The council has reworked several pieces of longstanding planning work, and is asking for feedback from you in a series of consultations – details in our diary. We’ve been keen to progress this matter for a while, and it’s good to see new activity. Firstly we should set the historical context, to better understand how we got here, what’s new, and not so new.

2015: Town Centre Working Party supports “West London Link” vision/Flyunder

Longstanding members will recall the 2008 Flyunder proposals that were developed originally by the West London Link group of architects and Hammersmith BID, including our former chairman Tom Ryland as a leading light, and then presented to the London Festival of Architecture that year. A significant part of that plan involved a reworking of Hammersmith to face more towards the river, by removing the awkward A4 spur road to the Broadway (seen above), and connecting King Street to St Paul’s Church, creating a much better and more identifiable ‘centre’. The flyunder would have been funded by building over what is now the A4, linking the roads cut in the 1950’s. This website maintains a series of articles under the flyunder tag, that details some of this work, along with the WLL website above which includes a detailed archive and feasibility study from the time.

Flyunder as proposed in 2008

The potential money ran out fairly spectacularly a year later when the finance industry melted down, but the whole issue had its first revival in 2011 when the flyover closed and was thought to be doomed. However the 2012 Olympics came to the rescue, because, as those imbued in the dark arts of Olympic transport will know, there are very strict maxima laid down for journey times between Olympic venues, no doubt causing the Parisians sleepless nights ahead of this year’s games. Without a flyover, the time to the western venues such as the rowing in Eton would be easily exceeded. That logic led to the special Olympic Travel Lanes, of which there is still the odd vestige if you know where to look. The flyover, as a piece of critical Olympic transport infrastructure, was patched up quicker than you can say ‘Hammersmith Bridge’, and then said to be good for about another fifty or sixty years.

The Hammersmith Residents Working Party was an early version of what came to be called resident-led commissions, which produced the Grimshaw report of 2019 addressing the central Hammersmith regeneration area. Sadly due to the range of topics covered and the divergent nature of the competing demands and constraints, the HRWP couldn’t agree the outcomes in the report and it was never adopted as a Town Centre Supplementary Planning Document as intended.

In 2022, Marks and Spencer came up with their controversial plans. With encouragement from the public and us, having been concerned at the ageing Local Plan and with no SPD in sight, the council was spurred into trying to fit a planning context around the Town Centre again. This has resulted in a hastily compiled report on potential opportunities for the regeneration of King Street and its environs, prepared by planning consultants Allies and Morrison. The report provides a planning framework for the evaluation of town centre development proposals like the M&S scheme (where we understand a revised design is emerging), and plays a significant role in the new Town Centre SPD.

We’re not entirely sure why the flyunder has resurfaced in these even more financially straitened times, as it makes the SPD potentially a very much larger enterprise. Arguably it gives the SPD a raison d’etre, a vision, and as you see above, the plan shows the extant flyover, in recognition that a flyunder can’t be afforded in the immediate future, renaming an aspiration.  The other aspects that were not in the original proposals are

• The revitalised Town Hall development to the West of the main regeneration area.
• The new buildings on the West London Magistrates Court site
• The triangle development
• Sovereign Court, Livat and associated developments in Glenthorne road.

These need to be knitted into the proposals such that the whole fits together.  We haven’t fully digested all the aspects of the draft SPD yet, we’ll review them after attending the scheduled presentations and discussing it more widely. Meanwhile, some members have written to us with views, several included in the bullet list below:

• Legally speaking, an SPD can’t introduce new planning policy. The first line of the consultation page says ‘…Council has prepared new supplementary planning policies…’  This council and others have come unstuck on this point of planning law in the past. If new policy is required due to the scope of the proposals, the Local Plan (2018) will have to be revised and go through the whole public examination and acceptance process. This is now overdue in any case, as we’ve said before.
• As alluded to above, we rather suspect fixing Hammersmith Bridge to be a higher priority to many – whatever the funding arrangements – than a ‘flyunder’, however desirable, it’s certainly our members’ number one priority.  But of course, these are, or should be, two different levels of endeavour: the flyunder being aspiration, while fixing the bridge is perspiration.
• The Allies and Morriion work feeding the SPD mentions a 2800 residential provision, a little larger than White City Living, itself very large. The SPD mentions “new high quality commercial and mixed use development including offices, residential….upper floors” It’s unclear where that substantial number would go, though there are several unbuilt towers shown above, some along King Street, at initial perusal appearing about as tall as the unloved 2022 M&S proposal, and a large development on the Broadway, presumably involving TfL, which has a good appetite for tall buildings these days. It needs to be remembered that we fought hard to reduce the height of Landmark House from 28 to “just” 22 storeys in 2017, we wouldn’t want to have to go through that again, though what is now showing on that site appears to exceed this.
• The A&M work suggests making King Street more people-friendly, something that was discussed at length during the cycle commission work, and yet to be achieved. However the tension between it being the major transport artery westbound, with tens of buses an hour carrying those unable to cycle, not to mention all the other traffic already backed up due to the recent width restrictions, has not been resolved. There remains an opportunity to reassess where each form of transport is best placed.
• An A4 ‘boulevard’ is mentioned. Please refer to the independent work of our member Dr. Alex Reid from last year.