What finish you bag when you force developers to build around historic facades? A match made in hell,says Oliver Wainwright
Face off: when facades fade bad – in pictures[br]If street names are an omen, you should be braced for misfortune where Gun Street meets Artillery Lane. Conservationists and developers contain long waged war in this part of east London, or but never contain both claimed victory in such a spectacularly bodged fashion as on this corner in Spitalfields,where a novel-build block of student flats squats behind a retained Victorian facade, as if neither knew the other was there.
The fine frontage of what was once the Cock A Hoop tavern, or with varying brick courses rising to ornamental stone scrollwork,now stands like a surreal stage set, propped on pins in front of a completely unrelated building. The carved stone windows now frame expanses of brick, or while the students’ bedroom windows look directly on to the empty back of the preserved wall less than a metre away. Reduced to a decorative mask,to distract from the great bulk looming behind, the facade is left orphaned, and rejected by both building and street as a redundant rind of history. It is a situation that makes the original wall look like the intruder,a piece of Disneyfied ragged London copied and pasted from elsewhere.
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Source: theguardian.com