Skyline campaign

FAR LEFT: PAUL RAFTERY. LEFT: HUFTON + CROW

A tale of two towers

When London has no skyscraper strategy,

good architecture becomes a matter of chance
as Rogers elegant Cheesegrater and Broadway
Malyans joyless tower show, writes Robert Bevan
02.08.12

trio of explosions has

informed the history of
tower building in London
over recent decades. The first was
metaphorical, Margaret Thatchers
Big Bang the deregulation of the
UKs financial services sector in 1986.
This, together with technological
innovations, turned the City of
London and Docklands into a
forcing frame for new offices, both
groundscrapers (which, we were told
briefly, were essential for large trading
floors) then skyscrapers, as the arrival
of flat screens and rapidly changing
practices meant trading floors were
out, so it was time to think taller rather
than Broadgate.
The next big bang for Londons
financial architecture was the evening
of 10 April 1992 when the Provisional
IRA detonated a one-tonne truck bomb
outside the Baltic Exchange in the City.
Later the same night, a second massive
IRA blast tore through Staples Corner
in north London. London felt under
siege. As was the intent.
The City of London Corporations
rattled response was the ring of>>
33

steel around its domain. Streets into

the City were narrowed and guarded
by armed police and surveyed by
CCTV. Reinforced bollards protecting
no mans land aprons outside buildings
turned public plazas into privatised
tank traps. This, just as the walls and
fences of the Eastern bloc were being
dismantled and klepto-oligarchs
were looking to London as a place
tolaunder, then pile, their stash.
The third explosion, of transatlantic
force, was, of course, the 9/11 attack
on the World Trade Center that
gave pause to high-rise ambitions as
corporate icons became terror targets.
There were predictions that companies
worldwide would flee conspicuous
city-centre high-rises for low-rise,
suburban business parks.
That never happened. Instead,
after building codes were checked
for structural safety and means of
escape, towers rose once more in our

The City has dug in and

spread upwards rather
than outwards
34 theaj.co.uk

cities. But that does not mean that

the consequences of 9/11 are not still
unfolding for Londons architecture.
The echoes of these three powerful
bangs are now combining with
dramatic effect on Londons skyline.
As New London Architectures
Londons Growing Up! report
and exhibition demonstrate (see
AJ04.04.14), some 236 buildings
above 20 storeys are now in the
pipeline from those proposed or
approved to those on site. If all built
they will change the capital forever.
They represent a search for security
in a world turned upside down by the
financial mayhem unleashed by post1980s neo-liberal economics, and the
chronic global instability that has only
intensified post-9/11 a new world
disorder. Despite being no less a terror
target, London is seen as politically
stable a safe haven for investors.
Among the many architectural
leviathans to have emerged recently
are two skyscrapers, each more than
50 storeys high Broadway Malyans
The Tower at One StGeorge Wharf,
Vauxhall, and Rogers Stirk Harbour +
Partners (RSHP) Leadenhall Building
in the Square Mile, which completes

Above left The

Commercial
Union Tower after
the 1992 Baltic
Exchange IRA
bombing. The
building has since
been reclad
Above The 9/11
attack on the World
Trade Center
temporarily halted
high-rise ambitions
Above right
Rogers Stirk
Harbour + Partners
Leadenhall Building
stands opposite
the same firms
quintessential
City landmark, the
Lloyds Building
Opposite Foster
+ Partners 30
St Mary Axe was
built on the Baltic
Exchange site

at theend ofthe summer and is

popularly known as the Cheesegrater.
The City has always been a club,
huddled together to protect its
privileges from first the crown, then
parliament over in Westminster. A
mess of merchants and gossip in
the past, today the City corporation
argues that its propinquity is vital
to its success as a global financial
centre. But now it is a fortress with
an outlier citadel at Canary Wharf.
The Square Mile could have steadily
spread its largesse east, regenerating
a vast mixed-use swathe of Tower
Hamlets between Whitechapel and
the Isle of Dogs the process. Instead
it has dug in, spread upwards rather
than outwards. Long monocultural, the
City has resisted new residents with
a vengeance. It has eaten itself and its
history and now, in the form of earlier
towers now up for renewal, its children.
The 225m-tall Cheesegrater sits
within a cluster of towers that is a
product of both violence and deference.
Violence in that it is sited close to the
Baltic Exchange bombing site that
transformed this part of the City. The
old exchange itself has been replaced
by Foster + Partners Swiss Re tower
11.04.14

at 30St Mary Axe. The Cheesegrater

site is the east side of a plaza formed
by the erection in the late 1960s of two
sub-Miesian buildings at right angles
by GMW Architects the former
Commercial Union Tower (now the
Aviva Tower, its 24 storeys reclad after
the bombing) and the 15-storey P&O
building demolished to make way for
the Leadenhall Building.
On the south side of the plaza
is Rogers Lloyds Building and
the dynamic between this earlier
building and the practices latest is
extraordinarily powerful; the portecochre canopy of the inclined
Cheesegrater reaches out across the
narrow Leadenhall Street towards
its parent. The Leadenhall Buildings
glassy angular wedge, 22 wall-climbing
lifts and diagrid mediate between
the crafted intricacy of Lloyds and
the diagonal structure of Swiss Res
smooth bullet. Built speculatively by
British Land, it will be occupied by the
insurance companies that dominate
thisquarter.
The existing square is a dreary affair,
shaded for much of the day and the
Cheesegrater cant undo this. Instead,
the building perches 30mabovethe>>
11.04.14

