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| 'Gotham City' image published in the Evening Standard hints at future view across the Thames from Victoria. Building at far right is on the site of the new US Embassy. |
Whenever I take my favorite bus ride from London’s East End to Oxford Street I am impressed that cranes – the kind used for construction -- seem to be sprouting everywhere in Britain’s capital.
How could this be? The daily news is full of glum and sometimes grim reports, large-scale manufacturing business seems almost to have died out, and people, at least the ones I know, tend to be pessimistic for the future. The truth is that modern Britain holds a very large international debt -- on a per-capita basis one of the highest in the world -- and expected government expenditures outstrip expected revenue by an embarrassing amount.
Yet the demand for new buildings, of which skyscrapers are naturally the most obvious, shows no sign of slowing. One of the fanciest is the Shard, which juts a shade more than 1,000 feet above the Thames. It may be less than half the height of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, but for Europe it is a magnificent monster. Other tall buildings with architecturally descriptive nicknames like the Cheese-Grater and the Gherkin could have threatened the view of famous sites like St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament. Some new buildings catch the eye because they are strangely shaped or just plain ugly. Some others, particularly in the financial City district, are strikingly handsome and/or intriguing to behold.
Now even more construction for the metropolis is being forecast by the lame-duck mayor, Boris Johnson, known for his shock of blond hair, his occasional off-the-wall comments, his series of proposals for new London airports, and the in-progress project that is piercing London with a new rail system to speed passengers from Heathrow to stations deep underground, out the other side, and back again.
According to Boris (to most there is only one Boris of consequence in London), over the next 35 years his town will need 1.75 million new homes, 600 new schools and colleges, new bridges over the Thames, and a revolution in public transport. Whether it will get them is another question, though Britain is still experiencing a bit of denial over the need for post-recession frugality, fearing greater slippage into the role of a small and snooty semi-European former empire-builder. It can be expected that more of the people who need in-town homes will be steered into elderly, modified office blocks whose better-off tenants have moved into snazzier, air-conditioned quarters – the latter costing more per square foot than anywhere else because of the great difficulty of building modern edifices on the corners of streets laid out by medieval sheep drovers. Across the canal from my flat, on Viners Street, artists have taken over a string of sweatshop garment factories. Result: studios and galleries on the ground floor, canal-view housing for the artists on the upper floor.
Boris’s dream, though he has assembled a team of architectural esthetes for guidance, is running into trouble from people who want London to look like London, and who dislike buildings that thrust their glass and metal shapes across iconic views of, for example, St. Paul’s and Trafalgar Square. Nor do they care for buildings that look as though they were originally spherical or dome-shaped but appear to have collapsed into squat, lopsided art millennial statuary.
And so I was pleased earlier this year when Britain’s architectural critics and gurus, including writers for the influential Architects' Journal, cried “enough!” and demanded better controls over the design of new buildings and the nixing of approval for those that would interfere with treasured views of iconic London.
More than 230 tall buildings, ranging from 20 storeys to more than 60, are currently planned for construction in central and suburban London. Many are for luxury flats, often left empty by wealthy overseas investors and financially inaccessible to the worker bees who simply need a decent place to live. Still, seven million square feet of new office space will be readied this year, more than anywhere else in Europe or the United States.
“When the appearance of a great city is about to be radically transformed, it is a good idea for its citizens to be shown what is going to happen and have a say in it,” remarked Rowan Moore of The Guardian. “It is also a good idea if the city's government has a vision, or at least an overview, of what is happening, Neither of these applies to the wave of towers about to hit London.”
A few days later, Jonathan Prynn of The Evening Standard announced that “the campaign against the ‘untrammeled rash’ of towers transforming London’s skyline gathered pace today with [publication of] images of ‘Gotham City’ style forests of skyscrapers. They show how the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall [see image above] and Blackfriars Bridge will be changed beyond recognition by towers already under way or in the planning system.”
