COLUMBIA MARKET SIR,—I am tired of seeing my name quoted
and my views misrepresented by your correspondent Mr. Fleet who writes from Bethnal Green Town Hall. Because I mentioned that Darbishire's Columbia Market on its hill looked well from the train, he persists in saying I have never been there on foot. I have visited it at least yearly on foot for the past ten years and trespassed all over it without the permission of the LCC, and I strongly recommend others to do so and to read the curious notices about not using obscene language and visualise the mentality behind this strange folly built by Victorian philanthropy and no doubt dreamed before a warm fire by Baroness Burdett-Coutts in Holly Lodge, Highgate.
As Gothic Revival architecture it is as strange as the dream which brought it into being. The iron spikes, the gables, the spires. the stonework. the cast-iron columns are all on a grand scale. But it is so over- decorated for modern taste that good average modern citizens with 'social consciences' like M r. Elect cannot look at it dispassionately. I understand that a techni- cal college or a school is to be built on its site. If this is so. then all schools need halls and in the great hall of Columbia Market there is one already built for the future institution. Paint, washing of stone and
brickwork will transform it, the London skyline will not be deprived of a monument which in years to come will be much admired. Light, imaginative modern architecture for the rest of the college or school will make a most happy contrast with it. I think there is nothing to be said in favour of the gloomy tenements which• flank the Columbia Market, but I am sure that a good architect could most skilfully adapt some of the buildings of the Market itself, and certainly the hall, for institutional purposes.—Yours faith fully,
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