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My nomination: The Westway through Paddington and Notting Hill in central London. For those who don't know the city, they had to build a 3.5 mile link road through densely population Victorian residential areas to join White City to Edgware Road back in the 1960's. A six-lane highway, on stilts, with many exit and entry roads, was built - and 700 houses had to be demolished to build it. What are other people's nominations for the most destructive building project the UK has ever seen?

(Hey, a differnt sort of thread here. Makes a departure from football, politics, and movies...).

Both Paternoster Squares (the 1960s one and the redeveloped one of the 90s). Both were/are devoid of life once the City closes... a waste of over a million square feet of buildings.


Buckingham Palace is pretty monstrous as well. Originally a town house built in the early 18th Century for the Duke of Buckingham it was extended by John Nash and Edward Blore.


Neither of the above, of course, caused the destruction of the number of homes you quote for the Westway, but both are deserving of being raised to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.

Any 1960s tower block. The social crime of the century. Bet none of the "architects" ever lived 23 storeys up with broken piss stained lifts and dodgy electrics and plumbing......

I agree that Paternoster Square, north of St Paul's Cathedral in London, was pretty brutal. So much so they knocked everything down 30 years after they built it and replaced it with, as you say, a new development. I'm not familiar with the new one, must check it out. That whole area was flattened by German bombs in the War, so they had no option but to rebuild.

Any post-war tower block, I agree with that. Barely any UK city wasn't blighted by those things. And everyone regrets it now. Have a look at a picture of the Westway at Paddington:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image ... ington.jpg

Try and imagine an old urban area where you live, or near it, and imagine a six lane continous highway, raised high in the air, being built through it. In addition to the 700 houses that were knocked down, many residential roads were simply cut in half. Some people have the top floor of their house just metres from the carriageway. You can also hear it humming half a mile away as the traffic nosie never stops.

Are these examples of redevelopment namby pamby-ism ?

On a more serious note, do people think this is a uniquely British phenomenon? Is it a consequence of the class system and decisions being made by people upon whom the consequences didn't impact and who disregarded the needs and sensitivities of the end users ? Did it happen to a similar degree in Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia ?

Bizarely, some post-war monstrosities actually get better with age. Trellick Tower in North Kensington, London - basically the less sulubrious end of Notting Hill - was the tallest High Rise in Britain when it was built and became a complete hell hole very quickly. Within a few years it was half empty. The building is enourmous - 31 floors high. But in the 1990's it became cool to live in it and the flats, now privately owned, are expensive to buy!

max_tranmere wrote:

> Bizarely, some post-war monstrosities actually get better with
> age. Trellick Tower in North Kensington, London - basically the
> less sulubrious end of Notting Hill - was the tallest High Rise
> in Britain when it was built and became a complete hell hole
> very quickly. Within a few years it was half empty. The
> building is enourmous - 31 floors high. But in the 1990's it
> became cool to live in it and the flats, now privately owned,
> are expensive to buy!


One of the flats is currently advertised on one of my favourite websites...

http://www.themodernhouse.net/docs/intr ... d=0:141:28

?225.000 for a rather pokey 2 bedroom flat

Sorry, my mistake, this isn't Trellick Tower in North Kensington, but the slightly smaller Balfron Tower in Poplar.

All were designed by the architect Erno Goldfinger who was a near neighbour of Ian Flemming. Flemming hated his architecture so much he gave one of his greatest villains the same surname.

It's interesting really about Trellick Tower, known as 'Colditz in the sky' back in the 1970's. In those days the stairwells were littered with heroin needles, women were raped in the corridors, the lifts were always broken and some old guy tried to scale the stairs instead. He got to the 6th floor then collapsed and died. Vandals were always letting of fire hydrants and on one occasion thousands of gallons of water poured into the lift shafts from one of the higher floors and the electricity for all 31 floors went out. Now, it has a consciege, a porter, security cameras, working lifts, etc. A nice place to live by all accounts. I dont think it was just the tallest High Rise in Britain but in the whole of Europe. The building is now listed aswell!