Why care about such esthetics when modern times demand ever more utilitarian efforts? Let me tell you a story. When I return from that bus ride to Oxford Street, you’ll probably find me in the house, nearly 200 years old now and a Blitz survivor, that was revived from near-dereliction by my daughter and her husband. You’ll see me admiring for the nth time what they have done to restore their house in a manner prescribed by a protector of historic buildings, the Spitalfields Trust.
With the help of a few friends they dug a sewer, replaced the three upper floors, and proceeded to make it look very much like it did when new, from the iron fireplaces to the few oldtime wavy-glass window panels that have survived the years. The plaster moldings were rebuilt, the unsightly rectangular shop window replaced by a high, gracefully arched window of Regency style. If a shutter or window frame was broken and needed repair, my “kids” were ready and eminently able to put it right, usually without having to call for help. I felt honored when my son-in-law David took me to a professionally restored house of a similar age to identify exactly the colors and finish of the paints used to paint the walls and woodwork, to make sure that the looks would be truly “right.”
There's no secret that I like old buildings. Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, but also the virtually unknown adobe ruins of an American Indian village, a certain church lost in the New Mexico desert, the old miners’ shacks in a coal mining town I know, the hop-pickers’ long deserted hovels in Kent. Some have the magic of fine artisanry, some are historical sites, some I just like to ponder and wonder who built them, who would have lived there, and what must have happened within those walls.
I appreciate the fact that so many attractive Victorian buildings of London have been completely gutted, leaving only the front wall standing, so that they can be refitted with efficient and comfortable workplaces for new tenants. And to tell the truth many of the all-21st-century buildings are visually beautiful for their clean, graceful outlines, which cleverly conceal the amazing engineering genius that gave them birth. Their builders cannot afford to commission the carvings, moldings, exotic building stone, and the intriguing and sometimes whimsical features that I see from the top deck of my red London bus, or which memorialize the achievement of financial and cultural glory in other cities which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nor do modern builders and residents appreciate the need for such items, except as curiosities and tourist attractions.
Boris is right. These days the city most of all needs affordable housing and efficient transport for moving passengers by air, rail, and road. The retention and care of attractive old buildings is the business of outfits like the National Trust and English Heritage. And of course the world has changed. It is not at all the same world that it was even a few decades ago. It follows that neither is the character of building construction. "Whereas Victorian London was built on the trading profits from a world-girdling empire,” wrote Will Self of The Guardian, “its 21st-century successor is being airily spun from the aerated finance frothing atop money flowing from other less stable economies.”
According to Boris (to most there is only one Boris of consequence in London), over the next 35 years his town will need 1.75 million new homes, 600 new schools and colleges, new bridges over the Thames, and a revolution in public transport. Whether it will get them is another question, though Britain is still experiencing a bit of denial over the need for post-recession frugality, fearing greater slippage into the role of a small and snooty semi-European former empire-builder. It can be expected that more of the people who need in-town homes will be steered into elderly, modified office blocks whose better-off tenants have moved into snazzier, air-conditioned quarters – the latter costing more per square foot than anywhere else because of the great difficulty of building modern edifices on the corners of streets laid out by medieval sheep drovers. Across the canal from my flat, on Viners Street, artists have taken over a string of sweatshop garment factories. Result: studios and galleries on the ground floor, canal-view housing for the artists on the upper floor.
Boris’s dream, though he has assembled a team of architectural esthetes for guidance, is running into trouble from people who want London to look like London, and who dislike buildings that thrust their glass and metal shapes across iconic views of, for example, St. Paul’s and Trafalgar Square. Nor do they care for buildings that look as though they were originally spherical or dome-shaped but appear to have collapsed into squat, lopsided art millennial statuary.
And so I was pleased earlier this year when Britain’s architectural critics and gurus, including writers for the influential Architects' Journal, cried “enough!” and demanded better controls over the design of new buildings and the nixing of approval for those that would interfere with treasured views of iconic London.
