London's Skyline

The Sunday Times Magazine said last year that London was taking over from New York as the world’s financial centre. Glance at the skyline of cranes and girders, and you’re inclined to agree. And if there’s one thing a preeminent financial centre loves, it’s talk of new skyscrapers. As the economic graph goes zinging upwards, so do the plans of ambitious developers and their ever-eager architects. Nobody can ignore a skyscraper. Which is why a public inquiry is taking place into designs for one that looks like a giant walkie-talkie. Just how desirable are these things, and where should we put them?
We Brits aren’t natural tower-erectors, cathedrals apart. We build them with bad grace. Until Norman Foster and his then sidekick Ken Shuttleworth produced the unexpectedly lovable 590ft “Gherkin” at 30 St Mary Axe, in the heart of the City of London, in 2004, we were bumping along in the wake of the Americans. They knew how to build tall, from Manhattan to Chicago. In contrast, we produced lumpen, ill-proportioned things. Manhattan had the Empire State and Chrysler buildings by the early 1930s; we weren’t allowed to build taller than 100ft in London until the end of the 1950s, on the principle that firemen’s ladders wouldn’t go any higher. We didn’t get our first true skyscraper — the 600ft NatWest Tower, now Tower 42 — until the close of the 1970s. We just didn’t have the knack.
Small wonder that we took a breather for a decade after that. Skyscraper service resumed with the stainless-steel obelisk of César Pelli’s 771ft Canary Wharf tower (1991). And when the IRA blew up the old Baltic Exchange in the City, thus providing a convenient excuse to build a new tower, Foster stepped up to the mark. His first attempt was a graceless super-scraper like a giant stick of celery. That was thrown out. But his second was the Gherkin. And it works well because it understands that it is part of a larger urban composition.
For towers to work in a great city, they can’t be plonked down just anywhere. Parisians were so traumatised by the arrival of the ghastly 689ft Tour Montparnasse at the start of the 1970s — stuck out awkwardly to one side of the centre — that they forthwith corralled all new towers in the western La Défense business district, an antecedent to our Canary Wharf. Better, perhaps, to have allowed a second small cluster of towers at Montparnasse to cloak the thing somewhat. Because, with skyscrapers, one-off buildings really don’t work too well. They need a companionable huddle. And this, despite all our make-do-and-mending down the years, is what we have in the City of London.

Go to Parliament Hill or Alexandra Palace, and take in those glorious vistas across the whole of London. There is the cluster of towers developing in the City, the Gherkin stuck like a marker pin right in the middle of everything. And there, out east, is the less satisfactory cluster of Canary Wharf. They’ve really packed ’em in down there. The towers are too close, too similar, too regimented. In contrast, the City benefits from having a radial, medieval street pattern. Take a look at its towers closer in, from Waterloo Bridge. They execute a stately dance. It’s a glorious sight, plainly a world-class capital. But it is, of course, about to change again.
They’ve just started work on Richard Rogers’s tower at 122 Leadenhall Street, aka the “cheese grater”. This tall, narrow wedge of a building, near the Gherkin, will comfortably outstrip both it and Tower 42, rising to 737ft. It will be finished by 2010. But two others will be taller: the Heron Tower will come close to 800ft, while pride of place in the City cluster will go to the spiralling 945ft Bishopsgate Tower, hopefully dubbed the Pinnacle.
Both are by the US architects KPF, who could be described as a class commercial outfit. KPF may not have anything like the international standing or originality of a Rem Koolhaas or a Zaha Hadid or a Foster, but they know how to build towers. It’s what they do. They have another pair — slimmer residential ones, 525ftand 470ft — planned for the gargantuan Victoria Transport Interchange development, perilously close to Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster. Ooer: cue heritage hand-wringing.
But hang on. Building those means getting rid of the hatefully banal 330ft Portland House from 1962: a reminder of just how bad we used to be at building skyscrapers. I’d rather have two good, taller, slimmer towers than one stumpy, horrible one. On the basis of the crude consultation models I’ve seen so far, it’s too early to make a judgment on the merits of the emerging Victoria mini-cluster of skyscrapers. We need to see the detail.
We’re transfixed by height — how about Renzo Piano’s proposed “Shard” at London Bridge, for instance? If it is built, it will finally breach the 1,000ft barrier in London. But the arguments about such buildings are nearly always stupid — they are about height rather than quality. Never mind how tall it is: is it any good? What’s it like at street level?
The view from the people who determine these things in London — which means Ken Livingstone’s cluster of architectural advisers and the well-meaning but usually rather hopeless bureaucracy known as Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment — is that tall is good, so long as it is in the right place. So long as the towers don’t get in the way of the complex of “viewing corridors” of the drum and dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. There are plans to narrow those corridors. Then there is English Heritage, the conservation quango headed by Simon Thurley, which tends to resist the new wave of ’scrapers, usually fruitlessly.
What’s exercising English Heritage at the moment is the public inquiry for the the Uruguayan-American architect Rafael Viñoly’s “walkie-talkie” tower proposal at 20 Fenchurch Street, for one of London’s most active commercial developers, Land Securities, the firm behind the Victoria proposals. It will impinge on views of the Tower of London, but that’s not the point. So does the Gherkin. The point is not whether you’ll be able to see it, it’s whether you will want to.
Viñoly has letters of support from Foster, Rogers, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and others. They stick together, top architects. It’s just as well he didn’t ask me. It’s a tower that gets wider towards the top, its facade curling forwards alarmingly. Forget “walkie-talkie”, they should call it the Hunchback. It may well have a marvellous conservatory-like viewing gallery on top. But compared to the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, the Pinnacle, the Shard, even Tower 42 — all of which have the sense to slim down on the upper levels — it is perverse. It looks slightly better if you turn the picture upside-down, but not much.
The Hunchback is scarcely elegant, then, but it gets one thing right. It is not trying to be top dog in London. Its height — if not its shape — is appropriate for its position. It would be on the edge of the stately dance, a peasant gazing enviously at the more graceful moves of the gentlefolk at the centre of the floor.
The world’s best skyscraper cities tell us that the ensemble is what matters, not the individual building. Close up, the Empire State Building is horribly crude; from afar, Manhattan is magic. When Canaletto painted (and carefully doctored) his views of London with all its spires, it was the overall composition that mattered. Nothing has changed. We need a new Canaletto to appreciate the possibilities of our new wave of tower-building.