We emerged from the Underground on to Warwick Road and there it stood, an edifice of pink neon and purple light saying “Welcome to Earls Court” where they’ve been “creating legends since 1937”. Unless something dramatic happens pretty soon, it was the last time that proud welcome will be extended.
The place was brimming for a performance by Bombay Bicycle Club, the north London band which closed this epic chapter of the capital’s cultural and commercial history with the big sound and spectacle it deserved. I went with two of my children. I wanted to see and feel with them the vibe and energy that makes big cities special; to soak up the excitement and allure I hope that they, as native Londoners, never take for granted; to get some sense of the impending loss to this part of their home town caused by wreckers rubbing their hands because Earls Court is lined up to be knocked down.
The area has hosted shows and entertainments since the late 19th century, drawing crowds from across the world. A huge ferris wheel rotated there in 1895, created for the Empire of India exhibition. In that imperial age Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor. Then, Detroit architect C. Howard Crane set out to dwarf the nearby Olympia halls by creating the largest exhibition venue in Europe.
Earls Court opened with a big confectionery fair. It went on to spawn a sister building, the adjoining Earls Court 2, and host grand annual occasions as varied as the Motor Show, the Royal Tournament and the Ideal Home Exhibition (lately renamed the Ideal Home Show), as well as grandstand rock nights from, among others, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Pink Floyd, whose Dave Gilmour joined Saturday’s headliners to perform Wish You Were Here.
If any one enterprise condemns the mayoralty of Boris Johnson, it is surely his eager promotion of the “project” to terminate such splendours and turn the Earls Court centre site, and others that neighbour it, into a vacuous, sterile colony of high priced, high rise speculator flats because more money can be made from doing so. The mayor has called the Earls Court Project a “landmark scheme”. It is certainly a beacon of slavering profit worship and extreme political fatuity.
This shabby story really began in 2006, when Hammersmith and Fulham council (H&F) fell into Conservative hands under the leadership of Stephen Greenhalgh, who is now Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing. The following year, H&F produced a plan for the “comprehensive regeneration” of the area, which would entail demolishing the 760 homes of two council-owned estates, relocating London Underground’s Lillie Bridge maintenance depot and reducing the Earls Court centre buildings to dust. Crane’s creation stands, in fact, in H&F’s next door borough, Kensington and Chelsea, but the Tories in charge there embraced the project too.
Also in 2007, half of EC&O Venues, the company that runs both the Earls Court centre and Olympia, was sold to Capital and Counties (Capco). Earls Court was already booked to host the 2012 Olympics volleyball competition. The then EC&O chief executive Anthony Lyons was reported as being pleased that its future had been secured. Yet the same report said that Lyons’s new partners “might consider reconstruction” after the Games. When Capco bought the rest of EC&O in 2010 this “reconstruction” was put very firmly on the cards, along with the wider Earls Court scheme.
Some parts of this are proceeding faster than others. An absurd contrivance called Lillie Square, whose non-existent apartments were put on sale at upwards of £595,000, is putting down roots on what was the exhibition centre car park. Transport for London (TfL) has decided it is feasible to move the Lillie Bridge depot facilities elsewhere, although it will be several years before it decides what to do with the land. There is now hope for the two estates following Labour’s regaining of H&F in May. But TfL, previously the sole owner of the Earls Court centre site freehold, has entered into a joint venture with Capco to replace the exhibition halls with over 1,300 housing units, none of which - not a single, solitary one - will be affordable, even by that word’s increasingly false meaning.
TfL needs the money. But London needs the life force of places like Earls Court. The valiant campaign to save it has vowed to keep on pointing out the cost to London of this sacrifice to its gluttonous property market and, with the help of artist Duggie Fields, describe how it could continue to thrive. Looking down from my seat in the old building on Saturday night, it felt beyond belief that anyone could imagine that the space below me, where the bulk of the crowd for the final Earls Court show was gathering, would be better filled with bland residential stacks that few who inhabit them will really make their home and that few who might wish to will be able to afford. Work on taking the roof down is due to start over Christmas. What a waste. What a loss. What a sad, sorry shame.
