Jonathan Morrison
The Shard: The Vision of Irvine Sellar by Howard Watson
This account of building the Shard lacks a point, says Jonathan Morrison
Oversized or iconic? Feathered or unfinished? A spike through the heart of London or an elegant spire, reminiscent of a Canaletto cityscape? No recent building has divided opinion quite like the Shard, the 310m skyscraper built next to London Bridge station and officially opened in the summer of 2012.
This book professes to tell the story of its 12-year gestation, focusing largely on how the property developer Irvine Sellar overcame all obstacles to get the £2 billion scheme off the drawing board. Sadly, it is about as impartial as the Shard is demure.
There’s probably a Greek word for the excessive love of a man for a building, and this publication would seem to demonstrate the pathology, not least in the epilogue, where the author marches from his own house to London Bridge on a sort of pilgrimage (only to be prevented from ascending it on foot by security — one of the few laughs). Not only does Howard Watson regularly compare the Shard to the greatest of all London’s architectural jewels, St Paul’s, but criticism is dismissed with a flourish, most bizarrely when he attempts to rebut aesthetic objections with the strange insistence that “Campari may not be to my taste” — as if buildings, like alcoholic liqueurs, are merely a question of palate.
While it is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, to a certain extent the book is at its flimsiest when it attempts to justify the Shard on moral grounds as well — it is a public building, he claims (but only if you pay an eye-moistening sum to reach the gallery, or for a meal in a restaurant); the view is spectacular (as it is from a plane); the alternative would be a “fridge” (not necessarily); and the development has brought financial benefits to a deprived area (as any development would, whether forced to under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act or not).
None of the arguments quite adds up. The fact that a building containing a five-star hotel, some of the most expensive apartments in London, an overpriced viewing gallery and three high-end restaurants was opened to the strains of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man may seem like a sick joke to many.
There are, of course, moments of drama in this story. The Shard is called in for a planning inquiry — the horror. The Qataris, whose scheme it effectively becomes, get Sellar over a barrel as he struggles for finance during the banking crash of 2008 — cue violins. The book is at its most interesting when it reveals how the obstacles were overcome. Informed that the planning inquiry would be held in “student accommodation”, the office of the architect, Renzo Piano, freshened up the room with expensive furniture and 150 dazzling artists’ images of the scheme. “The opposition were disadvantaged before the opening arguments ever began,” Watson crows, as if it were a neat trick and not a damning indictment of the process.
Later, hearing that the Shard is struggling to secure finance without an anchor tenant, Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London at the time, steps in and orders Transport for London to rent space. In fact, the biggest threat the scheme probably faced was a political one: did the new Labour government hate Livingstone enough to scupper one of his pet projects just for old times’ sake?
At the centre of the book is the figure of Irvine Sellar himself, who died this year. Watson claims that only Sellar’s East End market-stall to high-finance backstory could have produced a man determined enough to turn Piano’s back-of-the-napkin sketch into 11,500 tonnes of steel and 120,000 sq m of glass. “The Shard is one man,” confirms Chris Cole of the engineering firm WSP.
Irvine was evidently quite a character. However, one architecture critic’s description of “a stocky wheeler-dealer who looks as though he could sell you a retail park with one hand and deck you with the other if you try to stiff him on the deal” rings truer than Watson’s sycophancy. One description reads like a bad potboiler: “Sellar . . . would never be satisfied. He would always be looking forward, studying the horizon . . . wanting to both innovate and push himself into unknown territory.”
Aside from Sellar’s determination, his main contribution to the story seems to be deciding to build at London Bridge. This is portrayed as a stroke of genius akin to launching the chain of unisex clothing shops that made his first fortune, although it came at a time when Livingstone was throwing open the doors to towers all along the south bank of the river — the dismal results of which can be seen today — and at a place where two tall office blocks already existed.
If you genuinely believe that the Shard is the best thing to happen to the capital since St Paul’s, this may be the book for you. For everyone else, though, given there is little new information or insight, and given the wildly biased assessment of the project and the instigator, it ends up a bit like the Shard itself — lacking a real point.
∗ ∗ ∗