Impression of how the One Museum Street/Selkirk House development could look

• THE very first design review panel described the tower proposal at the One Museum Street, Selkirk House, site as too big and bulky.

If this advice had been heeded we could have saved Camden Council’s planning department, the Save Museum Street campaign, and the environment a huge amount of wasted energy over the last two-and-a-half years.

We know what a huge, modern, tower block looks like behind a small run of conservation-grade Victorian shops. This is the visually uncomfortable situation we already have.

It seems likely that Camden will agree to let developers make things worse. That is, 74 metres high worse. And 200 steps from the British Museum! This is not what six million visitors a year come to see.

In trying to extract the maximum profit from the two parcels of land between New Oxford Street and High Holborn, every part of this proposal sacrifices sensible site uses to complicated, overblown, constructions with no regard to heritage, climate change or even practicality.

The volume of the tower necessitates an amount of housing which then entails the destruction of a collection of mostly listed buildings.

The result? Yet more offices in an area over-supplied with offices at a time when offices are going out of fashion.

The developer wants to sell expensive offices with high ceilings, thus requiring the demolition of the entire tower.

The inevitable amounts of engineering, concrete, steel, embodied carbon, CO2 emissions, noise, dust, heavy goods vehicles etc are staggering.

In 10 years’ time, people will look up at the ugly One Museum Street tower and wonder how on Earth it was allowed to be built just as we look at the (20 metres lower) Travelodge building now.

HELENA RODEN
Bury Place, WC1