Jonathan Morrison
Skyscrapers in London: Do we want to reach for the stars?
Developers and corporate behemoths love skyscrapers but it is only relatively recently that the capital has fallen under their spell, writes Jonathan Morrison in this special report. Illustrations by Carol Hsiung
It started with a secret. And that secret was the worst-kept secret in the history of official secrets. By the time it was revealed in 1993, thanks to Kate Hoey MP and her parliamentary privilege, the Post Office Tower had dominated the capital’s skyline for nearly 30 years. You couldn’t miss it, let alone hide it.
When it was first built in 1964, the Post Office Tower, at 191m high including the antenna, was the first of London’s skyscrapers. Initially, though, it didn’t even feature on Ordnance Survey maps. It could only be referred to by the code name “location 23” in the trial of the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in 1978 after he had been accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act. The reason? Because it was primarily constructed to act as a microwave relay station. Tall enough to beam microwaves over the Chiltern Hills to the north, it enabled Whitehall to communicate directly with the RAF bomber bases in East Anglia via a network of line-of-sight relay towers that were considered to offer far greater resilience to nuclear attack, and eavesdropping, than traditional copper wires.
While few would describe it as aesthetically pleasing, it certainly embodied the Modernist ideal of “form following function”; its cylindrical design was mostly to prevent it moving in the wind, as most tall buildings do. Even a sway of 20cm at the top would be enough to knock out communications in the capital. But the architects, Eric Bedford and GR Yates, had also noted that the only buildings that survived the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were round ones, because the blasts flowed around them. Even if the rest of the city were to be obliterated, the chances were that the Post Office Tower would remain standing.
It was certainly an engineering marvel, requiring 13,000 tonnes of steel, 4,600sqm of glass and foundations 53m deep. It was capable of handling 150,000 phone calls and 40 TV channels simultaneously, which was an incredible amount of data for the time. And at the top was a rotating restaurant that offered panoramic views and quickly became one of the trendiest places to be seen in a city that, during the swinging Sixties, was the trendiest place on the planet. Famous diners included the Beatles and Dusty Springfield, but the restaurant was wrecked after an IRA bomb ripped through it in 1971. It was later closed to the public for security reasons.
The Post Office Tower was the first of what we would call proper skyscrapers but there had been other attempts to build up before. (The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a respected Chicago-based think-tank, defines a skyscraper as being over 200m in height, but other academic publications define skyscrapers as 150m-plus.) The 118m Millbank Tower in Westminster, formerly the HQ of the Labour Party, was completed a year earlier, in 1963. The elegant Shell Centre on the site of the Festival of Britain, was constructed between 1957 and 1962, and reached 107m. Then there was the Empress State Building by Earl’s Court, at 117m, which was intended as a hotel but was taken over by the Admiralty and GCHQ and is still mostly occupied by the Metropolitan Police. And, of course, the Crystal Palace transmitter of 1956, at 219m still the eighth-tallest structure in London, replaced the one at Alexandra Palace, dating from 1936 and only 65.5m. Yet as a general rule London remained a relatively low-lying conurbation well into the post-war period. In fact, it was one of the last of the world’s great cities to begin reaching for the sky.
There are three main reasons: geological, historical and legal.
Let’s start with geology. For many years the capital was considered unsuitable for skyscrapers owing to the nature of the bedrock it was built on. London clay is very soft and susceptible to climatic conditions. It tends to shrink during dry periods and expand during wet ones; buildings, sewers and even roads can crack. London clay made it very difficult, and expensive, to fling up a forest of towers to rival Manhattan, which is mostly built on hard, metamorphic rock.
Only in the late 1960s did engineers find a solution, building taller structures on large concrete rafts that were embedded in the clay and featured downward-pointing piles — tubes of concrete and steel — to give stability.
This is the method used when the 309.5m Shard was built. Only five metres from the nearest Tube line at one edge, it sits on a vast 5,500 cubic metre slab with 68 spikes, each 53m long, anchoring it firmly in the London clay and even the sand beds beneath it. Fun fact: the slab itself was the result of the UK’s largest ever continuous concrete pour, with three concrete pumps distributing 700 truckloads of the stuff over 36 hours.
The foundations of the tallest building across the river, meanwhile, at 22 Bishopsgate in the City of London (278m), has actually gone right through the clay in places to hit solid rock — the deepest foundations in the country. But that’s not a commonplace solution as it is phenomenally expensive.
Skyscrapers came into their own in the United States in the early 20th century, when American cities were enjoying a boom, although they had been in existence since the mid-1880s. London was already heavily developed, and there was little to be gained from tearing down perfectly good Victorian and Edwardian buildings to make room for only slightly taller ones.
