)

Summary

After a rapid run though the mandatory AGM procedures, approving the 2022 minutes, 2023 accounts, and committee re-elections, our guest speaker needed no introduction. As our local MP, with Twitter handle @Hammersmithandy, he has over 40 years experience as local councillor, deputy then leader in 1996, and an MP since 2005.  He talked about the various battles over the West Ken. estates that were originally given over to CAPCO for redevelopment as part of Earls Court, then reclaimed, the continuing issues with Charing Cross Hospital, the Bridge, flooding, and then onto large developments and the general pace of redevelopment, with a particular discussion on Shepherds Bush Market. He also mentioned that with the recently confirmed electoral boundary changes, his constituency is, not for the first time, being radically reshaped to lose the northern half to Ealing, while he could gain Chiswick in the new ‘Hammersmith & Chiswick’ constituency should he be elected next time.  He subsequently answered a number of questions from the audience including a topical one about Thames Water.

This year the main Environment Award was given to The Hoxton on Shepherds Bush Green. An addition to its own merits discussed in detail in the narrative, the building achieves the unusual feat of making a slightly awkward red brick building adjacent – Lawn House – fit better into the streetscape, so that the whole of ‘The Lawn‘ can be seen as a piece, perhaps the most characterful stretch of buildings in the borough, having won 2 further awards from us: the Dorsett (2015), and the Palladium (2022).

We again presented the Jane Mercer Award for “proactive co-operation, collaboration and communication” to a community gardening project – this time Askew in Bloom . The group shares some of the same enthusiastic members as last year’s winner, the Green Project, but this project has been running independently since 2019. It brings daily joy to what used to be a fairly ordinary W12 thoroughfare, and they are now spreading the word to other parts of the borough, starting with Dalling Road. More power to their collective elbows – and fewer asphalt tree pits!

Shepherds Bush Market proposal, from Goldhawk Road

Property company Yoo Capital, who are currently undertaking the ambitious expansion of Olympia, bought Shepherds Bush Market in 2020.  Over recent months we’ve advertised and attended a number of public consultations, revealing plans for the area. These include (i) the redevelopment of the Old Laundry site, the triangular area behind the east side of the market, and (ii) the upgrade and renewal of the market facilities.

Two buildings are proposed for the Old Laundry site: (i) a mixed-use commercial building, of 6 upper floors, ground floor and mezzanine, and a full basement floor below, together providing for office space and Imperial College research facilities, and (ii) located on the north end of the site, a smaller building providing 40 affordable flats in 5 upper floors and ground floor.

This is a dense, complex scheme, inserting a substantial building bulk in a site landlocked behind the 2-storey shop terraces of Goldhawk Road, and 2 & 3-storey residential terraces of Pennard Road.  For reference, the main commercial building is the same height as the Dorsett Hotel.

Commercial building

Shepherds Bush Market proposal, looking approximately North from Goldhawk Road

Looking North, this building would be visible from Goldhawk Road, rising above the shop terraces, and the substantial stepped, craggy elevation would not be out of place in the busy mix of style and scale, and could enrich the visual jazz of the area. From the west the building would be seen chiefly from the passing trains, and would form a new, east side to the market thoroughfare, with stalls partly tucked into the ground floor area, this would create an enclosure which could bring a sense of urban intimacy to the market thoroughfare, akin to the feel of Borough market.

On the east side, the building would be a dominant presence for the adjacent terrace of houses on Pennard Road, close to the rear gardens and crowding the outlook from rear windows. The design of the new building acknowledges this problem, and brings some mitigation with progressive stepping back at upper levels, and a landscaped area alongside the Pennard Road boundary: rules for this arrangement are set out in the Local Plan SPD (Section HS6), and the developer advises that the proposals comply with the dimensional restraints required. Resolution of this possible discord is fundamental to the development concept.

