Lazy solutions

Thus plans to upgrade Malvern’s fire station (‘Overhaul plan for fire station turned down’ August 31) have been thrown out because the proposed design is insufficiently ‘sympathetic to the conservation area’, while nearby Malvern Link station is to have new buildings that ‘emulate the railway architecture of the original’.

Translated into English, this means that what our councillors want in both cases aren’t modern structures to meet modern needs but yet more pallid copies of past styles in a town that’s already full of them. This makes sense in neither case.

The Victorian buildings at Malvern Link were demolished in the 1960s.

Since their successors are clearly unfit for purpose, those designing their replacement started with a clean slate and could have produced an up-to-date design whose form follows its practical function. The fire station story is even more bizarre.

To keep costs down, the building’s owners say they intend to retain its basic structure and have proposed a simple, modern upgrade. The issue here is, as ever, how modern buildings are best integrated into a historical setting.

The simplest – but laziest and least imaginative – solution is to make them look just like their neighbours.

Hence the above examples and the bland and predicable exercise in chocolate box repro recently proposed for the site of the former bottling plant at Colwall.

It needn’t be like this.

The Dome at what was then Malvern Girls’ College - built in the 1970s near the former Imperial Hotel – still looks innovative, as do the same college’s excellent sports centre and Malvern’s new hospital. In Cradley, the developers of a small group of houses at St Katharine’s have shown that it is possible to create – and sell – buildings that not only relate to their traditional site but also acknowledge that we find ourselves in the second decade of the 21st century.

If it can be done in a tiny village, why not in Malvern?

DAVID ROBERTSON

West Malvern