The Spring Gardens site is a highly important location in Buxton.
The rear and side facades of the present shopping centre totally ignore this, and represent ugly and insensitive architecture of the 1980's when it was built.
Fortunately, planning proposals and decisions have greatly improved since then and are
usually sensible and sensitive.
However, from the pictures shown in last week's Advertiser it seems that we are back in the 1980s.
I have not yet been able to inspect the proposal documents, but the two pictures shown look like a rehash of plans for a new town in the South, on a dismal Monday morning.
How can a brief for the architects produce such banality?
I was hoping for inspired architecture which would conceal the present awfulness, and make this important site worthy of its position.
The very least would be to restore the end facades of the old Buxton Midland station, to remind us of the twin stations which used to be there. What a sight that would be. The base of the window facade still exists, crumbling away.
Please, let us not lose this rare opportunity to transform this whole site with architecture worthy of this unusual old town.
Brian Lawrence
Temple Road
Buxton
The full article contains 211 words and appears in Buxton Advertiser newspaper.
