Artist’s impression: do the LabTech executives really spend their weekends visiting Ferris wheels?

I CAN date the year I worked at Camden Lock market by the release of Spandau Ballet’s hit single Gold, which was high in the charts in the autumn of 1983.

As an indie kid I hated the song but it blared out repeatedly on the stallholders’ radios across the market and has stayed in my mind ever since.

The memory of working on a bead stall in Middle Yard, just off Camden Lock Place, came back to me recently when I was reading the planning application submitted by owner LabTech to put an observation wheel in the West Yard, a public space that is currently occupied by food stalls and colourful narrowboats.

For my first Saturday job on the bead stall, I was paid the princely sum of £10 a day. The morning began by collecting trays of beads from the Bead Shop on the first floor of the West Yard shops.

In the winter months it was virtually impossible to count the miniscule beads into small plastic bags with my fingers freezing off.

Forty years later, my own teenage daughter hangs out at Camden Lock – she and her friends prefer it to other local places like King’s Cross because it’s not “bougie”.

Camden Lock is a place where young people become themselves. Later in life many of us still remember who we were with, what we were listening to and what we were wearing at the market.

Legally the site might belong to LabTech, but by rights it belongs to all of us. That’s why I’m so upset by the company’s plan to turn the area into a theme park and visitor attraction, (Wheel set in motion to revamp Lock, September 29).

At the hollow heart of their proposal is a 40-metre high Ferris wheel, which will dwarf one of Camden’s most beautiful spots, the West Yard of the Lock.

The wheel (a standard “off-the-shelf” model rather than a specially designed one like the London Eye) will be supported on five legs that straddle the lock, preventing the passage of water traffic.

The space of the West Yard, where people love to mill about, eat, and socialise, will mostly be taken up by the base of the wheel – a box containing the wheel drives – and no doubt there will
be a queue snaking across the rest of the yard.

This deeply flawed proposal is supposed to bring life, soul and culture back to Camden Lock. Do the LabTech executives really spend their weekends visiting Ferris wheels? I very much doubt it.

The Great Wheel of Earl’s Court was a popular attraction in 1894 but someone should tell them things have moved on.

More to the point, though, the beauty of Camden Lock and the Regent’s Canal is not about soaring views across the skyline but about the ground-level, close-up, fabric of the city.

Its appeal is about being connected to the water, walking on historic granite cobbles, across the roving bridge and being up close to the brick structures that make Camden one of Britain’s most important heritage sites.

The planning process is one of the most important tools of democracy that we have, but LabTech’s application seems designed to put people off reading it.

Consisting of 78 documents, most of it is repetitive padding that you have to wade through to extract the relevant information. When you do finally realise what the company is proposing, the idea is shocking in its disregard for the quality of the place, its history and architecture.

But, as the CNJ reported on June 9, LabTech plans to sell Camden Lock, so it seems likely the proposal is intended not for the long- term good of businesses, residents, or even visitors, but to make the property look like a lucrative investment.

In fact the Ferris wheel complements another atrocious idea, a subterranean theme park named Babylon Park, which is set to open across three floors of the Hawley Wharf development.

Nevertheless the West Yard proposal speaks about bringing culture and arts to Camden Lock.

It says that a proposed exhibition space in the East Vaults of the Interchange Building, which is also part of the application, is intended to rival Camden’s cultural sites such as the British Library, British Museum and the Roundhouse.

This is a serious under-estimation of what it takes to create a cultural venue and betrays the lack of imagination of the proposal.

I visited the West Yard and Interchange Building recently with my design students from the Royal College of Art.

I challenged them to come up with their own proposals for future uses for the West Yard and the Interchange warehouse.

One of them designed a centre for local gardeners to exchange knowledge, plants, and seeds.

Thinking about the huge demand there is in Camden for allotments, he imagined a system of floating gardens that would dock in Dead Dog Basin beneath the giant warehouse, from where an elegant spiral staircase would bring people up to ground level to enjoy greenhouses and gardens.

This is the sort of visionary thinking we need if we’re going revive Camden Lock. We would be better off handing the project to the young people who really value it.

• Vicky Richardson is an architectural curator and writer.