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Nancye Goulden Award 2019
Paintbox Studios | Coffeeology
Environment Award 2015
Dorsett Hotel
Environment Award 2008
Maggie's centre
Conservation Award 2012
St Peters Church
Conservation Award 2017
Bush Theatre
Conservation Award 2015
Hammersmith Station
Environment Award 2015
Waldo Road, College Park
Nancye Goulden Award 2022
The Elder Press Cafe
Conservation Award 2010
St Paul's church
Nancye Goulden Award 2018
St Paul's Girls School Pavilion
Nancye Goulden Award 2003
Ravenscourt Park walled garden
Environment Award 2018
Queen's Wharf & Riverside Walk
Nancye Goulden Award 2021
245 Hammersmith Road Landscaping
Environment Award 2018
TV Centre redevelopment
Tom Ryland Award for Conservation 2019
St. Augustine's Church
Nancye Goulden Award 2013
The Ginger Pig
Nancye Goulden Award 2018
2A Loftus Road
Conservation Award 2011
20 St Peter’s Square
Special Award 2015
The Eventim Apollo
Environment Award 2010
Burlington Danes School
Nancye Goulden Award 2014
Temple Lodge
Nancye Goulden Award 2019
Hammersmith Grove Parklets
Environment Award 2021
Quaker Meeting House
Nancye Goulden Award 2011
Phoenix School Caretaker’s House
Environment Award 2016
Dunnhumby building
Nancye Goulden Award 2017
20 St James Street
Tom Ryland Award for Conservation 2021
Mission Hall, Iffley Road
Environment Award 2022
The Palladium, Shepherds Bush Green
Jane Mercer Award 2022
The Green Project (Shepherds Bush)
The Society seeks to preserve and enhance the architecture and urban environment in Hammersmith by promoting public interest in, and campaigning for, an improved townscape [ more]
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The office of Beata Heuman
See Beata Heuman and House and Garden
Nominated by a member who says “There are often members of the public taking photos of this building, especially at night, as it is beautifully lit as well as sympathetically restored. It is a joy to walk by. The small “Wildlife” Garden is very well tended and is a great addition to having some plants and greenery to admire along this road”
The Sindercombe Social has had an interesting makeover for 2024 with a Ziggy Stardust-inspired “youth club vibe”.
It’s rather a contrast to the work undertaken to The Defectors Weld to improve their façade on the opposite corner of the green. Ziggy famously shocked his fans by falling to Earth with his ‘Spiders from Mars’ in the nearby Hammersmith Odeon, on 3rd July 1973.
We’ve reported on progress of this substantial development three times over the last two years; the plans are now complete and public, with 385 documents under planning reference 2023/03129/FUL. We’ve been in regular contact with the developers and attended meetings, as have the immediately neighbouring residents, and groups including Residents Associations either side – Ravenscourt Square – and our affiliate in Ravenscourt Gardens RA. These public consultations are summarised in the proposal’s Statement of Community Engagement on the planning portal.
We’ve said publicly many times that rescuing and repurposing this Grade II* set of hospital buildings is most welcome, but as usual, not at any cost. We review the proposal in that mindset. On the plus side, it’s a relatively sensitive proposal without the usual gross overbuilding we see in almost every other development. The team has engaged widely and openly with interested community groups, and many of our concerns have been considered and several addressed in the plans now proposed.
We welcome the refurbishment of this precious building, and appreciate the care that has been taken in the design of the alterations necessary for the new residential use; however we still have some significant concerns, most of which have been expressed in previous updates and are summarised as follows:
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The council has reworked several pieces of longstanding planning work, and is asking for feedback from you in a series of consultations – details in our diary. We’ve been keen to progress this matter for a while, and it’s good to see new activity. Firstly we should set the historical context, to better understand how we got here, what’s new, and not so new.
Longstanding members will recall the 2008 Flyunder proposals that were developed originally by the West London Link group of architects and Hammersmith BID, including our former chairman Tom Ryland as a leading light, and then presented to the London Festival of Architecture that year. A significant part of that plan involved a reworking of Hammersmith to face more towards the river, by removing the awkward A4 spur road to the Broadway (seen above), and connecting King Street to St Paul’s Church, creating a much better and more identifiable ‘centre’. The flyunder would have been funded by building over what is now the A4, linking the roads cut in the 1950’s. This website maintains a series of articles under the flyunder tag, that details some of this work, along with the WLL website above which includes a detailed archive and feasibility study from the time.
