Take the yellow brick road

Ever since W.S. Gilbert’s Lady Jane lamented, ‘Oh, South Kensington!’ in Patience, 1881, the place has carried a regretful quality. Owing to the extraordinary lack of confidence shown by successive governments and Treasury officials in the educational values that Prince Albert hoped to promote through the estates of the 1851 Commission, the gentle, south-facing slope of Brompton became, over the course of time, a palimpsest of build structures, not all of which deserve the title of architecture. ‘Here tears are absolutely vain — there is no remedy,’ said Beresford Pite, the Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, bewailing in 1905 the loss of the opportunity for a north-south axis leading to the Albert Hall. ‘“South Kensington” remains a remarkable if forbidding memorial to the practical foresight of Prince Albert,’ wrote the Survey of London in its meticulous chronicle of wasted opportunity in 1975.

Last summer, the Heritage Lottery Fund turned down the opportunity to fund Daniel Libeskind’s V&A Spiral apparently because the intention was to display new design in it, rather than ‘heritage’. Now the museums and colleges, in conjunction with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the Mayor of London, have announced a scheme to redesign Exhibition Road. This is a less ambitious version of Norman Foster’s pre-millennium ‘Albertopolis’ scheme, which focused on underground communication. With the introduction of congestion charging and the partial pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square, there is a new confidence in the possibility of elbowing cars into a subsidiary position in London, which would bring with it undreamt of possibilities.

During the planning of South Kensington, Exhibition Road was considered subsidiary to Queen’s Gate, which was modelled on Parisian boulevards. It was a back route, and still feels like one, except that no equivalent front route ever existed.