Amongst the ubiquitous townhouses in the Clerkenwell Green conservation area, there is an anomaly. 15 Clerkenwell Close is a crisscross of rough brick and fossilised limestone. A replica Grecian column lies, purposefully abandoned, at the front of the property. Ivy is weaving its way over the ground floor.
£4.65 million project faces wrecking ball
This is not a building site – it’s the £4.65 million project of award-winning architect Amin Taha and, despite looking unfinished, it was completed in 2017.
It comprises Taha’s top-floor family home, offices for his architectural practice, Groupwork, and seven other apartments, most of which have already been sold.
It faces the baroque St James’s church and the heart of the Clerkenwell conservation area. But it also faces the wrecking ball. Islington Council have issued Taha with an imminent demolition order that is currently under appeal, with a verdict yet to be decided.
Clashing personalities and disagreements with Islington’s planning system have delivered a damning sentence for 15 Clerkenwell Close. At first, there was confusion – the planning documents for the building were not uploaded to Islington Council’s portal, and it was claimed they had been lost.
Council says building looks very different compared with original plans
Then, the documents at the centre of the dispute were rediscovered – councillors claim that the finished building looks very different to the one that was granted planning permission.
Martin Klute, vice-chairman of Islington Council’s planning committee, told the Islington Tribute: “The building looks nothing like the approved drawings. Design is a matter of taste but I’ve not met anyone who has said it’s an appropriate design next to a grade I-listed church. The building is awful.”
Many would disagree. The Guardian’s architecture critic Rowan Moore describes it as “poetry set in stone… people like Taha are working hard to raise our experiences of the built environment. Councils should not be in the business of crushing them.”
Few buildings in recent history have been so applauded and reviled. A Financial Times article deemed it “the most sophisticated, witty and thoughtful new building in London” and it has already won a prestigious award from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and been shortlisted for a Dezeen Award.
“Rough, ugly and detrimental to the conservation area”
Conversely, the council said it’s “rough, ugly and detrimental to the conservation area” and residents complained, with one saying it is an “absolute abomination.”
These residents, Taha says, live 3 or 4 streets away from the building. Moreover, the vitriol against it has more to do with aesthetics than legality.
At its core, the debate surrounding Taha’s building is more than just a disagreement over an ugly façade on a block of flats. It’s about heritage, development and the preservation of Clerkenwell’s conservation area.
There have been several significant clashes between heritage and modernity in London developments of late. New Hall, the controversial student hall of residence on Caledonian Road completed in 2013, similarly divided public opinion.
It was granted planning permission on the proviso that its original Victorian façade was maintained, meaning that the new, grey block of a building has been placed behind it, detached. Many of the student rooms stare blankly at the brick wall of the original façade – and have limited natural light.
It was a planning misstep of epic proportions in an attempt to preserve the heritage of the area. New Hall won the 2013 Carbuncle Cup for the worst building of the year.
“You can enhance a historic jumble of buildings…by adding something new.”
Owen Hatherley, the author and architectural journalist, wrote in The Architectural Review that, “similar schemes to New Hall can be found everywhere in the UK, fragments made meaningless by the changes all around them.”
A dogmatic obsession with new buildings being “in keeping” with the context of an area is meaningless, he argues. “You can enhance a historic jumble of buildings, not by imitation, but by adding something new.”
It is clear from hearing Taha talk about the rationale for the design of 15 Clerkenwell Close that it was planned with thoroughness, consideration and sensitivity. It has a pebble garden, landscaped by Taha himself, but owned by the Council and open to the public.
Taha’s plans for the site include a lengthy analysis of all the buildings that have occupied it previously, dating back to an 11th century Norman Abbey. Far from an erasure of the heritage of Clerkenwell’s conservation area, Taha says he has tried to design a building that has a heightened sensitivity to the history of the area.
“The result is a truly bespoke, hand crafted work of art”
“The thoroughness and care that has gone into every thought and every inch of the project crossed the border of obsession very early in the process,” RIBA wrote on the building’s prizewinning profile. “The result is a truly bespoke, hand crafted work of art, but one that has a grace and balance suggesting that the obsession was harnessed.”
Taha has appealed against the council’s demolition order, but the verdict keeps getting pushed back. It was due to be decided in March, but as this article went to press Taha announced it has been further delayed to July.
The debate has been ongoing since Islington Council issued Taha with an initial demolition order in 2017, which ordered him to tear down the building and replace it with one made of brick, rather than the raw quarried limestone he chose for the current design.
It was dropped after the planning documents for the building re-appeared. A second demolition order was issued in February 2018.
“It just prolongs the process. They keep moving it down the line,” he says. “What’s happened here is that a series of small administrative failures have added up to create the situation we find ourselves in now. And then you get the scrutiny.” Taha is fed up of talking about it, having given countless interviews since press coverage of the controversy started soon after the building’s completion.
“It’s now a face-saving notice…driven by someone’s opinion that it’s ugly.”
“The decision [to issue a demolition order] is based entirely on the opinion of the councillor and a handful of neighbours”, Taha told Dezeen magazine. “It’s now a face-saving notice entirely driven by someone’s opinion that it’s ugly.”
When asked to respond, Islington Council were not available for comment.
Has this put Taha off building in London’s conservation areas? Definitely not.
“It’s not difficult to get planning permission for sites next to listed buildings… even to build contemporary extensions to listed buildings,” he says. “We’ve had plenty of success with that in the past and I’m sure we’ll continue to.” Taha’s other recent projects include the modernisation of a 1950s terrace in Bayswater and the restoration of a parade of 18th-century buildings on Islington’s Upper street.
Whatever the fate of 15 Clerkenwell Close, Taha has inadvertently played a seismic role in London’s changing architectural narrative.
As Hatherley states in the Architects Journal, “15 Clerkenwell Close shows that you can build with history, avoiding either pointless flash or dull copying. New ideas about how to build in historic areas of London could start from here.” Perhaps 15 Clerkenwell Close is a cue for London to look forward, not back.