More than 230 tall buildings, ranging from 20 storeys to more than 60, are currently planned for construction in central and suburban London. Many are for luxury flats, often left empty by wealthy overseas investors and financially inaccessible to the worker bees who simply need a decent place to live. Still, seven million square feet of new office space will be readied this year, more than anywhere else in Europe or the United States.
“When the appearance of a great city is about to be radically transformed, it is a good idea for its citizens to be shown what is going to happen and have a say in it,” remarked Rowan Moore of The Guardian. “It is also a good idea if the city's government has a vision, or at least an overview, of what is happening, Neither of these applies to the wave of towers about to hit London.”
A few days later, Jonathan Prynn of The Evening Standard announced that “the campaign against the ‘untrammeled rash’ of towers transforming London’s skyline gathered pace today with [publication of] images of ‘Gotham City’ style forests of skyscrapers. They show how the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall [see image above] and Blackfriars Bridge will be changed beyond recognition by towers already under way or in the planning system.”
Why care about such esthetics when modern times demand ever more utilitarian efforts? Let me tell you a story. When I return from that bus ride to Oxford Street, you’ll probably find me in the house, nearly 200 years old now and a Blitz survivor, that was revived from near-dereliction by my daughter and her husband. You’ll see me admiring for the nth time what they have done to restore their house in a manner prescribed by a protector of historic buildings, the Spitalfields Trust.
With the help of a few friends they dug a sewer, replaced the three upper floors, and proceeded to make it look very much like it did when new, from the iron fireplaces to the few oldtime wavy-glass window panels that have survived the years. The plaster moldings were rebuilt, the unsightly rectangular shop window replaced by a high, gracefully arched window of Regency style. If a shutter or window frame was broken and needed repair, my “kids” were ready and eminently able to put it right, usually without having to call for help. I felt honored when my son-in-law David took me to a professionally restored house of a similar age to identify exactly the colors and finish of the paints used to paint the walls and woodwork, to make sure that the looks would be truly “right.”
There's no secret that I like old buildings. Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, but also the virtually unknown adobe ruins of an American Indian village, a certain church lost in the New Mexico desert, the old miners’ shacks in a coal mining town I know, the hop-pickers’ long deserted hovels in Kent. Some have the magic of fine artisanry, some are historical sites, some I just like to ponder and wonder who built them, who would have lived there, and what must have happened within those walls.
I appreciate the fact that so many attractive Victorian buildings of London have been completely gutted, leaving only the front wall standing, so that they can be refitted with efficient and comfortable workplaces for new tenants. And to tell the truth many of the all-21st-century buildings are visually beautiful for their clean, graceful outlines, which cleverly conceal the amazing engineering genius that gave them birth. Their builders cannot afford to commission the carvings, moldings, exotic building stone, and the intriguing and sometimes whimsical features that I see from the top deck of my red London bus, or which memorialize the achievement of financial and cultural glory in other cities which flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nor do modern builders and residents appreciate the need for such items, except as curiosities and tourist attractions.
Boris is right. These days the city most of all needs affordable housing and efficient transport for moving passengers by air, rail, and road. The retention and care of attractive old buildings is the business of outfits like the National Trust and English Heritage. And of course the world has changed. It is not at all the same world that it was even a few decades ago. It follows that neither is the character of building construction. "Whereas Victorian London was built on the trading profits from a world-girdling empire,” wrote Will Self of The Guardian, “its 21st-century successor is being airily spun from the aerated finance frothing atop money flowing from other less stable economies.”
Great blog by Nigel as always.
ReplyDeleteLondon has been destroyed. Its communities have been replaced by foreigners, to the extent that it's actually a novelty to converse with someone who is actually from this country. Its character has been buried underneath the shiny new towers and shopping malls and blocks of ugly 'luxury' apartments that the Masons who control the place have been throwing up for the last fifteen years or so.
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