Mayor presents Environment Award 2022 to Flanagan Lawrence [Jason Flanagan & Barbara Twine]

Mayor presents Nancye Goulden Award 2022 to Elder Press Cafe [Lindsay and Andrew Elder]

Mayor presents Jane Mercer Award 2022 to Green Project SB [ Maria Helena Scott ]

Mayor presents Jane Mercer Award 2022 to Green Project SB

Mayor and Nicholas Boys Smith at AGM 2022

NB Smith + Chairman Richard Winterton

The Palladium [ Photo: @sbcalling ]

Palladium Plaque

Elder Press Cafe

Sawley Road – Green Project nominated for Jane Mercer Award 2022

Hammersmith Society Chairman + former chairs

Full House at AGM 2022

Andy Slaughter MP at AGM 2022

Members view presentation boards at AGM 2022

members of Green Project at AGM 2022

(AGM Photos: Franco Chen. Click for full-size versions)

Summary

‘Gentle Density’

Our guest speaker was Nicholas Boys Smith, of CreateStreets, and the CreateStreets Foundation, who gave an inspiring presentation, showing why we don’t need 55 storey towers to solve housing problems, and that real people prefer what CreateStreets refer to as “gentle density”.

The Environment Award was given to The Palladium on Shepherds Bush Green. We visited it earlier this year and were impressed with the design quality provided by the same architects, Flanagan Lawrence, who transformed the Dorsett next door, and to whom we also gave our Environment Award in 2015.  This area of the borough has seen significant improvements in the last few years, and we hope that the hotel currently under construction on the North side of the Dorsett lives up to the high standards set.

Unfortunately this year there were no projects of the right type or scale nominated for the Tom Ryland Award for Conservation.

The Nancye Goulden Award was given to the Elder Press Café which recently opened in South Black Lion Lane, W6. This conversion has been carried out with unusual care and sensitivity – the shop window is retained to bring life and light which animates this little street and the builder’s yard is brought back to life as an outside seating area with fine new timber gates thrown open during the day.

For the first time in several years we presented the Jane Mercer Award for “proactive co-operation, collaboration and communication”. The Green Project, Shepherds Bush provided exactly this, an initiative setup by local residents to make the neighbourhood around Sawley Road W12 greener, and at the same time to bring the community together.

Wooden spoons were awarded to the council for a failure to fully engage with their own green agenda by keeping new street trees alive and overseeing the generally inadequate tree pits partly responsible, which were similarly awarded in 2013, 2014, and 2015; and for an unfortunate lack of inclusivity afforded by the King Street Cycleway, C9, with everyone but cyclists losing out unnecessarily, some significantly.

Hammersmith School of Art and Building
[ Illustration: Roger Warry : H&F HBG ]

The college buildings together with their boundary wall are listed Grade II by Historic England, under the original title ‘Hammersmith School of Building and Arts and Crafts’, and sits in the Coningham & Lime Grove conservation area.  The site also contains about a dozen mature trees, including a mulberry.

The buildings are now up for sale as the college is rationalising to their other site in Stratford by the end of next year. Allsop are marketing the two acre Lime Grove site, and indicating potential for continuing educational use, but there appear few safeguards against inappropriate (over)development.

We could go on to use many of the same words contained in our popular recent article on the Royal Masonic Hospital similarly on the market for redevelopment, which, as well as being a hospital, was also partly an educational institution for nurse training. Instead, here we reproduce an article from 2006, written for H&F Historic Buildings Group by our president Prof. Hans Haenlein, who has the additional distinction of having been a student of architecture at the college from 1955-1960.  Firstly, some local context:

The origin of Hammersmith &West London College in Gliddon Road W14 is firmly rooted in the history of the London County Council at the end of the 19th century, and the actions of Architect William Lethaby (1857 – 1931) who was appointed in 1894 as the LCC’s Inspector to its Technical Education Board. William Lethaby’s dominant role in the Arts and Crafts movement, his friendship with William Morris, a Hammersmith resident, as well as with his connections with the Weimar Bauhaus through Walter Gropius and Hermann Muthesius, provided a unique and strong European foundation for the LCC’s setting up of Hammersmith College of Art and Building in the late 1890s in Lime Grove. This in turn was the foundation of H&WL College.

Edward Woods Estate : solar panels on southern elevations

Our beady eye on planning applications has noted the seemingly innocuous application 2022/00504/CLP for removal of the arrays of a total of around 1000 solar panels across the southern elevations of the three tower blocks alongside the A3220, that form the Edward Woods Estate on the edge of the borough, but also ‘the largest building-integrated renewable energy array in London’.

