When I am talking to pals and communique turns to new homes in Greenwich, I freeze. Between 2006 and 2010 I changed into chair of Greenwich council’s making plans board, which makes choices on all of the massive applications. So if we are speakme approximately a brand new improvement there may be a truthful browbeat I changed into worried in granting it permission.
Many of the homes authorised on my watch I can study with pride. But Woolwich Central – a improvement of 960 houses and a big Tesco, which opened in November 2012 and has simply been declared the winner of Building Design magazine’s 2014 Carbuncle Cup – isn’t always one in all them.
I can plead a few mitigation: the plans had been already well-developed by the point I have become chair in May 2006, and I had little strength to extrade them. Woolwich Central isn’t always universally disliked: uninteresting the constructing isn’t always, and while the plans had been conceived again withinside the early 2000s they ticked quite a few boxes.
Government making plans coverage strongly encourages massive supermarkets to be positioned on the town centres. Tesco promised to construct new council places of work and the close by Woolwich Centre – a satisfactory constructing which changed into unfairly nominated for the Carbuncle Cup in 2011. Tesco’s proposals had been warmly welcomed as a pioneering version of sustainable, excessive-density city living.
Although I had personal doubts, I quickly realised different councillors at the making plans board – each Labour and Conservative – could vote for the scheme and that it changed into useless to vote in opposition to it myself.
What took place next? To start with, nothing. Because of the credit score crunch, in 2008 onwards Tesco ordered a evaluate of the scheme. In 2009 and 2010 new architects Sheppard Robson made “especially modest modifications” which appeared harmless however in exercise dumbed the layout down considerably.
The layout segregated the personal houses from the inexpensive ones, with all the inexpensive houses positioned withinside the least appealing blocks going through the busy Grand Depot Road. The vehicle park changed into raised so that you ought to climb 5 flights of stairs to get throughout the webweb page on foot. Where a row of “impartial retailers” changed into envisaged, a garage place for dustbins changed into built: of the 5 small stores that remain, 3 are vacant and the others are a Subway and Domino’s Pizza. The “neighbourhood police workplace” additionally promised remains now no longer open, despite the fact that the police station across the nook has closed.
A 26-storey tower, clad in brass “sails” as an “summary connection with the lengthy seafaring and army lifestyle of Woolwich”, stays unbuilt. “Build it excessive and construct it quick,” changed into the decision of one in all my Labour colleagues, however today, Tellytubby-fashion triangular “sculpted grass mounds” fill the area. I nevertheless remorse now no longer kicking up extra of a fuss approximately the demolition of the purple-brick Victorian put up workplace that used to face there.
As Building Design rightly says, Woolwich Central’s predominant crime is that it “diminishes the efforts of these who’ve labored tough to regenerate this run-down, disadvantaged a part of London”. Nearby General Gordon Square has been rejuvenated well, however towering over it’s far the hulk of the brand new Tesco and the apartments above – defined through Carbuncle Cup decide Ike Ijeh as “brazenly militaristic, defensive, boastful and inept”. I cannot disagree.
What instructions may be learnt from this fiasco? Firstly, neighborhood politicians are nevertheless depressingly possibly to fall for any glitzy promise of “regeneration” that builders provide up. Secondly, well-intentioned making plans regulations can bring about monsters simply as alienating, and not going to enhance with age, because the Sixties and Seventies traits that we study with horror today. Thirdly, info matter; and reputedly minor layout modifications will have devastating consequences. A layout evaluate panel did its satisfactory to enhance the scheme because the info had been thrashed out from 2007 onwards, however it changed into already too late.
This Tesco isn’t always as massive because the 128,000 sq toes shop first proposed (the council argued it right all the way down to 80,000 sq toes). But irrespective of the way you get dressed it up, Woolwich Central is a big two-storey vehicle park with a grocery store above and a few apartments on top: a sort of improvement absolutely alien to London metropolis centres and one that struggles to combine well. Regenerating locations like Woolwich isn’t always executed simply through massive supermarkets or Crossrail stations. Making an area someplace you need to live, paintings or grasp out in is right all the way down to masses of little things – considerate public spaces, new pubs and restaurants, and inexpensive area for small businesses, now no longer simply the part-time, poorly paid jobs that Tesco brings.
Woolwich Central is at satisfactory a purple herring and at worst an impediment on Woolwich’s avenue to recovery. It won’t be a carbuncle, however it’s far a fallacious task and I remorse my function as its midwife.