It would be down to the Luftwaffe to make a few new building plots available, although some older red-brick buildings were bulldozed in the 1960s too, such as the old Euston station and its famous arch, in the mistaken belief that they were ugly compared with Modernist creations. Only the intervention of Sir John Betjeman, the poet laureate, saved George Gilbert Scott’s gloriously ornate 1873 St Pancras Hotel from the wrecking ball. It just goes to show how wary we should be about knocking down older buildings simply because tastes have changed; often they can be refurbished and reused, saving massive amounts of carbon in the process.
Now to the legal. The law played its part in limiting London’s rise. From 1894 until 1954 the London Building Act limited the height of buildings to 24m, or the length of a fireman’s ladder. This was to ensure that they could be evacuated safely in the event of a blaze but it also ensured a low-lying cityscape, above which the dome of St Paul’s, at 111m, ascended majestically.
There were one or two exceptions to the Act, including Senate House, designed by Charles Holden for the University of London. Completed in 1937, it reached 64m in height and inspired the description of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. The former headquarters of Transport for London at 55 Broadway, also by Holden and completed in 1929, was slightly shorter at 56m.
St Paul’s pre-eminence was also ensured, perhaps improbably, by a gentleman’s agreement between the City of London Corporation and developers. This came into force in 1938 and established eight large “protected viewing corridors” along which the bourgeois inhabitants of Primrose Hill, Hampstead and Richmond could gaze lovingly at Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece. (If you lived in the poorer areas to the east or south, tough luck.)
The agreement was the brainchild of W Godfrey Allen, a surveyor of St Paul’s, and allegedly featured vistas from outside his favourite bars. Similar rules were adopted to protect the Monument, Tower of London and the river itself, leaving a complex asterisk of rigid height controls that remain in force to this day. San Francisco, Portland and Vancouver have taken a similar approach.
There are now 13 vistas enshrined in the London View Management Framework, which forms part of the capital’s planning guidance, but there are also, as usual, exceptions. For example, one of the reasons why the Leadenhall Building, known as the Cheesegrater, leans awkwardly towards the north, and the Scalpel opposite it leans to the south, is to preserve the view of St Paul’s down Fleet Street. And yet looking down the Kenwood House corridor from the top of Hampstead Heath, what should dominate the skyline? It’s the Shard.
Of course, there is also widespread criticism of the protected view system, not least because some vistas lend themselves to charges of parochialism. For instance, the sightline from King Henry VIII’s mound in Richmond Park to St Paul’s, which has significantly limited development around Liverpool Street station, is only made possible by a notch in a hedge.
St Paul’s, on the highest hill in the City of London, has come to symbolise the capital as effectively as the Eiffel Tower does Paris.
One of the finest examples of Baroque architecture ever created, it not only embodies centuries of history — having been built in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666 — but also certain national characteristics we’d like to give ourselves. Who can forget images of it standing defiant, seemingly alone, amid the swirling Blitz as the buildings beside it burnt?
Yet it was not always loved. The great dome, for which the cathedral is famous, was considered too “papish” — or Catholic — when first proposed and Sir Christopher Wren had to build it in secret, having shown the churchmen a more traditional design. It was concealed under scaffolding for decades until he believed that Londoners were ready to accept it. It probably helped that construction took 33 years.
Partly inspired by the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, partly by Michelangelo’s St Peter’s Basilica, St Paul’s pushed the boundaries of engineering. Wren drew heavily on the mathematical genius of his friend Robert Hooke, who discovered plant cells amongst other things, to calculate exactly how the 365ft and 65,000-tonne dome, which is still one of the largest in the world, could be supported.
Wren went on to build or rebuild 52 churches and the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. He is buried in the crypt at St Paul’s with a simple plaque in Latin that states: “If you seek his monument, look around you.”
Wouldn’t his masterpiece be diminished if it were to be hemmed in and overshadowed by a thicket of modern towers?
True skyscrapers were a rarity for the post-war period. But there were attempts to build landmark towers in the 1960s and 1970s, including Richard Seifert’s Centre Point, completed in 1966, in the heart of the West End; his Space House in Holborn; and Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower to the north, leading to an ugly “dragon’s teeth” skyline of widely spaced high-rises.
If you really wanted a cluster of tall buildings (which most people agree looks better and is now central to planning strategy), the nearest you could get to Chicago’s skyline was Croydon, which contained Seifert’s “threepenny bit” (or 50p) building at No 1 Croydon, beloved by fans of Brutalism.
The diminishing popularity of tower blocks for social housing also had a knock-on effect: what started off as a utopian “streets in the sky” experiment in the early 1950s became associated with poverty, deprivation, decay and crime, hence the use of Thamesmead as the set for Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian Clockwork Orange. The collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 because of a gas explosion appeared to be the final nail in the coffin. Such buildings were now seen as “slums in the sky”, with the notable exception of the Barbican in London, which was finished in 1982 and is home to more architects per square foot than anywhere else in the world.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of smaller multiple-storey buildings for accommodation. Usually squat, cheap to construct and of precious little architectural quality, they offer developers a quick return on investment and local councils find it hard to turn down the social housing and other goodies promised in return for planning consent.
