High street, Layton road, Morrison’s tower block and the Francis Crick Institute
Brentford as we all know is an anything goes dumping ground which the council appears more than happy to accommodate. I could go into specifics about only for rent tower blocks failing every local requirement, the historical and traditional height of Brentford being 4 stories, ‘enabling’ developments only enabling high profit margins, but such things fall on apparently deaf ears.So, no matter how much we point out the council is not fulfilling its fundamental requirement to act in the best interest of the residents, or its legal requirement to bring pollution under control, we are likely to end up in a few years time with a hopelessly overdeveloped town. Abu Dhabi Workers City number 2 keeps coming to mind.With this thought, perhaps then we should look at the architecture and style of town we’re going to end up with. A problem with massed building over a short time is that it all tends to a similar design. Looks very ‘now’ when first built, a bit crap a few years later and desperately in need of knocking down shortly thereafter. Examples that spring to mind are any town center built in the 1960’s (concrete), the 70’s (concrete with patterns), 80’s (bright red window frames). More recently it’s been full glass frontings or trendy creams and greys. Cream is not good for any building in a polluted environment, Grey is well its grey, and the all glass effect is immediately ruined by the chap on the seventh floor who hanging his pants out the window to dry. The Layton Road images show all brick buildings, and incidentally if you divide the number of flats into the number of buildings they're giving a false impression of the height. The Western side of the canal and the island is also predominantly brick, as are many other proposals. The brick type is always sand based, which tends to brown and yellow in colour. London brick of course is clay based, more expensive, but traditional red and oranges. Brentford’s history revolves around the rivers and the canal so the wood facing of historical warehouses and clap board houses seen in our Victorian town photographs really should feature at least somewhere. Actually, on the other side of the Brent to me on the Island there is one single row of houses with black wood facing, and in a mass of nothingness architecture it looks incredibly different and very nice. Building material to one side, the actual designs we’re presented with are monotonously as cheap as possible and maximizing size and height to the absolute limit. Marketing then includes any reference to green or eco that can tenuously be made, use of landmark or iconic to excuse something absurdly big or high, plenty of photographs of Kew and equally many photographs of the Butts. One even has a picture of my front door and bay trees to show how leafy the area is, which I thought a bit much as if I’d known I’d have put a sign on the door saying the flight path for a thousand planes a day onto a third Heathrow runway is 300m above this and every door in Brentford - and our council appears very keen on it.Good building design, along with appropriate and historically contextual development is completely achievable and would be welcome, but just not for Brentford as we’re in the ‘cheap as possible at maximum profit’ category and have a council that strangely appears to have an agenda at odds with the wishes of the local population. Good to see the recent evolutions of accountability within our legal system though, so perhaps things might yet be bought under control.Room for one small joke which I’m sure someone would have said before, but I hope it wasn’t standing room only at the support Jeremy Corbyn curry night.
Lorne Gifford ● 3703d0 Comments ● 3703d