Isabel Hardman

Is the Marble Arch mound a joke?

  • From Spectator Life
Image: MRVDV

What better way to get shoppers back into London’s West End than by, er, building a large hill in the middle of it? That’s the latest plan from Westminster City Council, who hope that the Marble Arch Hill will lure people back to the area with the promise of stunning views around the city from its 25 metre high summit. The mound, designed by an architectural firm MVRDV, will boast a winding path with trees and plants, along with a hollow centre for exhibitions. It will tower over Marble Arch, and visitors could be charged a small fee for scaling its heights by Westminster City Council. The BID’s chief executive Kay Buxton describes the hill as a ‘clarion call to the recovery of London’s hospitality and leisure sector, in an enduring, world-renowned destination’. 

No doubt the hill will be popular with some because it will end up on one of those lists of ‘things you must do in London’.

Perhaps it is fitting that plans for the recovery of this shattered sector after such a surreal, nightmarish year are in themselves totally bizarre and the sort of thing you’d expect most people to laugh off as an idea emerging from one of those dreams you have after eating too much cheese. Why does Marble Arch need a temporary hill with temporary trees and temporary plants? It’s not as though the area is devoid of green space: one of the first things visitors will see once they’ve paid the fee and trundled up the ‘winding path’, probably in a long, slow and dreary line of people who aren’t entirely sure why they’re doing this, is Hyde Park. Sure, that huge green space lacks a random mound, but at least its trees have had a chance to put their roots down, the flowers aren’t spending a sabbatical there before being shipped off elsewhere, and the wildlife hasn’t been enticed there on false pretences.

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Isabel Hardman
Written by
Isabel Hardman
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

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