The Faustian bargain struck between developers and local authorities is known as Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act. Sometimes it delivers primary schools; more often than not the lawyers get involved, the developers claim that they can’t afford the infrastructure any more and the council is forced to backtrack. The government plans to scrap Section 106 in its proposed reform of the planning system.
The biggest towers with the best flats, such as those in Nine Elms, are sold to overseas investors and often sit empty much of the year, while first-time buyers and those on the housing list are crammed into ever-diminishing spaces. The pandemic may have put a spoke in the wheel, causing delays to construction or even forcing a rethink of how and where we want to live (and work), but the forces and flows of so much capital are likely to prove intractable.
It was to fight the spread of second-rate projects that an architect called Barbara Weiss set up the Skyline Campaign, a group that has become one of the most significant advocates for keeping things at a more human scale.
“I do worry what all these towers are going to look like in 40 or 50 years,” she says. “We try to rein in the worst excesses of developers and prevent the sort of buildings that just don’t fit in with London’s character. But nobody really polices these things and I fear the horse has bolted. So much has already been lost.
“The problem with badly designed tall buildings is that they’re not just a local problem — they can be seen miles away so they become everyone’s problem. We need some sort of community veto. London has had its fill of bad tall buildings and they are fundamentally not in its character. We’re importing a typology from places like Dubai and it’s down to greed.
“It’s like the melting of the glaciers — it’s never going to go back to what it was, and the place has largely been ruined. It does upset me.”
While badly designed and shoddily constructed tall buildings are clearly an issue for the future of the city, and there’s no mechanism for removing them, these are not skyscrapers in the pure sense, which tend to be better designed. Skyscrapers now come in clusters rather than the “dragon’s teeth” of Seifert’s legacy and even the the Skyline Campaign agrees that clumps in the City and Docklands are the best - or least worst - ways of building skywards, assuming that the urge to build ever higher, bound up as it is with the symbolism of power and wealth, is not likely to vanish suddenly. Given that the world’s first 1km-tall building, the Jeddah Tower, is under construction in Saudi Arabia, it seems unlikely.
Eventually, Seifert did give London its second skyscraper, the 183m Natwest Tower, now called Tower 42, but he had to wait until 1980 to do it. It was poorly received by the public.
Much better designed, and with a floorplan that was not solely based on the owners’ corporate logo, was César Pelli’s 1 Canada Square (235m), which heralded a shift in financial power to the east. The poster child for the revitalisation of the Docklands — Margaret Thatcher’s great project to create a new business district where London’s disused warehouses and wharfs had been — Pelli quite literally used his skyscraper as a signpost to put Canary Wharf on the map.
Pelli also forced the City of London to chuck out their planning rule book: faced with the prospect of the big banks moving to Canary Wharf, where, like HSBC and Barclays, they could build ivory towers to advertise their power, suddenly the City was all ears when it came to building upwards. Competition from Frankfurt intensified the effect.
It was Lord Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe, with its Fabergé egg-like spiralling glass and steel cage, that really opened the floodgates. Only the second tall building in the City after Tower 42 when it was built — it’s now almost hidden by later additions — it fascinated Londoners, who nicknamed it “the Erotic Gherkin”. Suddenly, skyscrapers were cool again. Foster had shown that they could be sleek and beautiful and, in the years before the financial crash of 2008, his creation seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the bustling, booming capital.
The City cluster was under way and the Gherkin would soon be joined by the Heron Tower. The Cheesegrater, the Scalpel, the Walkie-Talkie and the Can of Ham all sprung on to the horizon, like so many children’s building blocks. There was even a scheme for a giant spiral — the Helter-Skelter — until the financial crisis poleaxed it.
Many years later its concrete core, nicknamed The Stump, and its prestigious site would be absorbed into 22 Bishopsgate, which for now is the tallest building in the financial district and one of the most advanced. Facial recognition technology permits seamless access for its occupants and the building also boasts as the world’s highest climbing wall to keep them fit.
The Docklands has also gone through a building boom and looks more like Doha by the day. There are five buildings more than 200m tall, with the latest, the “Diamond Building”, aka Newfoundland Quay, due to be completed within months. Here there are no sight lines and few obstacles to development and it shows. Only a few years ago, less was definitely more.
