It is almost ten years since people emerging from Earl’s Court Underground station on to Warwick Road, London Sw5, ceased to pause and gaze at an edifice of pink neon and purple light across the way. The monumental, original Earls Court exhibition centre – no apostrophe – completed to the design of US architect C. Howard Crane in 1937, had hosted its last ever big London night.
I went to that December 2014 show, a concert by Bombay Bicycle Club, and took two of my children. It was, after all, the end of an era of big events of many kinds, ranging from the Ideal Home Exhibition to the Royal Tournament to David Bowie live on stage, at a venue which, for decades, had drawn visitors from far and near to be entertained, enlightened and enthralled.
The exhibition centre had provided a defining focal point for a London district with a personality and history all of its own – a place of wonder, you might say. With the closure and subsequent destruction of the exhibition centre buildings, much of that wonder was extinguished. Can it be revived?
Achieving that goal has been a foreground aim of the Earls Court Development Company (ECDC) since it moved in right next to the site in 2020. A joint venture between developer Delancey on behalf of its client funds, the Dutch pension fund manager APG and Transport for London, freeholder of the 44-acre space, it has recently submitted a huge hybrid planning application to the adjoining boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea, which the development area straddles.
The plans foresee the creation of 4,000 homes, 12,000 jobs and three centres for cultural activity around a public green open space (ECDC image below), all of these to be pleasantly traversed on both east-west and north-south axes. Clusters of commercial workspace are pencilled in for inclusion by each of the stations, suitable for different kinds of start-up. The company has set out its objectives for the development’s social character in the form of four “place pillars“: innovation, nature, neighbourhood and culture.
Each of these draws on a thread of Earl’s Court’s complex past urban tapestry – for nature, think of the nearby Brompton Road Cemetery, a timeless and tranquil royal park – and aspires to weaving them into its future. Last week, a gathering at the ECDC’s office, chaired by Patricia Brown, a strategic adviser to the company, heard two cultural commentators, Travis Elborough and Peter York, both of them eloquent about the capital, draw some of these threads together in the service of imagining a larger, new London west-side story.
York, surveying the evolution of certain SW postcodes, identified in Kensington, Chelsea and Earl’s Court a common raffishness, inventiveness and artiness which flourished with particular vigour between the wars and “culminated in the form of the Chelsea set in the 1950s – smart rich kids plus Princess Margaret”.
The King’s Road was, of course, the retail artery for this exotic form of London life, one also characterised by social mixing across class boundaries, facilitated by the solvent of art school. That chemistry and enterprise would generate what York called an “internationally tradable pop culture” of music, fashion and movies. He noted that Terence Conran and Mary Quant invented the Swinging Sixties there.
Elborough, focussing more exclusively on Earl’s Court, highlighted recurring themes of transience and bohemianism, manifested in different ways. Its residential built environment, distinguished by curving terraces and elegant squares, remains shaped by the advent of the Tube (the presence of three stations, Earl’s Court, West Brompton and West Kensington, explains TfL’s part in the ECDC ownership amalgam), but its attractions as a visitor destination, which predate even Crane’s art deco pile, account for a surviving smattering of small hotels.
Like York, Elborough emphasised a coming-and-going human variety that has variously embraced Poles, Filipinos, Australians and New Zealanders, musicians from everywhere and a 1970s and 1980s gay scene. The Coleherne Arms pub now called The Pembroke, accommodated the latter two agglomerations. Elborough also mentioned the dissolute and sometimes darker side of Earl’s Court captured in Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel Hangover Square.
A personal link between the unique species of cosmopolitanism that thrived in Earl’s Court’s yesterdays and the area’s envisaged tomorrows was provided by Sharon Giffen, ECDC’s head of design and previously a member of TfL’s commercial development team. Earl’s Court, she revealed, was the place where her Colombian mother and her Northern Irish father met in the 1970s. They lived off Earl’s Court Road.
Giffen described the Earl’s Court project as “really personal to me” and professed her wish to “turn the lights back on” in a part of London whose landmark institution went dark and has been levelled – a loss she said has been “keenly felt”. Recalling the exhibition centre’s illuminated display, she said, “part of our vision for this site is to turn the lights back on.”
There is a long way still to go: it will take a while for the officers of the two boroughs to simply read and assess the planning applications. The hope is that building will begin in 2026, with the first phase of the scheme opened in 2030. That six years from now, though, will be a drop in time’s ocean compared with the period for which Earl’s Court was synonymous with innovation and spectacle, going back to the Great Wheel that turned there as part of the 1895 Empire of India exhibition.
Stitching a brand new patch into an old and lately frayed part of the city’s fabric, one woven from highly individual and sometimes unlikely combinations of human endeavour and desire, is going to take skill and sensitivity. Familiar arguments about tall buildings and the amount and affordability of “affordable” homes may well occur, probably with the equally familiar failure to recognise the financial relationship between the two.
But important components of the plan, flowing from the four “pillars”, align with historic strengths of Earl’s Court and its inner south west London neighbours, be they in arts and entertainment or advances in various kinds of technology, the latter being an element of the industrial strategy of Hammersmith & Fulham Council. Giffen listed providing opportunities for “the clean tech sector” among her aspirations for the new Earl’s Court scheme, all of a piece with its proposition for a new core of Earl’s Court to honour, harmonise with and renew the Earl’s Court of old.
To learn more about the Earl’s Court scheme, listen to The London Society’s 35-minute documentary podcast about it.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky