Going past Olympia on the top deck of a bus from Hammersmith to high Street Kensington earlier this week, it meant I had a good view of the works there. I was really keen to see the recently uncovered Grade II listed Art Deco era façade, that has for at least two years been covered in scaffolding and protective cloth and supported by scaffold.
The first pic below shows it in 2016 and the second two are from 2002. All three are screen grabs from Google Streetview:
From my seat I could see that the whole façade has been slathered in a continuous sheet of white paint and there are already dirty marks on it, mostly near ventilation pipes:
I pondered why the developers would be so daft as to paint over beautiful Portland stone. Also, the windows looked different to me (were they gray before?) and the panels of horizontal bars also looked odd. Ah, but no, well, sort of... it turns out that my memory is playing games with me.
When I got home I dug out a pic of how it this part of the exhibition complex looked when it was first completed. Being as the building has been covered for so long it appears I have sort of forgotten what it looked like in recent years and, instead, it is this next pic that I have in my mind's eye because I show it to people on my guided walk around the area. It shows that the façade in 1930. It was stone clad, the windows were not so obvious and those horizontal metal we see today bars weren't part of Emberton's original design.
I was going to start ranting on about how daft it is to cover the Portland Stone, but having checked previous years via google Streetview and zooming in for a closer peek, I can clearly see that it's been slathered in paint for at least 15 years. For instance, his is the building in 2014, which also shows that extra row of windows and rows of horizontal and vertical bars used to attaching signs for the events within:
All this paint has meant regular upkeep, as here in 2012:
The rant didn't happen. I have no finger to point being as the 'damage' happened decades ago. Though, it would have been nicer if they had cleaned off all that paint and return to the beauty of the Portland stone rather than slap on another layer.
There are some really interesting things happening with this site and I am looking forward to seeing how the whole complex will look when it's finished. Why not join me for a guided walk...?