The Kensington Art Deco Cinema before Indian developers got their greedy hands on it.
LODHA is an Indian developer. It stands guilty of recklessly destroying this wonderful Art Deco cinema and replacing it with the horror below.
The Council stands guilty of permitting these barbarians to raze this important part of our heritage to the ground.
Those with long memories know that the council has form for vandalising heritage buildings.
Overnight, the then Council leader, weird Nicholas Freeman, had the wonderful Old Town Hall destroyed before a Preservation Order could be served.
If a British developer knocked down an Indian heritage imagine the anger yet LODHA are allowed to get away with it here.
To add insult to injury what was an intact 1926 Cinema Building with its original Art Deco interiors (hidden under 1980’s shop fittings) is now called “Holland Park Gate”- completely erasing any reference to The Kensington Odeon. This was the home of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies , he was born nearby and his very first film The Black Orchid was premiered here when the cinema first opened - the developer has tried to erase this history and what is this building without the story of the cinema - a hollow modern building in a B minus location next to two busy roads and not even a view of the park across the road that it is supposed the be the “gate” to and no view of said park because this is blocked by 3 ugly towers - another unfortunate development for absent apartment owners - permitted by a morally bankrupt local authority. More then half the voting population of the borough voted to save the cinema and they were ignored.
ReplyDeleteThe real question is why were the Council & English Heritage so willing to accept the developers claims that the interior of the building had been substantially wrecked by the 1980's division into a multiplex - when all they needed to do was look behind the hardboard partitions? Money talks indeed
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