Come on IKEA; do the Right Thing!

Sainsbury's pioneering eco store
threatened with demolition
 by IKEA after less than 15 years

IKEA’s decision to demolish Sainsbury’s pioneering eco store on the Greenwich Peninsula after less than 15 years is both shocking and enlightening.  As everyone knows IKEA understand sustainability; right?  Their Calvinist heritage values the notion of the collective good, thrift and endurance and this philosophy is embedded in the IKEA corporate mission statement:


"Our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people."

They develop upon their corporate mission statement, expanding it into their customer proposition:
 

"Offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them."

So how can it be that a company with such a powerful and a clearly articulated vision can believe that it is acceptable for them to be responsible for the senseless destruction of a pioneering eco building after less than 15 years?  I would argue that their unacceptable behaviour on the Greenwich Peninsula is driven by an obsession with cost not value and that this is distorting their decision making, leading to outdated thinking that is not relevant to the specific demands of the many people who occupy our crowded island; let alone the residents of Greenwich Peninsula who already suffer from dangerously high levels of atmospheric air pollution caused by road traffic.



IKEA Southampton integrates their
offer into a city centre context
well served by public transport

Prior to the recession IKEA delivered two stores in Coventry and Southampton that sort to evolve a development model that retained their distinctive blue and yellow presence but designed a solution to work in harmony with, rather than to the detriment of their host communities, locating them in urban locations, well served by public transport and adjacent to existing retail centres.  At this point I should say that we worked with IKEA on their Hillingdon and Southampton projects, so have an in-depth knowledge of both the process and the resultant development; so it is uncomfortable to say the least advising a client that what they are doing is unacceptable and in conflict with their published sustainable development objectives.

We live in an increasingly resource constrained  world, where there is growing concern about the availability and price of many common building materials, so to senselessly destroy a perfectly serviceable building after less than 15 years, is in my view immoral and totally unacceptable.   Customers expect corporations like IKEA and Sainsbury’s to do the right thing when selecting and sourcing products, undertaking their business activities and helping their customers to minimise their impacts on the environment; but fail to see the hypocrisy that is implicit in promoting demolition.

 



IKEA Hillingdon scheme included a store
 with direct access to the tube
 at the end of an existing High Street
 along with 200 affordable homes

Sainsbury’s justify their position by saying that building technology has moved on since the building was completed and that their new store will use the latest technology!  Does it therefore follow that they will be closing all of their branches over fifteen years old: clearly that would be ridiculous!  If it were not for the restrictions that they have placed on the building preventing it being re-let to one of their competitors, it would not now be threatened with demolition.

IKEA say that they intend to recycle the small portion of the demolition waste pile that they create and are also going to use a green roof on their new store.  When you bear in mind that the proposed building will be over twenty meters tall I am not sure what they believe this will achieve for local residents, but the fact that they are happy to state this as some form of compensation smacks of tokenism of the worst possible kind.

IKEA are about to submit their Reserved Matters Planning Application and once that has been rubber stamped by The Royal Borough only English Heritage and the Secretary of State can save the building!  Catherine Croft, Twentieth Century Society Director said that:

“Not only would the demolition of such a recent building be a tragic waste of energy and resources, but this supermarket is outstandingly important. It is the most innovative retail store to have been built in the UK in the last 50 years.”

It still seems inconceivable to me that either IKEA or Sainsbury’s are happy to have their brands associated with an act of such wonton destruction but they appear not to care!  Last weekend, local residents who started a campaign “No IKEA Greenwich Peninsula”, held a protest picnic in the eco-garden planted by the Woodland Trust behind the store.  They oppose the loss of a culturally significant public building and the introduction of a large, car dependant store into the heart of their community, which already experiences some of the worst air pollution in London.

I believe that many retail companies view their property activities as not really core business and are therefore able to convince themselves that different standards of behaviour apply to their property activities.  IKEA would not buy up millions of pounds worth of second hand, perfectly functional home furnishing products, only to then senselessly smash it up; as this, they would rightly judge, to be unacceptable behaviour!  Yet this is exactly what their property department are proposing!

