A diary entry on layers within layers and a site that has already been rebuilt at least twice
Monday, A Redevelopment That Is Actually A Second Redevelopment
Cadogan’s redevelopment scheme at 30 to 33 Sloane Street, alongside 2 Hans Crescent and the ground floor of 49 Pavilion Road, is currently reconfiguring these buildings to deliver new retail space, offices, and a top floor restaurant, and I want to note something the current construction coverage mostly skips past: the buildings actually being redeveloped right now were themselves built in 1924, replacing an earlier row of eighteenth century houses that originally occupied this exact site.
This means the current construction hoardings represent not a single moment of change but the second significant rebuilding this specific stretch of Sloane Street has undergone, eighteenth century domestic housing giving way to 1924’s Neo-Georgian commercial buildings, now themselves being reconfigured again for an entirely different twenty-first century retail and office model.
Monday Afternoon, Why This Layered History Changes How I See The Hoardings
Walking past construction hoardings usually reads as simply forward motion, but understanding this specific site’s actual layered history reframes the current work as one further chapter in an ongoing, considerably longer cycle of reinvention rather than any single definitive transformation.
Tuesday, A Small Detail About The Original Architects
The 1924 buildings were designed by Robert Angell and Curtis in Neo-Georgian style, a detail I find myself wanting to research further specifically regarding how much of their original design intent survives within the current reconfiguration plans.
A Site Worth Watching As Its Third Chapter, Not Its First
Whatever this current redevelopment ultimately produces, I think it deserves understanding as this site’s third significant identity rather than treating the coming changes as entirely without precedent.
I also spent some time comparing surviving photographs of the 1924 facade against the current redevelopment renderings, curious how much of that Neo-Georgian character the new scheme intends to preserve versus simply referencing stylistically in its new construction.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
