The next Shoreditch or just another Stratford? The £10bn plan to revitalise Earl’s Court

Another old part of London is to be spanking new again. Eleven years after the exhibition centre was demolished, 160 years after the railways arrived, over 900 years since the de Vere family first built their eponymous manor house, Earl’s Court is being remade from the cleared earth.

Will it work? Will the new Earl’s Court become a funky and valuable Shoreditch for west London, as hoped? Or will it be just another tired collection of ugly and modernist towers marching mindlessly into a 1960s version of the future, like Nine Elms, Battersea or Stratford?

It’s hard to tell from the computer-generated images with which the developer, a joint venture between Transport for London and Delancey costing £10bn, have studded their enormous planning application. In the CGI world, towers don’t create wind effects, it is always sunny, the trees are always in leaf and the crowds are always copious.

But will the future be better than the past?

Earl’s Court’s origins are Norman and thuggish. Albericus de Vere was a French knight gifted this slice of Middlesex countryside when he made the wise decision to accompany William the Conqueror in 1066. Albericus’s descendants, subsequently earls of Oxford, owned the estate for over 500 years and the manor house and farm they built and leased, gave the neighbourhood its comital name.

Earl’s Court’s name may be aristocratic. But everything else in its history is commercial, accidental and plebian. The history of modern west London is the history of the great estates, above all the Grosvenors, who owned the freeholds and leased out the streets and squares to a collection of joiners, masons and speculators who built west London grandly to the Grosvenor’s ducal designs and patterns.

But not Earl’s Court. Its ownership descended into a motley collection of brewers, vintners and publicans who fitfully created a scruffy village around a malthouse where Earl’s Court tube station now stands.

The trains made the difference. Their arrival in the 1860s transformed the surrounding orchards and market gardens into valuable real estate, subsequently built out in a charming tissue of high density but finely grained crescents and squares. What would today be monotonous tunnels of ‘development’ are humanised with indulgent decoration and detail: domestic red brick and Italianate stucco, rusticated pilasters, Doric and Ionic porticoes, cornices and corbels, paterae and aedicules. My favourite is Philbeach Gardens, which curves sinuously and embraces the communal garden at its heart.

But the trains’ blessing was mixed. They connected most of the neighbourhood but isolated a portion. For the two new train lines running east-west and south-north created a wedge-shaped land parcel which, unlike the surrounding streets, was hard to reach, an inshore island marooned by tracks. What to do with it?

A Leeds-born polyglot, John Robinson Whitley, had the insight. Easy to reach from across London but hard to reach locally, the answer was to create a show. He hosted spectaculars celebrating the Wild West (with American showman Buffalo Bill), Italy, France and Germany. The success was runaway. Queen Victoria visited, a fact unlikely to be celebrated in new Earl’s Court but which is recalled in the name of one nearby street, Empress Place, which the previous developer crassly wished to demolish.

Whitely left Britain and mounted comparable attractions in Le Touquet. But other empresarios and exhibitions followed, celebrating everything from imperial India and Old Japan to Shakespeare’s England.

From 1894 to 1907 a giant Ferris wheel at Earl’s Court was one of London’s great sites. Belgian refugees sheltered here. Boats and cars were shown and bought. The 2012 Olympics played volleyball. A dense infrastructure of servicing shops and suppliers emerged until in 2014, with the promise of homes and ‘regeneration’, all was demolished. Eleven years on, nothing has been built, one of the most visible scandals of our failed development and planning system.

So what next? Thousands of pages of application have been submitted. But it’s not easy being a developer in modern London. So great is the undersupply of homes that developers face density targets, and implied values, that push to elephantine scale and height. So great are the obligations placed on developers by two layers of planning authority, that new development must bear many costs.

Worst of all, most of their architects are trapped in the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of modernism, mentally unable to analyse the very predictable data on what architecture most people like or where they are happiest. This is why most new development remains ‘pastiche modernism’ free of texture and ornament and bereft of organic forms and sculpture. Acres of repetitive ‘spreadsheet architecture’ with no pattern, little variety and few of the symmetries and symbols that most of us probably prefer and in which we will pay more to live.

This is the fate Earl’s Court risks unless the developer is wise enough to fire the usual architects for the later phases and instead hire those who actually know how to ask the people what they like and care about the answers.

The good news is that some planning committees are starting to demand beautiful and popular buildings, buoyed up by the growing evidence of what most people like and value. In 2017, Create Streets even ran indicative polling near Earls Court which showed how much more popular were traditional streets to featureless modernism.

Increasingly, London’s regeneration schemes are blessed with texture and ornament not mere faceless lumps. Notably, Francis Terry’s exquisite improvements to Hans Place, the new Marylebone Place, the hugely improved new King’s Walk shopping centre and St Mary’s Church on Lambeth Walk.

In Europe, there are even more reasons to hope. Developers and architects are increasingly liberating themselves from failed 1950s traffic-modernism and regenerating neighbourhoods with real delicacy and delight. We are re-learning how to create ‘walking architecture’ and streets which charm and don’t depress. Plessis-Robinson near Paris and Brandevoot in the Netherlands are the best large urban regenerations.

Phase one of Earl’s Court is already cooked but let us hope that the later phases dare to differ and dare to be beautiful.

Nicholas Boys Smith is the founding chairman of Create Streets. His history of London’s streets No Free Parking is available from Telegraph Books.