Organise To Save The Museum Of London!

The City of London Corporation – the local council for the square mile – owns the Museum of London and is closing this institution at the end of this year so that the current building can be demolished and replaced with two over-scaled office blocks. The Museum of London won’t be able to reopen at its new site in Smithfield for several years and its temporary shutdown is coming early and being extended* because the Corporation wants to bulldoze the building it is housed in as soon as possible.

Yesterday (3 March 2022) the Barbican Association (BA) held a meeting in St. Giles’ Church to discuss the City’s preliminary plans for London Wall West, currently the Museum of London/Bastion House site. The meeting was packed out with about 200 attending, so this is clearly something local residents – and not just those who live in the Barbican – care about.

Visitors to the Barbican Association meeting about London Wall West were greeted by artist Siu Lan Ko’s All That Is Air Melts Into Solid banner, originally created in 2017 for the Spectres of Modernism protest in nearby Golden Lane.

There were presentations by a number of speakers but here we will focus on what BA chair Adam Hogg had to say in both his speech and in answer to questions later.** Hogg implied consultations about the project between the council and residents have been a sham – nothing new there – and that the Corporation are simply interested in maxing out the profit they can make from the site. The Corporation wants two very large tower blocks on the site because they have an America bank – thought to be Morgan Stanley – willing to move into the new buildings once they are constructed and specifying the huge floor space they require.

The proposed buildings will degrade local heritage which includes not only the listed modernism of the Barbican but also Roman and medieval features – with St Paul’s Cathedral just a few minutes walk away. There would be a considerable loss of public space and it would no longer be possible to navigate uninterruptedly around the Barbican highwalk (part of the famous ‘streets in the sky’ aspect of the estate’s design). There would also be a major loss of light to both local residents and businesses. The carbon footprint aspects of the proposed project are also an issue with refurbishment of the current building being a better solution.***

The City of London will be applying to itself for planning permission and its planning committee is already notorious for its developer friendly ways – due in part to it being steered by individuals linked to property development – which is why residents have organised a petition and protests against it. The successful campaign to save Bevis Marks synagog from an over-scaled building casting it into shadow was discussed. Most were in agreement that to run a successful campaign against the destruction of London Wall West, objections needed to come in from beyond the City of London – although not mentioned in the meeting, it is largely due to the fact that 80% of its councillors are ‘elected’ on undemocratic business votes that this local authority habitually ignores the views of its residents.

At the BA meeting a variety of ideas were put forward for the Museum of London and Bastion House site. Our own view is that what is now the Museum of London should be transformed into a Museum of Money Laundering & Reputation Washing.**** As for Bastion House, it could be used temporarily to house the City of London Corporation (until all its functions are transferred to other bodies) before being converted into homes, freeing up the council’s Guildhall HQ so that this could be transformed into a museum exposing the horrors of slavery and colonialism. As we have explained before this would resolve the current impasse over what to do about the statues of the slavers William Beckford and John Cass on display in the building. While we object to many aspects of the Corporation’s Culture Mile project, what we are suggesting would actually fit very well with it.

Some other ideas about what to do when the Museum of London building is vacated are being put forward on the London Wall Best site. Discussion and democratic process should decide what happens, so the fight we have is not just about the Corporation using bulldozer tactics to push through its short-sighted plans, it is also about dismantling a local authority that has resisted democratic reform for too long and remains the last rotten borough in the UK.

Slide presentation by architect and Barbican resident Jan-Marc Petroschka during the London Wall West meeting.

Notes.

*Due to a variety of factors it is impossible to say when – if ever – the new Museum of London site will be ready for use. Our view is the Museum of London at London Wall West shouldn’t be closed until the new site is ready. Among the delay issues is the following as reported by the Financial Times (Meat traders wield centuries-old law to frustrate new Museum of London by James Pickford, 18 February 2022):

…the opening has also been put back by an intractable dispute between the corporation and the meat traders of Smithfield, where livestock has been brought to market since at least the 12th century. The impasse shines a light on the peculiar anachronisms of some of the City’s oldest institutions — and the impact they continue to have on 21st-century development projects.

The redevelopment of the long-vacant General Market building, once a fish-trading centre, represents only the first phase of the new museum. In the second stage, the museum will take over the adjacent Poultry Market. But this building is still fully occupied by working traders, some of whom have family links with the meat market going back generations.

One trader who asked not to be named said: “It’s a wonderful place for us to be. People come and visit. We’re in the right place — in the middle of everything.”

The City authority is backing the museum move with funding of nearly £200mn. It is asking the traders, its tenants on the site, to join the two other big London markets — Billingsgate and New Spitalfields — by decamping to a new facility 14 miles to the east at Dagenham Docks. But the Smithfields wholesalers, skilled at striking a bargain, are unhappy with the terms of the deal offered to them. And since the market’s role is protected by royal charter, moving it requires an act of parliament.

**The full list of speakers was: Averil Baldwin (chair), Adam Hogg (chair of BA), Jan-Marc Petroschka (architect and Barbican resident), Tom Dyckhoff (writer, broadcaster and historian of architecture, design and cities) and Peter Jenkinson (first national director of Creative Partnerships UK and Barbican resident). Peter Jenkinson’s speech included the following:

Imagine the newspaper headlines: “Within sight of St Paul’s Cathedral the richest local authority in the United Kingdom makes hundreds of millions of pounds by demolishing a public museum on an historic site and building out-of-scale offices for a private American investment bank.” It’s completely shameful…

Just before the first lockdown in 2020 my partner and I were visited by friends from Copenhagen one of whom was Tina Saaby. She had just retired as Copenhagen’s City Architect, a role that encompassed far more than architecture to include the city’s public and civic realm and the feel of the city. As we walked around the Square Mile at many times she was open-mouthed and genuinely shocked as she encountered the traffic jams, the multiple ferocious wind tunnels created by high-rise, low-quality buildings, the narrowness of the pavements, the paucity of generous and open civic and green space, the meanness of most office buildings at street level…and she kept asking “how did this happen?” and “who let this happen?”, questions that we are asking now more than ever before.

…we residents, sadly so often dismissed as being self-obsessed nimbys down in the weeds, are not all anti-development. Many of us recognise that we can’t stay stranded in the past and development is inevitable and sometimes needed and that, in some circumstances, there are going to be trade-offs and compromises. But we do expect and demand the right kind of development, as do the City’s workers and visitors who also have a stake in the post-pandemic future of this city…

So for now we should surely confidently demand that we go best rather than go west through openly and generously sharing our ideas, perspectives, proposals and reflections that suggest a different direction that matches the vision and imagination that led to the creation of the wonderful Barbican. That is what this gathering this evening is about.

Everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that the consultation process has been a joke, a total farce, patronising and dishonest. Once again our voices have been consistently ignored, our questions left unanswered, whilst the project carries on regardless.

***On top of the unnecessary carbon release from demolition, there is also the issue of the project seemingly being developed for Morgan Stanley who have been targeted by Extinction Rebellion because they invest in fossil fuels: “Extinction Rebellion (XR) gathered outside Morgan Stanley’s office on Waterloo street today, protesting the bank’s role as a financer of fossil fuel extraction. According to the group, JP Morgan is the biggest banking funder of fossil fuel extraction, 33% ahead of their nearest competitor Citibank spending $316b on businesses that destroy the environment.” XR host Trillion Bash protest outside Morgan Stanley by Luke Chafer, Glasgow Guardian, 2 November 2021.

****We are aware there is a risk that the City of London council establishment will object that museums document history and money laundering is an ongoing and still very profitable business in the square mile. Our view is it’s about time we made money laundering history.