32 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 DIANE HARVEY-WHITE The fate of industrial conservation areas We undervalue our industrial past by not understanding industrial sites or acknowledging that heritage value has a tendency to change as the taste for building styles changes. Several years ago, when working on an expert witness testimony for an appeal case, research provided the opportunity to really understand a conservation area that had been much altered. This was a former industrial site in the east end of London. A conservation area appraisal had been done in 2010, after a conservation area designation in 2008. It set out the architectural typology as ranging from mid- to late-nineteenth-century warehousing and factory sites to mid-twentiethcentury factory sites. The description highlighted 31 buildings of note, including chimneys, gantries, access to the canal behind, enclosing yard walls and decorative art deco parapets. It noted the meandering lane with wide entranceways to each organisation’s yard and glimpses of buildings above their walls, the quiet nature of the conservation area and the heights of the buildings. By the time of the relevant date for the appeal case (2016), only 13 of those buildings remained, the lane had largely disappeared and the relationship between the site, the canal and the industrial past was illegible. Only six years after the conservation area appraisal had been written, the document was already obsolete; it no longer described the conservation area as it actually presented. This area was part of the redevelopment of the Olympic site for 2012. Used largely for storage during the games themselves, it is, however, the site of the Torch Totem tower, which replaced one of the buildings of note, demolished the year after the conservation area appraisal was written. Historic England (then English Heritage) commented on every consent for demolition and strenuously objected on several of them, but these comments were buried in a file that covered a much larger development already approved before the Olympics commenced. In the process this area was renamed and the conservation area appraisal now relates to a A ‘building of note’ in Sands End Conservation Area, the finest of only three remaining buildings in the area from the industrial past Sand’s End Conservation Area viewed from Wandsworth Bridge
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