Intervening in the local planning process, the mayor of London is creating a exclusive, divided city of private enclaves, designed for the rich.
Mount Pleasant, a gentle rise between Kings Cross and Farringdon in north London, has always been something of a misnomer. From the 16th to the 19th century, it was home to a stinking heap of rubbish and human excrement.1 The great dump was finally cleared in 1794 to make way for an imposing brick prison, the notorious Clerkenwell Gaol,2 where inmates were forced to grind treadmills and pick oakum amid overflowing sewers. It was cleared again in the 1880s for a gargantuan postal sorting office, the largest in the world at the time, which has stood as a majestic shed ever since.
The three-hectare site next to the sorting office is now subject to a planning application for 700 mostly private flats, to be erected in a series of hefty blocks rising up to 15 storeys, which will frame narrow canyons of “public” space in their shadow. Architects should usually be praised for being contextual, but it seems they might have taken the rubbish-dump-prison analogy too far.
“It's like a fortress,” says Edward Denison of the Mount Pleasant Forum, the local residents' association that has been battling this oversized scheme for the past few months. “It's an exclusive development that completely turns its back on the surrounding area, essentially sticking two fingers up at those that live around it. It's the profoundly cynical result of trying to cram as many units on to the site as possible.”
The application, submitted by the recently privatised Royal Mail Group to Islington and Camden councils, whose boundary the site spans, has garnered an increasing amount of hostility, with designer and local resident Thomas Heatherwick now joining the calls to see it halted.
“This proposal is downright lazy – cheap, bland, generic and misconceived,” he wrote to the council this month.3 “The developer is going to make a vast amount of money from this project, but what is being offered in return is empty, cynical and vacuous.”