Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@johnglas wrote:

Come to that, Newmarket (great space waiting to be reborn) could be developed with tall, gabled bldgs not apeing some old style but getting inspiration from them, i.e a square of tall, gabled, narrow-plotted contemporary buildings recapturing the spirit of the place. Or is that too much of a challenge and we prefer a ‘mixed-use’, bigfoot slab with a few quirky (‘cutting edge’) details?

This level of agreement can’t last, but, while we’re at it, here’s a photograph of some modern gabled in-fill from Bremen that impressed me enough to get the camera out.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I think it illustrates your point.

The plaque on the wall records what this little square was like before the war.

There are times that I think we might have been better off if we had been bombed to dust on a single night, rather than suffer the slow grinding destruction of neglect over decades. At least then we might have had to take a long hard look at the city and we might have noticed that bits were missing and, just maybe, a bit of thought might have gone into putting that right.