UK supermarket chains habitually bawl at us with lurid plastic signage that is over-the-top unless you’re extremely myopic. We have windows blanked out with curling plastic, trip-hazard National Lottery signs, aisles that funnel you to places you don’t want to go, and brutally harsh strip-lighting redolent of a Stasi detention centre.
But M&S’s refurb of its Brixton store shows supermarkets needn’t be blots on the streetscape. Its once-faded art deco facade shines out like a welcoming beacon in buzzy Brixton. Inside and out, this store has been respectfully renovated, revealing its previously neglected heritage features while radically remodelling the retail space. Brixton is loving it.
So why is a chain enlightened enough to execute this dazzling retrofit in Brixton about to take the wrecking ball to its flagship store on London’s Oxford Street, only to replace it with a much larger 10-storey retail and office block?
Orchard House is a handsome 1929 stone building in the ‘Flatiron’ style with striking metal-frame windows. I’ll bet that whatever replaces it will be as utilitarian and architecturally meritless as the Primark building across the street.
Anyone with aesthetic judgement and common sense would retain and convert Orchard House. Yet deputy PM Angela Rayner, who was foolish enough to greenlight its demolition, and M&S CEO Stuart Machin defend its obliteration by trotting out the usual knock-it-down-and-start-again ‘sustainability’ blather. They ignore the fact that reducing Orchard House to rubble will instantly release almost 40,000 tonnes of embedded carbon, just for starters.
Along from Orchard House, the old Oxford Street House of Fraser is being renovated. Both edifices are unlisted, of a similar period, and in a style that presents building challenges. Other chains are also carrying out thoughtful retrofits. The old Topshop at Oxford Circus will reopen as a flagship Ikea. TK Maxx has just opened a new store in a 1930s building just a block away from Orchard House.
Britain will look back at the destruction of Orchard House as yet another monumental planning blunder based on hollow, discredited ‘green’ rhetoric. It’s long overdue that the M&S board steps in to halt this building gaffe. Can’t M&S reflect on its Brixton success and think again?
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