Welbeck Street Car Park due for demolition

"In summary the existing car park building has no particular aesthetic or historic value, and detracts from the setting of nearby heritage assets by virtue of it's bland and uninspired elevational treatment"
KM Heritage Consultant 2017

The inevitable has happened and yesterday, Thursday 10th August, Westminster Council approved the demolition of Welbeck Street Car Park. Although it has been on the table for a long time it's such a shame that yet another stunning piece of brutalist architecture will be destroyed to make room for a bland, non-descript hotel with no particular aesthetic value. I still can't understand how Historic England and the heritage consultants used can't see it's aesthetic quality or structural ingenuity and therefore listing it so it might survive just a bit longer. It will be a great loss!

I have been shooting the last few months of it's life since March and hope to undertake a few more shoots before it finally closes. Once the project is finished I will be putting the photographs onto my website so please come back to see the full project soon...

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New Work - Brutalist Playgounds

I have wanted to visit and add some brutalist playgrounds to my Beautiful Brutalism project for a long time. I remember playing on a concrete tube we called 'the saddle' at my old primary school and loved it. So have fond memories of these concrete playgrounds. Unfortunately not many have survived but last November I researched and visited a playground that was still standing down in South Clapham beneath Belgravia House tower block. This was a fantastic playground with a spiral slide and tunnels to run through the hill that housed the slide. It was great to see the playground was well maintained and looked like it was still used. I couldn't resist and have to say the slide was fantastic! The whole project can be seen here. Then earlier this year I visited the Aintree Estate playground in Fulham. The two tower blocks, Hartopp Point and Lannoy Point are due to be demolished this year so wanted to visit before access was difficult and the area the playground is sit...

Brutalism in Photos Feature

Oracle Time Magazine featured a lovely positive article about brutalist architecture in London in their June issue of the magazine and online. Along with photographs from my ongoing personal project Beautiful Brutalism they also featured the work of photographers Simon Phipps and Hayley Goodwin. The online article can be read here .

Concrete Cambridge

Over the last few months I have been adding a few colleges in Cambridge to my Beautiful Brutalism project. Many new college buildings that were being built from the late 50's to 70's embraced contemporary architecture of concrete, steel and brick and many leading architects of the era were commissioned to design these new buildings. New Court, Christ's College and Fitzwilliam College by Denys Lasdun, George Thomson Building of Corpus Christi College by Philip Dowson of Arup and the History Faculty by James Stirling to name a few. I photographed the two Lasdun designed buildings late last year. New Court, Christ's College, 1970, has an amazing steeped slope of the students rooms with a terrace running through the middle. The rooms all have large windows that allow light to flood in and the use of exposed reinforced concrete is beautiful. Fitzwilliam College, 1964, has a very distinctive shell-vault like roof on the dining hall which is visible from the str...

JO UNDERHILL / STRUCTURALEYE

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