The potential money ran out fairly spectacularly a year later when the finance industry melted down, but the whole issue had its first revival in 2011 when the flyover closed and was thought to be doomed. However the 2012 Olympics came to the rescue, because, as those imbued in the dark arts of Olympic transport will know, there are very strict maxima laid down for journey times between Olympic venues, no doubt causing the Parisians sleepless nights ahead of this year’s games. Without a flyover, the time to the western venues such as the rowing in Eton would be easily exceeded. That logic led to the special Olympic Travel Lanes, of which there is still the odd vestige if you know where to look. The flyover, as a piece of critical Olympic transport infrastructure, was patched up quicker than you can say ‘Hammersmith Bridge’, and then said to be good for about another fifty or sixty years.
The Hammersmith Residents Working Party was an early version of what came to be called resident-led commissions, which produced the Grimshaw report of 2019 addressing the central Hammersmith regeneration area. Sadly due to the range of topics covered and the divergent nature of the competing demands and constraints, the HRWP couldn’t agree the outcomes in the report and it was never adopted as a Town Centre Supplementary Planning Document as intended.
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Under the banner ‘Taking a View’, from time to time, we’re pleased to publish articles by members on a subject of their choice, which they believe will be interesting to the wider membership.
Earlier in the year, we wrote about the parlous state of some shopfronts in the borough, giving some examples of better practice. The story was part-inspired by affiliate BRA’s activities and those of our members, in appealing to the council for enforcement of existing planning regulations. We note that this issue is not specific to LBHF – there’s been a rising tide of graffiti across London, even recently reported in Barnes.
In this follow-up, two members detail particular issues and the enforcement actions they’ve been working on with the council and with our encouragement and support.
If you have an article you would like to be considered, please send it to .
Articles are unedited personal viewpoints, and may not always represent the views of the Society
There should of course be an obvious answer to the question of what constitutes a park Summer’s faded into a distant memory, so it’s a good time to take stock, with a season of site visits, reviews of virtual CGI, and actual wooden models of new developments in full swing, showing the newly alluring sunlit ‘park’ images, here in our mid-winter. So far, these suggest that many a developer has rather different idea to us, but perhaps it’s just a naming thing.
Without even considering Wormwood Scrubs, we have several wonderful parks in H&F, the largest of which – Ravenscourt and Bishop’s Parks – provide for almost every conceivable outdoor leisure need, even including exhibitions and Laser shows. From basketball nets in the north to a paddling pool in south, taking in sufficient space to play several team games – of football or cricket – in the middle, tennis courts, toddlers playgrounds, dog exercise areas north and south, popular all-weather football pitches adjacent, and greenhouses and community gardening alongside. Even a renovated and listed Tea House. And that’s just Ravenscourt Park.
Bishop’s Park has a Grade I listed palace adjacent, the river and riverwalk too. This gives us a pretty comprehensive idea of the purposes of a park. We even have possibly the world’s smallest park, Beckett Wharf Park, between the bridge and Riverside Studios. One of our members, has recently worked with Kier Construction to renovate it as part of a community contribution.
The Open Spaces Society, to which we’re affiliated, noted recently that parks are under unprecedented pressure from commercial activities, and we a little of that here with fairs, concerts and so on, but those are modest by comparison with say, Hyde Park, where a good part is cordoned off for most of the summer for the huge ‘BST’ outdoor concerts. Even so, some damage occurs as the photo adjacent shows.
Perhaps we’ll get a better feel for the modern take on a ‘park’ or open space by looking at recent developments? Kings Cross seems a reasonable place to start, with the possibility to do what it likes with public spaces and presumably with few budgetary constraints. The ‘park’ shown adjacent is about the size of a communal garden of the type you might find in Notting Hill, the difference being that this is expected to be shared by a thousand or more people, the original by perhaps a hundred or two. There is perhaps no coincidence that the name of this example is connected to one of the great 18th century builders, Cubitt, rather than a name we might choose, say, Capability Brown.
A review of some proposed new developments we’ve looked at might help. We don’t have to go far for CGI proposals, and to compare then with some recently built. Mayoral Opportunity Areas, notably Old Oak and it’s environs provide good hunting grounds, in addition to those actually in the borough. The evidence suggests that developers, rather than producing fanciful CGI’s, might perhaps go and visit some of the many Victorian and Edwardian parks around us to see what they do, and what their public values might reasonably look like.