Other clusters have emerged, thanks mostly to the former mayors Ken Livingstone, who liked tall buildings, and Boris Johnson, now prime minister, who liked developers. So now there are clusters at Nine Elms, hard up against the blast zone of the new US embassy, which, according to Weiss, has “ruined living in Pimlico”, and by Blackfriars Bridge, where the “Trouser Bulge” (1 Blackfriars) looms darkly over the river. Stratford, Elephant and Castle and Croydon are to get clusters too. The tallest building in Croydon at the moment, Saffron Square, may be a contender for the worst in Britain: it’s so lurid it looks as though it has been beaten and is bleeding.
In the City more skyscrapers are planned. That’s partly so that the financial district can maintain its international preeminence — it claims that even post-Covid it is facing an imminent shortage of office space, particularly for lawyers — and partly to hide the Walkie-Talkie at 20 Fenchurch Street.
If the Gherkin showed the public everything there was to love about good modern architecture, the Walkie-Talkie did the opposite. Not only is it an obnoxious hunkered presence on the skyline but it also made headlines by burning nearby parked cars. The curvature of the facade was such that the sun’s rays were focused into a sort of death ray that could fry eggs on the pavement below. In winter the gusts it generated knocked pedestrians off their feet. The City now plans to expand its cluster to the south to swallow and hide it. Billions will be spent and an ancient streetscape will be all but destroyed because of one bad design, one bad decision.
There is a further limit on development, particularly in the City, which means that we are unlikely to see another building like the Shard any time soon. That limit is imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority and is designed to protect aircraft flying into City Airport. The CAA has capped building heights at 305m. So the tallest and most eagerly anticipated building of the future will be precisely that height above sea level, given that the City is on a slight hill.
Eric Parry says that his new 1 Undershaft building is designed to perform “a civic duty”, with the top floors given over to the Museum of London to create a viewing gallery and education centre. It is designed for cyclists more than cars, with 1,700 bike spaces and only a handful of parking spaces. And it is designed to taper at the top like a classical pillar, to fit elegantly into the cluster and provide it with a literal peak.
Parry’s design was partly inspired by the maypole. “The aim is to provide a still centre around which the rest of the circus rotates,” he says. “It’s deeply rooted in the landscape and culture of the place. Great care and attention has been paid to what the result will be and how it addresses the City’s need for good public space. Tower 42 used to stick out like a sore thumb, and that’s the opposite of what we want to achieve.”
This, perhaps, reflects the real change that London‘s skyscrapers have undergone in recent years, and for once it is positive: if they were, formerly, solitary beasts stalking the skyline, designed to attract attention and make a statement (the Post Office Tower partly exempted), now they are becoming model citizens, deferential to the public and the past, forming intricate and occasionally beautiful forms in conjunction with their neighbours.
For William Pedersen, the 82-year-old American architect who has built more skyscrapers than anyone living, his latest design in London, the Scalpel, is all about “the conversation”. He says: “The symbolic importance of height is hard to escape but… creating a building that responds and gestures to what’s around it is really what I’ve been trying to do for 43 years.” Parry agrees: “We have a civic duty to create a fantastic dialogue.”
Skyscrapers may not be to everyone’s taste but the attraction of building to the skies is deeply rooted psychologically and shows no signs of abating. So it is only with careful design and planning that the worst excesses of the money men can be controlled and some sort of harmony achieved. At the end of the day the skyline belongs to everyone and is too precious to be frittered away in a jumble of misconceived and frivolous blocks.
So perhaps we need to have a deeper conversation about what we really want for our capital city. Is it to be a fiesta of novelty, with sky gardens and LED-clad spheres to satisfy Instagram-fixated tourists? How often do we allow giant corporations to make an architectural statement about their wealth and power? How do we protect the history and culture and spirituality of our communities, without fixing them in aspic? How do we protect what is beautiful? And who really gets to decide?
The final word goes to Professor Alan Dunlop of the University of Liverpool, himself a practising architect, who has wrestled with many of these questions. He argues that some of the greatest skyscrapers of all time have been created for enlightened corporations, including the Lever, Sears and Seagram buildings in the United States, but he would like to see “a proper city centre with a good mix of uses, including cultural, residential, commercial and social”.
He says: “We need walkable districts, parts of which are car-free, with good transport connections. And whilst tourists are important for the economy and sky gardens are generally wonderful, it’s better to have gathering places and parks at ground level, where everyone can access them. That would improve the quality of life in London.
“Who gets to decide what’s built is easy: at the moment in the UK it’s politicians, who have a short electoral cycle and are unable to look beyond that and take a longer view. That’s why it’s so important for the public to take an interest.
“But the most challenging question is how we can protect what is beautiful. It’s one that I’ve been grappling with as a practitioner and an academic. First you have to define beauty. In schools of architecture we no longer talk about beauty; nor do we have an architectural canon [of what is considered beautiful] to draw on. We focus instead on sustainability, technical resolution and preparing to practise. A debate on beauty and what it means is long overdue.”
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