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Dirt-covered gem is an important part of working class history
• ARGUMENTS in favour of destroying the old Strand workhouse in Cleveland Street – on the basis that the reformer Dr Joseph Rogers hated it – are spurious (‘He hated the sight of it, so why save it in his name?’, April 3).
It is obsessive for “critics” of listing the building to equate “new” with improved.
For example, in terms of affordable housing, homes built in the 1920s and 1930s are often of better quality and better planned than their equivalent built today.
Planning law weighted against citizens, in favour of money, lawyers and political expediency, is having a widespread detrimental effect on our civic culture. This building is part of Fitzrovia’s heritage; it is part of working class history.
If we are imagining what Dr Rogers would think then we must not just imagine ourselves in Dr Rogers’s time, but imagine him in ours.
The old workhouse is a little, dirt-covered gem.
PB
Address supplied, WC1
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