Which one of these new developments has the space to play a team game of some sort or an individual game of tennis? Or any of the other activities listed above? Perhaps one.
Increasing physical activity must be a central part of everything we do
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The council held a planning committee meeting on 5th December, as noted in our Hammersmith Weekly email, with the majority of the agenda devoted to the market redevelopment proposal. Officers have recommended consent.
After a short speech by one objector, following on from a rather longer exposition of the proposal by the planning officer and daylight consultant, the meeting was spectacularly derailed by protesters related to a group called ‘Protect Shepherd’s Bush Market’, and then cancelled.
We first engaged with the developers in October 2020, and most of the committee has been to one or more of the four exhibitions in various locations in the market over the last three years. The development hasn’t changed significantly over this time, it was born as a large set of buildings, somewhat awkwardly dropped into the Old Laundry Yard. We made our observations public back in April.
We followed up with a letter to the planners in August when the plans had been published and we’d reviewed them, detailing a significant number of issues that need to be addressed before any consideration of consent, these being:
We were pleased to hear the independent daylight specialist’s review at the start of the planning meeting, addressing one of the concerns. This shows that there are some daylight issues, but they appear fairly modest for neighbours. However one or two locations will be significantly affected in and around Pennard Mansions, and mitigation needs to be provided, in addition to proper consideration of the likely limited daylight in the market, due to the size of the proposed overshadowing building – point 4. The meeting ended abruptly before we’d heard answers to the other equally important issues that we’d raised.
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Today we announce Hammersmith Weekly, an email containing a roundup of news focussed on our shared interest in the built and natural environment in Hammersmith. Responding to feedback from our continuous member survey and the related AGM announcement that we no longer intend to print newsletters in pre-pandemic form, it’s a pick of the week, curated and concise version of selected additions to our Local and Affiliate news, and new Architecture and Construction news pages over the last 7 days, plus excerpts of any of our own articles published in the week. For completeness, we’ve added our upcoming diary events and selected Tweets addressing relevant matters of interest for Hammersmith and nearby.
We’ll continue to send our normal Society update emails accompanied by editorial for members and supporters when we publish our own articles; Weekly is a separate and optional email to save you trawling through so many of the available websites and emails. You can expect a dozen or so short curated excerpts in a weekly email, with links to the source websites for the full stories – example adjacent. Please consider supporting the third party sources directly if you’re interested in their content. Sign up here 👇
A reminder of how our local news page works: where available, we automatically syndicate news from the websites of our affiliate organisations, plus a number of other relevant local and nearby public sources, including mention of ‘Hammersmith’, ‘OPDC’, ‘Old Oak’ or ‘Shepherds Bush’ in Parliament and by the GLA, and Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s Cabinet, Economy, Arts, Sports, and Public realm PAC, plus Planning committee feeds.
As the example adjacent shows, we’ve been testing it on ourselves and refining it for a month or two now, and recent topics have included: TfL funding, several questions in the House about the funding of HS2 and Hammersmith bridge, Council cabinet and planning meeting updates, London Forum updates on local planning reform, matters that affect London in the King’s speech in parliament, the Leaning Lady statue (to which we pledged £500), an update on Fulham Town Hall, improvements to Google Maps to include safer cycling routes, updates on OPDC approval of more 55 storey towers, threats to London parks from commercial exploitation, an update from Coningham police panel, Wormwood Scrubs PSPO, and Brackenbury area flooding.
If you’re NOT already a member or supporter, subscribing to our emails, please sign up here.
If you ARE already a member or supporter receiving our emails, please go to an email we’ve sent you – any will do – and click on the “update preferences” link in the footer. This will take you to a personalised page where MailChimp will offer to send you an update email, so you can add Hammersmith Weekly to your preferences, like so:
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One news item from each selected source – more on our Local and Affiliate news page. Subscribe to our weekly highlights
Our small offering to citizen science: HF5 (Town Centre:Broadway), HF4 (Shepherds Bush) & HF7 (edge of Frank Banfield Park) are so-called 'Regulatory Air Quality Monitoring Sites', Breathe London sites are currently unavailable.'Traffic light' colour scheme information here.
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