Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, on why the M&S demolition decision exposes a broken planning system and how we need urgent reform to safeguard heritage assets and reduce embodied carbon emissions.
Designed by Trehearne & Norman with WA Lewis, Orchard House was completed in 1930 and has been Marks & Spencer’s flagship Oxford Street store for decades.
The issues played out at Marks & Spencer’s Oxford Street are familiar to anyone who lives near a struggling high street, or a handsome landmark building with an uncertain future. How we re-use and transform existing buildings as a means of boosting regeneration is a national issue. Add to that the overwhelming sustainability case for re-thinking our outdated trash it and re-build approach, and you have one of the most controversial and high-profile planning cases in the last decade.
SAVE is calling for urgent reform to national planning policy after the government’s short sighted decision last week to allow M&S to demolish its flagship 1930s building for a replacement office block and ground floor food store, right next to world famous Selfridges. Our campaign triggered unprecedented media and public interest and has for the first time put climate and heritage firmly centre stage of the debate.
We demolish more than 50,000 buildings a year, and embodied emissions from the demolition and construction of buildings equates to 40 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 annually – more than emissions from aviation and shipping combined. The urgency is obvious. Just last month at COP29, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said 2024 had been “a masterclass in climate destruction”. At the same event, Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed the UK to an ambitious new target to slash carbon emissions by at least 81 per cent compared to 1990 levels. Yet, there is still no national policy on embodied carbon emissions. It’s a broken model that incentivises demolition and it needs to change.
By greenlighting the M&S proposals, the current government has chosen the easy option – business as usual – when it had a real chance to show leadership and ambition. We urgently need transparent rules around embodied carbon and demolition, bringing national policy up to date with the imperatives of the climate crisis.
Restored and transformed buildings have turbo-charged regeneration all over the country. Just look at the cultural powerhouse that is Tate Modern, other successfully converted department stores in London, Bournemouth, and Edinburgh or the great Pennine textile mills that are once again a driving force in their local economies as commercial space or homes.
Agile and forward-thinking property developers working in central London, like Seaforth Land, Fore Partnership and General Projects, say their tenants are increasingly demanding characterful commercial retrofits that ‘earn the commute’, not the outmoded glass and steel boxes, which come with a vast embodied carbon footprint attached. These arguments are already helping to change policy and practice in a material way. Several local authorities, including Westminster and the City of London, have begun introducing retrofit-first policies that require developers to consider re-use rather than automatically releasing the wrecking ball.
Just a few hundred meters from M&S on Oxford Street, a number of big stores are currently the subject of high-profile retrofits – including the former House of Fraser, another 1930s department store reopening as a mix of retail, restaurant and office uses, and the old Topshop at Oxford Circus which will be transformed into a flagship Ikea. TKMaxx has just opened a new store in a 1930s building a block away from M&S, and Foster + Partners is repurposing Fenwicks on Bond Street. These buildings are not museum pieces, they are evolving with the changing needs of shoppers and retailers in the 21st century.
It is wilfully myopic not to see that the elegant M&S building could play a similar role in the story of Oxford Street, whose fortunes are already on the up.
Source: Architecture Today
