If things go ahead as planned, the world famous Earl’s Court exhibition centre and concert venue will be demolished after the London 2012 Olympics, during which it will host the volleyball competitions as the last event ever to be staged there. This forms part of a vast local development programme which has been given the catchy title ‘Earl’s Court and West Kensington Opportunity Area’ by the three joint owners of said area: the London Borough of Fulham, who hold some of the existing housing stock around the Earl's Court centre, London Transport, who own the tube line that runs underneath it and a fair bit of trackside wasteland around it, and the investment and development company Capco (Capital & Counties), who own both Earl’s Court and Olympia (the old Olympia Centre in Kensington, not the new Olympic Village in East London...)
While a masterplan for the redevelopment appears to be at an advanced stage, a ‘first public consultation’ about it has only just now come to an end (26th april 2011), and this is also the reason I suddenly became aware of - you could say alert to - the impending changes proposed for a place two minutes‘ walk from where I live.
As somebody who generally likes change and embraces the new, I started out looking at the plans for Earl's Court, almost liking them. Certainly I did not see anything substantially wrong with them, apart perhaps from the fact that they seemed somewhat 'pedestrian' and mediocre (if the people who have presumably laboured hard to come up with them will forgive me what is, if anything, an unintended slight), proposing at heart nothing much more and nothing much less than a new set of 'urban villages' much in the general contemporary planning mould that you could find practically anywhere in the world where there's a bit of space with a lot of money sloshing around, handled by a competent team of architects.
(I want to emphasise at this point - as if that were necessary - that I’m not an architect, city planner or urban strategist. It could well be that people who are, not least perhaps the masterplanner himself, Sir Terry Farrell of Terry Farrell and Partners, would venture that I’m talking out of the wrong part of my anatomy, and I grant that purely metaphorically, this may well be the case. So while I certainly have my steadily growing doubts, I do make allowance for their doubting too...)
Examining the plans in more detail, and especially giving them, and my home turf, Earl's Court, a little more thought, I'm beginning to wonder whether this project - also bearing in mind that it calls itself an ‘opportunity area’ - doesn’t in fact miss two giant opportunities and may, for this reason, be misguided to the point where it should be re-conceived:
Firstly, Earl's Court One (there is also an Earl's Court Two, right behind it) is an iconic landmark building of at least some historical significance and architectural interest. It's an exponent, albeit not ‘pure and unaltered', as some might point out, of the Art Moderne Style, which is a less fussy and more robust evolution of Art Deco, and it has its own characteristic elegance and an imposing beauty.
Now if, as the masterplan suggests, venues for large and small scale events should continue to exist in Earl's Court, then keeping this landmark, which itself has come to define the area, intact would appear both the obvious and indeed the inspired thing to do. Internally, as the redevelopment of the erstwhile Millennium Dome demonstrates (also something of a theme park and very middle-of-the-road along the covered mock 'high street', but top-notch inside the performance spaces), there is enormous scope for creating a genuinely exciting, and newly ground-breaking location which can incorporate a sizeable, adaptable performance space for big, top headline acts of the kind that have made Earl's Court famous - Pink Floyd, Madonna, David Gray... - and that the Earl’s Court Centre itself likes to claim it has helped turn into legends, with compendium venues for smaller events, such as a high quality jazz club or independent music club, just as examples. Within the structure, there would be plenty of room to also accommodate a new studio theatre with perhaps two performance spaces (what London hasn’t got enough of and what would therefore be more than a little desirable in this constellation would be a 250-350 seater and maybe a smaller experimental space with a capacity of up to about 150, both with completely flexible and removable seating, so performances can take any shape they like), a state-of-the art digital cinema with two or three screens (we are reasonably well-served with mainstream chains in the area, but what is sorely lacking in London generally are independent cinemas), and, as the icing on the cake, there would still be scope for turning some of the structure into a vast unconventional art/performance space that allows for large-scale, site-specific, non-auditorium style theatre, music and cross-media art events to take place.
