Welbeck Street car park: Fighting the demolition of an icon
London’s Welbeck Street car park was perhaps the UK’s most beautiful brutalist building. Now, Umbrella’s ‘concrete correspondent’ Jo Underhill has published a book to commemorate its needless passing.
Until 2019, London’s West End was home to a true architectural gem – Welbeck Street car park.
Designed by Michael Blampied and Partners, it was built in 1970 to provide parking facilities for the new flagship Debenhams store on Oxford Street. Not only was it a superbly designed car park, but it was also stunningly beautiful.
I still remember the joy of walking around the corner behind Debenhams and seeing Welbeck for the first time. That was in 2013 when I started photographing it for my Beautiful Brutalism project. I instantly fell in love with its prefabricated tessellated façade – I’d never seen a building like it before. Although it was built 43 years before, its design seemed undiluted and unique – even today.
It was big, bold, and unafraid of its brutalist roots. It also attracted a lot of coverage from the architectural press. In 1971 Building magazine wrote, ‘Blampied’s design put aesthetic quality and structural ingenuity on a par with functionality, creating a striking yet eminently practical building.’
Fewer than 50 years later, Welbeck was sold to developers. Shiva Hotels planned to demolish it and build a hotel on the site. After several failed attempts to get this remarkable building listed, on August 10th 2017, Westminster Council approved its destruction.
KM Heritage Consultants wrote: ‘[Welbeck] has no particular aesthetic significance and its harsh geometry and alien appearance detract from the settings of nearby heritage assets.’
Demolition began in April 2019 – today, there are no traces left.
“ I instantly fell in love with its prefabricated tessellated façade – I’d never seen a building like it before. Although it was built 43 years before, its design seemed undiluted and unique – even today”
Feeling powerless after numerous failed attempts to save it, both as a photographer and an admirer, the only thing I could do was to take pictures of it. So, between March 2017 and June 2019, I photographed the car park regularly. This project was the only way I could preserve it.
It was always a hope to turn this project into a photo book, and during the lockdowns of last year, I had the time to create it. I have been working closely over the previous few months with the graphic designer, Emily Macaulay of Stanley James Press, on the book's design.
We wanted to use the colours found in the car park for the cover and decided to use the space left in between the tessellated concrete polygons of the facade to create the pattern.
The images are laid out to make you feel as though you’re walking through the car park from outside, then in, and finally back out. We’ve also placed the yellow lines found on the car park floor and barriers throughout. As a bonus, Dr Barnabas Calder, senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Liverpool, is an advocate of brutalism, and kindly wrote a foreword for this book.
I hope in some small way this project and resulting book keeps the memory of the stunning Welbeck Street Car Park alive and changes people’s views on brutalist architecture. So that in the future we reuse and love these buildings rather than demolish them.