The M&S department store on Oxford Street is expected to be demolished, but national heritage and conservation leaders have called for the execution to be suspended before it is torn down.
Heads of planning meet on Tuesday evening to decide if Marks & Spencer can send the bulldozers to tear down the building of Marble Arch built 68 years ago and replace it with a new nine storey building.
The food and fashion chain insists that the shop at the 458 of Oxford Street is “enormously inefficient” and suffers from a drop in sales, contrary to his much more modern Oxford Street shop.
It could be that they arrive at the typical London compromise, which is to demolish the building and keep the facade. There is a long well-informed article on this trend by Edward Heathcote, critic of architecture and design of the Financial Times.
Give some recent examples of this fashion.
The Chancery the former US Embassy in Grosvenor Square
Knightsbridge Estate located between Harrods and Harvey Nichols
Olympia Exhibition Center is about to be demolished, but the facade from the ’12 will be kept
Whiteleys the old department store was practically demolished but its facade still exists, behind a project by Foster and Partners
54 – 68 Oxford Street The facade of the 1910, by Charles Holden who also designed many subway stations, remains, the rest of the building is demolished.
These are just the famous and recent ones, but if you turn to London you will see that there are many ‘fake’ buildings. Will this be the fate of the old M&S?
