^Breakdown of one volumetric "lot" that has been divided and sold to different owner occupiers, and modified by various designers/architects
This situation exists in Soho,because unlike most of the rest of Central London, which is owned as large assets by families like the Bedfords, Grosvenors and the Howard De Walden Estate, Soho is owned by multiple landlords, building by building, street by street. Often the buildings in the main London Estates are leased out on long leaseholds (25, 50, or 99 years), with large rounds of investment occuring when the leases come up for renewal, meaning that the stock is maintained uniformly, with the kinds of tenants being just as unrelentingly homogenous (as a palliative the Howard De Walden Estate creates a fictive image of diversity by allowing certain "atmospheric" shops to have artificially lower rents. They call this "nurturing"). The leases on Soho's building are constantly coming up for renewal, plots are always being bought, sold, redeveloped, or left to decay, and correspodingly the life and architecture of the place is sparkling.
^Plans
We tried to develop a similar scenario to the one found in Soho, but 3dimensionaly disposed, not stacked but more like a fractured honeycomb, into whose voids gets squeezed a range of privately owned properties, supported and connected by a communaly managed framework. The current Derwent London proposals for the site create a Howard De Walden type scenario, with a large single ownership area of building, punctuated only by the image of diversity (a small space is being kept in the new office complex for an etiolated "cultural" space that is supposed to make up for everything that was wiped away), effectively giving bones to the threat of "cleaning up" that have been leveled at the apparently scruffy and "tacky" area for some years now (if the GLA and politicians consider thispart of London scruffy, god help us).