VIEW/DENNIS GILBERT

Skyline campaign
A tale of two towers: essay by Robert Bevan

street on diagonal legs with its lobby

and a restaurant and bar reached by
escalators that animate the undercroft
entrance. It should be particularly
effective when illuminated after dark.
The additional public space created
under the soffit is, though, likemuch
of the citys new public realm,
actually a private and controlled affair.
Jacking the building up no doubt
helps with security too. Control is
notrelinquished.
Stepping back 750mm between each
diminishing floorplate, the tower is
designed to reach its maximum height
while deferring to the protected views
of St Pauls Cathedral. This, like the
Swiss Re, is achieved with an admirable
simplicity and elegance that makes its
upcoming neighbours (Kohn Pedersen
Foxs Scalpel, Foggo Associates Can of
Ham and, if it restarts, the Swiss roll of
KPFs Pinnacle) look exactly what they
are silly one-liners from architects of
a certain generation who have watched
Blade Runner once too often.
That Londons skyline should be
radically altered by such throwaway
gestures is appalling but at least, in the
City, these additions are for the most
part clustered with purpose.
If the Leadenhall Building is highrise architecture at its best, Broadway
Malyans 53-storey, catherine-wheel
plan offering on the river at Vauxhall
shows it at its worst. Grandiloquently
christened The Tower, One St George
Wharf, it is the tallest residential tower
in the UK and rarely has crassness
been achieved at such a scale. It is so
utterly bland that there is no danger of
it garnering a nickname out of either
affection or disdain.
It rises 181m from the west side of
the lower St George Wharf flappy
birds housing and office development
with all the joy of a PFI hospital, and

The St George tower is so

bland there is no danger
of it garnering a nickname
36 theaj.co.uk

LEFT: HUFTON + CROW. RIGHT: PAUL RAFTERY

Skyline campaign
A tale of two towers: essay by Robert Bevan

also by the house of Broadway Malyan,

that fills the former industrial site
between Vauxhall Bridge and a new
pocket park.
Instead of its lower neighbours
cheap green glass, precast concrete
and grey framing, The Tower has a
cheap grey glass and metallic finish.
At its foot is a two-storey podium
containing a gym and lobby (guarded
by a bowler-hatted, white-gloved
flunky), while at its peak, it steps back

Above Broadway
Malyans The Tower
at St George Wharf
in Vauxhall is the
highest residential
tower in the UK
Opposite Rogers
Stirk Harbour +
Partners Leadenhall
Building by is
set to complete
this summer

for penthouse terraces and is crowned

with a 10m-high wind turbine in a
cage thatcant possibly have been
worth theeffort.
The Tower meets the ground
defended by raised flowerbeds, a
gravel-filled mini-moat, and a locked
and gated driveway and private garden
(not shown in earlier CGIs) that
shouts SLOAP space left over after
planning. Black granite-blade garden
walls, a mix of paviours, metal fencing
and a tiled water feature surround it
like a dust-up in a samples library.
One could go on about its many
design failings, but that would miss the
larger point of its role as a shock trooper
pushed through by Ken Livingstone
and John Prescott to gain territory for
a rash of even higher towers planned
between here and Battersea, including
One Nine Elms (58 and 43 storeys)
that will, unpardonably, muscle in on
the setting of the Palace of Westminster
when viewed from bridges east of
Big Bens tower, and throw more of
the Thames into shade. This would
matter less if we were guaranteed the
exceptional quality one would expect
ofsuch a sitein a world city.
Some 80 per cent of the 236 towers
on their way are greedy, vertical
gated communities of this ilk built as
investments; a three-bedder on the
23rd floor of The Tower is already for
resale at 3.1 million through Savills.
The ghost streets of Kensington &
Chelseas international super-rich will
be joined by ghost towers elsewhere
inthe capital.
That this has come to pass is
partly the result of the slow death of
strategic planning another legacy
of neo-liberalism coupled with global
political and economic strife that has
seen capital dash to London as a place
of greater safety. Such architectural
braggadocio is a sign of weakness, not
strength. These are not towers of hope
for a world city, but towers of fear in
a world of instability the clustering
progeny of a global cluster-fuck. n
Robert Bevan is a regeneration consultant
and writer on architecture and urban design
11.04.14