The case for demolition

Thornfield argues that there are many better Victorian market buildings around, but scholarly classification is not entirely the point.

What the damaged, imperfect market buildings offer is not only the sense of time, and the record of lives lived there in the past, but also a sense of possibility. There is a feeling that the complex could be interpreted and adapted in different ways by different people, that it could be a place like none other.

Possibility - the idea that your life could change today because of something or someone unexpected - is one of the main reasons for living in a city, but in modern development it is almost always eliminated.

Possibility is too much like risk, which developers hate. It has a price put on its head, and is packaged, marketed and branded, or is pushed aside in favour of known formulas. So most new developments end up looking much like most others. In describing them, the adjective "bland" is never far away.

All of these arguments go to support SAVE's case. Whatever the expense, it suggests, and whatever the millions of pounds of opportunity lost to Thornfield and the City of London, the dream-like interiors of the threatened market buildings represent something too precious for London to lose.

But there is a fatal flaw in this conclusion, which is the assumption that, even if the buildings were preserved, their essential character and their glorious openness to the unexpected wou ld remain unchanged.

What would actually happen is that they would be tarted up, kitted out with heritage-style fixtures, filled with shops (which, while not selling exactly what anyone wanted, would still do good business) and finally be hailed as the new Covent Garden. This would be death by exploitation rather than death by demolition, but it would be no less fatal for that.

Which leaves a rare alternative, that the new buildings might put back the richness and intrigue that demolition of the old ones takes out.

There is no fundamental reason why office buildings or even retail complexes have to be bland, as Horace Jones's magnificent and distinctive Leadenhall Market, now essentially a shopping arcade, proves.

In New York or Chicago, the architecture of red-blooded commerce, in blunt juxtaposition with the public space of streets and squares, creates those cities' most powerful moments.

The London office of Kohn Pedersen Fox, responsible for the proposed Heron tower in Bishopsgate, designs quietly classy office buildings, like well-made cars.

Its proposals for Smithfield show large office blocks with roofs elaborately sculpted, in an effort to reduce their impact on the surroundings. At the bottom, in the space currently occupied by the market buildings, the blocks are lifted two storeys off the ground to create space for shopping and public movement.

This is not yet a place of urban fascination to match the lost market, but it could be. There is drama in the heavy structure that holds up the blocks, which is a start.

What needs to happen now is that the architects redirect their energy from the over-fussy roofline to the ground level, to create an interesting public place. It is also essential that the developers do not try to milk the site for everything it is worth, or kill it with the standard solutions of retail design, or eliminate the unexpected through obsessive control.

Recent history does not offer too many examples of new developments that enrich the experience of living in cities - there is the silvery blob of Selfridges in Birmingham and not a great deal else. To achieve this at Smithfield would be truly pioneering. It might even be a new model, as the renewal of Covent Garden market has been for a generation. It would be about time.