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Nicolete Jones at the Plimsoll Viaduct |
Plimsoll author draws line at loss of heritage
AN historian has joined a campaign to save Victorian buildings threatened with demolition to make way for the £2 billion King’s Cross development.
Nicolete Jones has described as “vandalism” plans to demolish buildings at Wharf Road, off York Way, associated with Samuel Plimsoll, the Victorian social reformer about whom she has written a book, The Plimsoll Sensation.
The buildings, dating from the 1850s, are currently occupied by a café and nightclub.
The Wharf Road site also houses empty and semi-derelict railway warehouses and the architecturally important Plimsoll Viaduct.
Plimsoll, a former coal merchant whose family owned outlets in Upper Street, Islington, and King’s Cross, was Liberal MP for Derby, and lived in Harrington Square, near Mornington Crescent.
Ms Jones who lives in Plimsoll Road, Finsbury Park, was inspired to write the book after coming across a discarded Plimsoll pub sign in St Thomas’s Road, near her home.
Plimsoll developed the line painted on ships to indicate when a vessel was overloaded. Ms Jones said: “This was a man who virtually single-handedly cut the numbers of people drowning in shipwrecks from hundreds a year to maybe dozens. This would be destroying the last remaining structure that he built.”
She would like to see the viaduct used to house workshops and craft centres, with a Covent Garden-style piazza.
Ms Jones says Plimsoll should be remembered with a museum on the site or, at the very least, a plaque on the viaduct.
The King’s Cross Railway Lands Group (KCRLG) and the Industrial Heritage Trust are opposing plans to demolish the buildings. The proposals are currently subject to a judicial review.
King’s Cross developer Argent hopes to build offices and luxury flats, but campaigners want affordable homes included in the development.
KCRLG chairman Michael Edwards said the Wharf Road site is at the centre of the land that Argent hopes to develop.
He added: “We’re trying to get Camden and English Heritage to take a more conservationist line about Wharf Road. But we haven’t been very successful.” |
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