As the wholly inspired and ingenious conversion of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern illustrates: a big empty space is not a big empty space, it can bring value, visitors, and - directly or indirectly - revenue to an area, if its potential is recognised and utilised. Of course, we don't need another Tate Modern here, but this kind of bold, conceptual thinking that recognises Earl's Court as a unique location and maximises its potential would genuinely move Earl's Court forward as a destination and also serve the twin goals of on the one hand preserving an historic architectural icon, while rejuvenating and newly inspiring people locally and from all over London (as well as the massive tourist contingent that's already here anyway) to use Earl's Court as a place of inspiration. A set of ‘urban villages', by contrast, is something that could take shape anywhere in the world and nobody would be any the wiser as to where they were or why they were there. Yet surely the point and substance of redeveloping a local area like Earl's Court is to take its character, its identity and build on that, expand on it, make it clearer, more pronounced: enhance it. The current masterplan does nothing of the sort, it eradicates the Earl's Court identity and imposes a fairly bland globally applicable residential patchwork on the area instead.
Secondly, then, keeping Earl's Court One (in particular) would of course require comprehensive re-imagining of the surrounding development area. Here, I feel that the proposed plans are, while not inherently objectionable, timid and tame (although it could be argued, of course, that being timid and tame is inherently objectionable...). I see this, too, as a chance for bold, inventive planning, in which, to my mind, real emphasis should be given to architectural and conceptual innovation, with a clear focus on the kind of communities that one would like to build/facilitate in the area. My impression is - and I consider myself on somewhat less firm ground here than with my first point above - that the plans are principally aimed at a broadly affluent corporate clientele, which is understandable in so far as the development cost will be huge and investors will want to see a return. But Earl's Court is a multifarious, diverse, complex community that has often in the past been described as essentially transient. Here is the opportunity, I believe, to set a marker for the area to be evolved and characterised as an 'organic' continuation of where it's coming from. I would certainly like to see the pendulum of the 'happening place in London' swing back now from Hoxton and Shoreditch to the centre-west, and what better place for this to take root than here in Earl's Court, which has a long-standing association with artists, actors, performers, writers, musicians, photographers, poets and thinkers, and why not bring into the fold contemporary artisans, designers and specialist manufacturers. With the Design Museum set to move into the former Commonwealth Institute up the road, with Olympia still there as a conference venue, and Earl's Court's status as a music, performance and art location reinvigorated, we could find ourselves with a ‘magic' triangle of culture, commerce and community that people will want to come to not just because it's convenient for the airport, but because it has identity, character and real content to offer.
Targetting, and making an area accessible to these kinds of people, projects and enterprises is in itself, of course, an investment, because they are not, I realise, the most profitable bunch, but as has been shown over and over again, in the King's Road, in Notting Hill, in Dalston and Southwark: if you have or make available useable, accessible and above all affordable spaces where creative people can work and live and in particular also showcase their work, then the moneyed people will invariably follow. The difference is that without the people who make and create things you get corporate lets and sterile gated communities where people on two-year contracts watch HD TV and go to the gym before moving on to their next assignment in Singapore. With the ‘artists and creatives’, you still get those, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, indeed, you need a blend and after all, somebody has to come and engage with all the art, the music, the performance and the cinema that's being produced, but you also get the vibrancy and dynamics of a thriving culture. I think therefore that this is essentially a choice between: just going for the money and plonking down a soulless pseudo-village, or going for the character of an urban area and allowing the content to pull the money, thus creating a thriving, lasting, spirited mix of life.
So I’m coming around to answering the question in the affirmative. I think that maybe Earl’s Court is worth saving. I think the current masterplan can and should be rethought, that Earl's Court One at least should not have its current Certificate of Immunity from Listing (COIL) renewed but instead be protected from demolition and that the Earl's Court and West Kensington Opportunity Area ought to be developed as not just a commercial, but also conceptual and civic project that genuinely relates to, enhances and evolves earl's court as a cultural hub.
(I’d be seriously interested to know what other people make of it all. and here are some links to related websites):
the developers’ masterplan
a ‘causes’ page set up by people who want to save earl’s court
a tandem facebook page
a 'save earl's court' twitter feed (added July 2012)
a facebook page dedicated to c. howard crane, the architect of earl’s court
and his wikipedia entry
sebastian's website sebastian on facebook
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