The handsome frontage of The Somers Town Goods Yard [The Midland Railway Study Centre, Derby www.midlandrailwaystudycentre.org.uk]

• A STUNNING old iron gate to the Somers Town Goods Yard is being sold off by a salvage merchant. This is a remnant of the St Pancras railway heritage.

Unlike St Pancras the Somers Town Goods Yard was not spared the demolition, despite boasting walls of gothic arches and intricate iron gates.

In the last few years people have watched as three locally listed buildings were demolished; some 80 Gilbert Bayes 1930s finials disappeared; and the beautiful goods yard wall. More demolition than the World War II managed here.

St Pancras and King’s Cross have retained their heritage in creative ways: and you can still find ironwork gates incorporated into Camley Street Natural Park and at the station. But Somers Town’s is demolished or stolen.

Yet our heritage clearly has value to the salvage merchants and auction houses that regularly sell bits off.

The amazing structure of the goods yard once stood near Phoenix Road, now replaced by the British Library and the Francis Crick Institute.

Camden Council has HS2 funds to “green” landscape and “people” (sic) Phoenix Road; a competition is being run for creatives.

Here is an opportunity to incorporate in an innovative manner the heritage of the area. The gates honour an identity and working class culture, and the family members who worked there.

This would also be a tribute to the goods yard itself, which supplied the whole of London with produce, on rails, not road: “a brilliant Victorian logistics solution” (Anthony Reeve) that today’s council planners devising pollution and traffic congestion measures can only gasp at with envy.

Incorporating heritage gives a sense of place that no end of “consultations”, “parklets” or painted zebra crossings will ever achieve.

We are robbing this area and its community, and indeed London itself, of unique heritage and character.

We will be addressing this issue of working class heritage in a public panel discussion on the evening of June 28 as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

Please email us to join: info@aspaceforus.club

DIANA FOSTER
Somers Town Museum