Negroni Talks #s11 - Westward Ho! From Ealing Green to Old Oak Common

Sir John Soane built Pitzhanger Manor at a time when Ealing was considered a nice location to have a ‘country retreat’. Things have obviously moved on since 1804 and in 2024 the house can be found sitting within the hustle and bustle of the Broadway – featuring shops, restaurants, offices and 200+ years’ worth of speculative residential developments. Soane wouldn’t recognise Ealing of the 21st century, however he did understand how to create a vision and sell ideas about ‘what could be’ to his patrons. It is an interesting context in which to consider what future plans there are for the further development of the local area, and how the powers that be may draw on the past in order to do so, in a manner that the great architect himself would have done? With the arrival of a HS2 station site and the associated redevelopment planned for Old Oak Common and Park Royal, the London Borough of Ealing is now facing more immediate change than it has done for a long time. How will this work with existing communities and how will it impact on the identity of the area? With the local council recently bidding to be London borough of culture in 2025, questions around what Ealing has been, currently is and can become, seem all the more poignant. Soane was a master of creating modern mythologies, whilst having a sensitivity toward ideas of loss and rebirth. His domestic architecture is engaged with evocative ideas about space and time, and a sensitive crafting of personal spaces that display grandeur, yet retain a distinct intimacy. In creating a localised world within the world, the manor house and its orchestrated surrounding landscape is also expansive in its outlook, referencing other cultures with an ever-present awareness/sense of ‘the eternal'. The collaboration between Negroni Talks and Pitzhanger, came out of a feeling that the fates were somewhat aligned with the recent arrival at the Pitzhanger of prints from the Soane Collection, that recorded the vibrantly coloured roman frescos in the C2nd Villa Negroni in Rome. To bring the “Negroni Talks…!” to such prestigious architectural surroundings was too good an opportunity to miss and aligned perfectly with our ongoing desire to get new perspectives away from East london - so what better than to go to the west. It seems fitting to host a talk about Ealing’s future development in the timeless atmosphere of an important piece of local, national and international heritage. Speakers: Fourth_space (Chair) Eleanor Fawcett, Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation Natalie Campbell MBE, social entrepreneur and broadcaster Peter Fink, artist William Filmer-Sankey, Alan Baxter Associates