Proposed hotel will compromise V&A

Sir, - I write in response to recent articles in this newspaper relating to what has been described as “an addition of 109 new bedrooms to the existing 40-room Premier Inn hotel on Riverside Drive”.

Do not be hoodwinked into thinking that this is merely an extension to the existing building. It could not be further from this.

The current hotel is to be demolished and a gigantic four-storey structure built in its place, obliterating ever more views of the river, the approach to RRS Discovery and, in my opinion, lessening the impact of the far superior forthcoming V&A building.

An architect’s impression of the hotel, as seen from Riverside Drive, was printed in The Courier last week and I implore you to print the proposed building as seen from the river.

It is nothing short of a modernist industrial factory. If you added a chimney stack it would resem- ble the recent flurry of biomass power stations that have appeared all over our country in recent years.

It is also jaw-dropping to compare the existing and proposed elevations, especially the south-west elevations of the building which give frightening scale to this proposed development.

I appreciate that the new hotel may not be any taller that the adjacent Care Commission building, but please do not use this design as a benchmark or guide to architectural beauty.

The proposed hotel may be regarded as “good design” for current general hotel building but surely not for this highly sensitive riverside site.

If this four-storey hotel, in its proposed form, receives approval from our council it will be a travesty and I shudder to think what lies in store for the development land surrounding the V&A. Ian Milne. Craigiebarn Road, Dundee.

A river view of the proposed hotel