Vandals in South Kensington

Anthony Howard, The Times

21 October 2003

South Kensington with its two floors, general air of spaciousness and splendid arcade, has always struck me as one of the more attractive of London’s Underground stations. It was, therefore, wholly predictable that the vandals should want to move in and destroy it.

The present “modernisation scheme” is, however a worse outrage than anyone could have anticipated. It includes a 143ft-high (44m) glass tower that could hardly fit more incongruously with the neighbouring domes and turrets of the South Kensington museums. It will remove at a stroke all traces of the old elegant Metropolitan Railway station and put in its place an out-of-date memorial to the crudest sort of off-the-peg architectural brutalism from the 1970s.

It has absolutely nothing – except aesthetic offence – to offer to the genteel residential ambience of the area by which it is surrounded. I am not at all surprised to learn that both the main local conservation bodies – The Kensington Society and the Chelsea one – are up in arms about it.

The easiest way to protect the present station would, of course, be to have it classified as “a listed building” – but in this rampant age of the developer, that, I fear is unlikely to happen. So the buck looks like stopping with the planning committee of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. If its members have any difficulty in making up their minds, I suggest they go and look at the fate of the old Hammersmith station, now reduced to being a monument to Mammon. At least you could say that it lies in the midst of a commercial area. No such defence is open to those who want to “redevelop” South Kensington station. They should be stopped before they inflict yet another mark of the stalinist approach to architecture on the long suffering face of London.