A Mayfair Medley

Matt Bell

Corporate Affairs Director, Grosvenor UK and Ireland In July 1933, a group of architects got together on a boat from Marseilles to Athens and came up with a charter that championed the idea of separating uses. Le Corbusier and his mates agreed that housing, work, recreation and commerce should be strictly separated in the interests of public health.

[Top Left] Arrival from Oxford Street. [Top Right] Brook Street, South Molton Lane. [Bottom Left] Davies Street looking south. [Bottom Right] South Molton Lane.

Their logic was born partly from a time when TB ravaged Europe, just as Covid-19 does today. That school of modernism produced some wonderful architecture but as urban planners they gave us gems like Brasilia and it took us a long time to escape their instinct to separate uses.

In December last year, in the midst of a pandemic once more, Westminster City Council approved a scheme to redevelop the South Molton Triangle. It’s an area just beside Bond Street tube station in central London, connecting the Oxford Street District to Mayfair.

For years, this has felt like a dank purposeless junction. There’s a fashion in design circles for praising messiness, which I get, but this area really isn’t full of interesting urban juxtapositions. Just bad paving. It’s somewhere you dive down to reach the Running Horse pub or more recently a little Italian cafe on the corner.

So consent for half a billion pounds' worth of investment in the Triangle is fantastic news, not just for this corner of Mayfair but for everything it says about West End recovery. It was the biggest application Westminster has seen during lockdown, providing 35 new shops, elegant public realm adjacent to the new Elizabeth Line station and a 56% increase in office workspace. (That’s right – an increase in office space).

Despite those numbers, the feel of the design work is wonderfully low-key. Less sleek and determinedly modern than Fitzroy Place. More like Wickside in scale and character but less focused on the residential element.

There’s a 31-bed hotel and six new suites above the pub and retained facades of some lovely heritage buildings. BDP created the designs for a healthy dose of pedestrianisation, more trees and spaces for bikes, as well as consolidated servicing by electric vehicles.

It’s a proper old urban jumble. None of that dogma that blighted the Athens Charter. But the promise of some handsome human streets brought back to life. A fantastic way to end 2020 and good reason to feel positive about what the future will bring.