Another one bites the dust
Can someone tell me if there's a plan to obliterate every old building in Brentford?O'Riordan's Tavern is to be demolished and replaced with... wait for it... new-build flats. Because, obvs, there's a shortage of those in the area. And, as we all know, they're in very high demand.Is it really beyond the imagination of a developer to take a tired (but pretty) building and give it a little TLC? I realise that it was not viable as a boozer, but I know a couple of people who live in old converted pubs - and they're stunning dwellings. Of course, it's much easier to bulldoze and put up an undistinguished bit of pre-fab horror which will have a shelf-life of - say - 25 years before it'll want tearing down again, but really? That's the best they can do?By and large, the people planning, designing and making decisions about our area don't live in it - it's easy to trash something if you don't have to look at it on a daily basis. And, as I've said before (to deaf ears), it takes a moment to demolish a building, but in that moment years, decades, centuries of history is consigned to the dustbin. What replaces it is very seldom worthy of praise. (Anyone remember a certain D J Trump demolishing the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan and taking the beautiful bas-relief sculptures with it? It's not a million miles from this.) It still beggars belief that - at the very least - the Barclays and Post Office facades could not have been saved and incorporated into a new development. It's been done before, many times, and successfully too. Significantly, the old Wilson & Kyle building featured in a Guardian article about derelict buildings. I've long said that if it had been located in Shoreditch or Hackney, it would have been refurbished and given a new lease of life as achingly hip flats or workspaces. But here? Too much to ask. Much better employed as a billboard before it's flattened.I'm afraid that some committee's decision to throw around a couple of swimming pools-worth of sky blue paint, picking a funky sans-serif font and labelling something a 'project' does not inspire confidence or engender civic pride. It's patronising. Especially when they construct a watchtower too brutal for even the Korean DMZ, without planning permission - or shame.So now it's goodbye to quirky, pretty little O'Riordans, part of the landscape since 1841 - and hello to... well, more of the same. Lucky us. Lucky, lucky us.
Tracie Dudley Craig ● 2582d56 Comments ● 2561d