The panels have recently been assessed as a high fire risk, and the plan is to remove them all, without replacement.  Just a few hundred metres from the Grenfell Tower, this is another aspect of the ongoing cladding scandal, with added spice.

We’re fans of renewable energy, (this website is 100% renewably powered by way of a miniscule example), and it was good news seeing such huge arrays installed here in Hammersmith just a decade ago, and now equally disappointing that the greenest borough, can’t find a way to economically replace or remediate them by reducing the risk to acceptable levels, especially in the current energy crisis, in visible support of a very public climate change strategy. We’d like to understand if there are any implications for other buildings with such PV panels, including small residential – read on…

The situation helps highlight more arcane yet significant structural problems in the energy market, which we expand on below, and which despite all the recent column inches on the subject, have not been talked about in mainstream media. Your reward for reaching the end of the article is an insight into why you’re still regularly paying the gas price for wind or solar power.

Edward Woods was ‘The largest building-integrated renewable energy array in London’, the solar part of the project costing around £1m a decade ago. To put it in context, this scale is equivalent to about two years of the entire borough’s Solar Together buying scheme applications (and rather more than actual installations), a scheme which is being promoted by the council at the moment.

Perhaps a significant lesson is staring us in the face?  As the climate change team say below, they’re focusing on other interventions instead, namely insulation and boiler replacements which are a more effective use of limited funds, especially on buildings taller than 18m with new post-Grenfell constraints. Take your cue, and look at this offer from the council to provide free Ecofurb Plans to help you identify what’s best to do in your particular circumstances, which can otherwise be a challenge to work out, as we mentioned before.

We approached Cllr. Wesley Harcourt, cabinet member for the Environment, for comment. The council’s climate change team responded with the statement in the blue box below.

Palladium and Dorsett Hotel [ Photo: @sbcalling ]

Over the recent years we have seen the transformation of the buildings alongside The Lawn, the original name of the road on the west side of Shepherds Bush Green: the reconstruction of the site where the post office used to be will soon be complete, another new hotel, in a contemporary style building which might sit uncomfortably in the distinguished streetscape it shares. Its immediate neighbour is the Grade ll listed Dorsett Hotel, in the building which was once the Shepherds Bush Pavilion: this started life in 1923 as a palatial cinema, suffering war damage in 1944, restored in 1955, and becoming a bingo hall in 1983 – which closed up in 2001, leaving a derelict, lifeless heavyweight on the streetscape.  It was spotted by Dorsett Hospitality International in 2008, and given a new purpose with an imaginative and ingenious conversion to a luxury hotel, bringing life and style but retaining the gravitas and history of the original building, and winning our Environment Award in 2015.

Cinematograph inscription reinstated (alongside The Empire)

Next to the hotel is another piece of Shepherds Bush history, a building recently known as the Walkabout, which started life in 1923 as a 760 seat cinema – Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre; this was enlarged and upgraded, introducing the front arch and pediment which is retained today, to become the New Palladium Cinema.

The venture proved short term, and changed hands to become the Essoldo, then the Classic, and finally the Odeon 2, which closed in 1981. Derelict for some years, it then became the Walkabout pub, which provided a popular and noisy venue until it, too, closed in 2013, leaving a diminutive, shabby building struggling to survive between its distinguished neighbours. The Dorsett Hotel came to the rescue, recognising the potential of the building with a wholesale reconstruction, led by the designers of the Dorsett Hotel conversion.

Palladium frontage

Palladium Plaque by HBG

LBHF planning played a significant and positive role in guiding the design process, together with the involvement of the Historic Buildings Group who provided the plaque wording as part of its advice, alongside the Hammersmith Society. The Dorsett magic has successfully transformed the Walkabout into such a handsome building, which now comfortably fills the space between its two important neighbours. The triumphal arch and classical pediment, retained and restored from its cinema days, anchors the 7-storey high frontage, with a crisp vertical geometry of brickwork and stone fins rising above. The design brings a confident stature to the building and comfortably earns its place in the streetscape, a visual resonance with the corner tower of the decorative Shepherds Bush Empire alongside and with the brick entrance pavilion to the Dorsett Hotel.