Hackney Fight has explicated the conservative values of the borough’s planning department. The rhetoric of their ‘vision’ for the area is becoming substantiated. Hoxton Docks is becoming characterised by a Potemkin facadism whereby the use and vitality of an area is relegated in favour of a frozen nostalgic image.

Our proposal is a Trojan that at once seeks to work within yet undermine and stretch this current ocular-centric planning language. A scaffold platform, it is a guerite providing an ivory tower from which the Junior Planning Officer can observe, monitor and plan the surroundings. Cloaked in a fabric printed with the saturated skies (collaged from renders of approved local applications), it blends into the conservation area within our visualisations, but will stand starkly against London’s infamously grey skies. Underneath this cerecloth we propose to keep a fragment of the Maich Swift pavilion, its yellow staircase. As in Italo Calvino’s mythical city of Thelka*, by retaining only a segment of the theatre pavilion, its deconstruction will never finish and thus no planner can call for the scaffolding to be removed.

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