Come on IKEA, do the right thing, remove the threat of demolition from a pioneering eco building that is less than fifteen years old and think again.  Develop a proposition that meets the needs of the many people of London by developing a store directly served by train or tube and built with the same care, craftsmanship and environmental stewardship that you demand from you furniture.

Save Sainsbury's Greenwich

So it is now official, Sainsbury's are to close their pioneering low energy supermarket in Greenwich after being open for less than 15 years and if approved it will be demolished to make way for an IKEA.  So a building that was awarded the RIBA Journal Sustainability Award in 2000 and was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, the largest prize in British Architecture, the same year will be torn down after such a short period of time with barely a passing comment.


Is the sun about to set on
Sainsbury's Greenwich
 after less than 15 years trading?

We'll not as far as I am concerned!  You see I spent nearly five years of my early career developing the concept for what was then a pioneering development.  My team spent long hours designing a building that would redefine retail architecture and challenge the belief at the time, that all retailers required from their buildings was something to keep the customers, the technology required to moderate the internal environment and the fridges and freezers out of the rain.  The norm was for a dark, windowless interior, that was ultimately little more than a poorly built and badly performing shed, with no consideration given to customer comfort.  Lighting, heating and cooling were all achieved with inefficient mechanical systems, that wasted energy and did nothing to improve the conditions that customers were expected to endure.

So why is it considered obsolete and ready for demolition after such a short period of time?  On one level it is a victim of its own success; as since opening it has been well received by customers, achieving the highest Customer Satisfaction Index score for any Sainsbury's within the first year of trading.  As the number of people living on the peninsular has increased the store trade has outgrown the building and Sainsbury's want to move 500 meters away to a new store that will be three times the size and offer food and non-food along with an internet hub to serve online customers.  So the building is well liked and successful but still cannot find an alternative use?

So this is what gets me really annoyed, the reason why it cannot be relet to another tenant is that Sainsbury's will have in place a restrictive covenant on the building as part of their deal with the developer of their new store, preventing it from being used for food retailing.  I believe that this is anti-competitive and is a flagrant abuse of the planning system which originally granted consent for the development.  I have good memories of many meetings with English Partnerships and the London Borough of Greenwich as they considered our proposals and ensured that they were in keeping with local and national planning policies.  This process placed restrictions on the eventual consent including a requirement to review and reduce car parking provision over time and another to prevent extension in the first 10 years.  What none of us envisaged at the time was that once consent was granted it could be removed by Sainsbury's without any further democratic consideration and that by granting consent for retail use they could both have their cake and eat it, benefitting from the enhanced value of the asset that the consent crystallised but able to limit its scope so that only non-competing retailers could benefit when it no longer fulfilled Sainsbury's requirements.

To destroy an exemplar of
sustainable design best practice
 would be an act of vandalism
 that must not be permitted

This cannot be right.  If this restrictive covenant were not in place I am sure that there would be a long list of food retailers who would be only too willing to move in and pay the generous rents common in the sector.  The buildings would continue to be economically sustainable, the community would have a greater choice of where to shop and the environment would not be impacted by the destruction of carbon intensive construction after such a pitifully short period of time.  I feel very passionate about this; no architect should see their work destroyed as a result of underhand, un-democratic behaviour and not object.  The building is a good building and should not be demolished.  It must become a test case for the rhetoric that is now widely exposed by the sector to justify its dominant position in the nation's food supply chain.  It is not acceptable to promise communities sustainable development to gain planning consents simply to renege on those undertakings when it suits.  The government must urgently review restrictive covenant legislation to close this anti-competition loophole to prevent more perfectly serviceable buildings being destroyed to safeguard the self-interest of food retailers or others who would limit the use of land or buildings that they no longer require.  A free market must demand that this is the case and that the local communities that grant consent must be the ultimate arbiters of what can and cannot be done on any site.  If not, there is a real threat that the sector will be painted with the anti-competitive criticism that Tesco has previously been accused of.

 

Please support our campaign to #stopIKEA and #SaveSainsburysGreenwich by signing our online petition at:

 

http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/stopikea