Regeneration. It is a word that can mean whatever you want. It can mean bringing back life to run-down districts, sure. But does that mean knocking buildings down and starting again, or finding new uses for what is there? One thing never changes. The ones doing the knocking-down kind of regeneration will be the developers with big bucks, seeking bigger bucks. And the gentler kind of regeneration will be proposed by people without much money, but often better ideas. This conflict of ideals is happening in London’s Smithfield, where a £150m office development is planned.

Fear not, the famous meat market is safe — though for how long, nobody can say for sure. But there is another part of Smithfield market — a collection of agreeable Victorian buildings at the western, Farringdon end. Known as the General Market, these make up about a quarter of the whole. This is now the target of office-block developers, with the active assistance of the freeholders (and planning authority), the City of London Corporation. The City loves offices. It cannot get enough of them.

The General Market is a late work of the architect Sir Horace Jones, also responsible for many of the other City markets and Tower Bridge. Largely disused and distinctly neglected, it is one of those corners of old London that you can imagine being colonised by the stalls, shops and restaurants that have transformed Borough, Leadenhall and Spitalfields markets. Or, for that matter, the touristy Covent Garden market, a famous conservation victory of yesteryear.

Just such new uses are spreading all around Smithfield, which now feels like Covent Garden in the 1970s, just before the market traders moved out. So now is not the best time to start knocking down chunks of it, you’d think. But this is not how the City thinks. The City is keen to have a large supply of available office space in order to maintain its world domination as, well, a place full of offices. There is a glut of empty office buildings right now, but it always wants more because it knows that, in the end, they will all be occupied. And the City is running out of places to build them. Hence the crop of skyscrapers now being planned. And hence the big guns being turned on Smithfield.

The big guns in question, apart from the City itself, are the developers Thornfield Properties (part-owned by Lehman Brothers and the Bank of Scotland) with the architects KPF — one of those transatlantic firms that builds all over the globe. Actually, KPF are not bad as corporate spacemongers go. The two big blocks they propose are by no means the worst of their kind. In cold planning terms, they plug a gap, bringing the scale of West Smithfield up to that of the big buildings along Farringdon Road. But this misses the point, the point being that this low-rise end of Smithfield is a characterful urban pause point, a breathing space in what already feels too much like an office canyon. Fill this gap and an important part of London’s eccentric inherited townscape will become just another glacial corporate cliff face. A kind of speciality retail mall is proposed at ground level in the largest new building, but you could turn the existing buildings into that, if you didn’t want offices as well.

The General Market was built as part of a huge, technically advanced Victorian engineering exercise that includes railway tunnels and sidings underneath. Trains run through the basement. It is said this underworld is in a poor state and needs to be rebuilt at a cost of £18m — which you cannot do with the old buildings on top. How convenient for the developers. Engineers employed by the conservation group Save dispute this claim, however, and reckon that any necessary repairs to the tunnel structures would be relatively straightforward — so long as you keep the old buildings.

It seems increasingly likely that the General Market will shortly be listed, but this does not confer absolute protection: even listed, the buildings can be torn down. West Smithfield’s situation reflects the eternal struggle of London — Mammon v moderation. In truth, the capital needs both. We need the great engines of finance and administration, in the right places. But we also need the quirky corners that make London different from everywhere else. Save and restore Smithfield’s General Market buildings, and this unique urban oasis will be strengthened. Sweep them away in favour of internationalist office blocks, and future generations will curse us for allowing them. It really is as simple as that.