The Marshall Street development

• IF any deluded person thinks the planning permission process in Westminster is anything but a farce, I draw their attention to the monstrous development in Marshall Street and how little resemblance it bears to the planning permission applied for and granted in 2017.

Once upon a time this building was a generating station and nothing more. Then it became National Magazine House, when an unusually tasteful development added offices above the generating station and a layer of flats above that.

The offices kept beehives on a green space outside them, the flats had lovely balconies, and the entire edifice was six storeys high, well in keeping with surrounding buildings and neither dominating the often narrow surroundings streets nor looking incongruous.

Then in 2017 a planning application was circulated, for permission to totally alter the lower reaches of what had been National Magazine House and to add a seventh storey to the building.

I, among others, objected because I thought an extra storey would make the large area the building occupied too high; but the permission was granted.

Since then the developers have been very busy indeed. In fact they reached the seventh storey long ago, upon which they have built far higher slabs of concrete and a huge mass of metal scaffolding.

I haven’t the faintest idea how high this monstrous building will eventually become, and nobody has stopped them, nobody has done anything.

What has been erected now is totally and utterly out of keeping with the size of other buildings in the area and absolutely incongruous.

It is completely out of place and makes me weep for Soho every time I look at it (which, since I am unfortunately still in lockdown, is far more often than I would like).

Westminster planning? It’s to annihilate Soho along with the whole of the West End. We all know that. But does it also have to make it so ugly?

Out of the blue, when I went online on Tuesday, I found it smothered in material about 72 Broadwick Street and the fact that Shaftesbury had gained permission in 2019 for an enormous multiple-use development on that site.

This material is new to me. Neither I nor any of my neighbours has, to my knowledge, received any planning application details regarding this massive extension to the development.

Why not, when we were all circularised about the earlier and more modest version by a different developer? Without details nobody in the area could protest.

This is the city council at its most sickening. How could such an enormous development simply be allowed without reference to those living around it?

ALIDA BAXTER
Broadwick Street, W1