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As part of my research for my dissertation I interviewed Peter Rees (Chief planning officer for the City of London from 1985-2014). For a contrast, I interviewed Rowan Moore, architectural critic for the Guardian and leading role in the London Skyline Campaign. For my dissertation I won the Architecture Dissertation Prize and have since been nominated for the RIBA Medal. |
I met Peter Rees outside the Leadenhall Building amongst the emerging cluster. From there we went to the nearest cafe, just across the street from the Gherkin, where I carried out my interview. (The transcript of the interview is below.) After the interview was over, Rees insisted on showing me ‘the City’s hot gossip spots,’ as he called them. His point of view is that these are vital locations, if the City is to continue flourishing on the global financial stage. On the walking tour he showed me the endless array of pubs where he said all the important deals were made. Peter joked how not much had changed since the origins of the financial industry, which can be dated back to the medieval public houses of the City. He showed me the winding secret alleyways where a fly on the wall could apparently earn a fortune. He was very quick to point out, nowhere else in the world could you find this kind of contrasting typology between secret alleys and modern skyscrapers, ‘Certainly not in Canary Wharf,’ he joked.
At the beginning of the walk, when we were still amongst the cluster, Peter Rees told me that he thought the tall buildings here actually benefitted the medieval churches amongst them. He said the churches become focal points due to the surrounding tall buildings, which serve as contrasting backdrops which frame the ‘medieval gems’. He then pointed out that you could stand nowhere else in the world whilst being surrounded by the work of such high caliber architects. Nevertheless, he did point out a problem I’d never considered concerning the Gherkin. That problem is the façade that has been exposed on the adjacent building to the northwest, which had originally been designed only to look over a narrow alleyway. However, because the plot was a result of the IRA attack on the Baltic Exchange, which had previously occupied the site, Ken Shuttleworth and Norman Foster couldn’t have done much to resolve this. The only option would have been to build a rectilinear building using the entirety of the site. But I think the success of the project outweighs this easily overlooked problem. After leaving the cluster we made our way to Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street, or the Walkie-Talkie. He maintained its viability and told me that it had been 90% let. Upon looking up to the summit of the Walkie-Tlakie, a plane passed by it on route to City Airport, which prompted Rees to tell me that one of the constraints which defined the location of the cluster, was the flight-paths. We then went onto the Barclays HQ building which we discussed further following the interview. Initially, he had tried to refuse the planning application but the threat of Barclays taking their business to Canary Wharf meant he reluctantly granted them approval. He told me that the bottom half of the building was reclad in Portland stone to refresh the tired-looking building, and the outcome is that the building’s bottom half is much less offensive than the rest of it. We then made our way through the secret alleys and gathering points, onto the Royal Exchange. We finished our time together at the Bank of England. Here, he told me how one of the baroque-esque stone blocks, serving as a platform for a cast iron statue, was actually his solution to hiding one of the huge venting ducts needed for the London Underground. An ingenious approach, which otherwise would have left an unavoidably modern blemish on one of London’s most beautiful historic spaces.
Peter Rees referred to the churches amongst the cluster of skyscrapers as 'medieval gems'. The 15th-century St Andrew Undershaft (pictured above) sits in the shadow of the Cheesegrater, Lloyds of London and the Gherkin.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT [11.02.2015]
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO GO INTO PLANNING AS OPPOSED TO ARCHITECTURE?
I was always more interested in places rather than individual buildings. (This became a theme for much of what Peter Rees told me.)
DID YOU HAVE A VISION FOR THE CITY WHEN YOU TOOK OFFICE?
When I arrived in the City in 1985, it was a very different place. The government had just announced the deregulation to the financial services industry, so it was inevitable the City had to change. The culture remained the same from the 19th century up until the 1980s. The business was a closed business, only open to English companies. They suddenly allowed foreign firms, such as the Americans, Japanese, and Germans to come into the action in London. The City had previously run on paper transactions, carried out in cellular offices based on either sides of a corridor. The post war redevelopment buildings had been concrete slab blocks with narrow floorplates. Shallow floor to ceiling heights. It became obvious very quickly that these buildings were not appropriate for the deregulated financial sector. Which was coming in with computer technology, group working, and a need for much more flexible building forms. So we knew very quickly that buildings needed to have larger floorplates, greater space between floor and ceiling, as to allow for evolving cabling techniques and a higher quality of PLACE. If I summarized the atmosphere of the City in 1985, it was very much the same image portrayed by the world’s media, who would always show the same images of bowler hatted commuters, miserably walking from London Bridge station to the City for their 9AM starts. And what they never showed was the same shot at 5PM of the same people running across the bridge to get themselves back to the suburbs, which at the time was a much better place than the City where all the pubs closed at 8.30(PM). To me, that didn’t seem like an international business centre capable of attracting the brightest kids from around the world. I therefore felt radical change was necessary if London was to continue to lead the way in the financial servicing sector. SO from the outset, we tried to create more suitable, flexible buildings, to accommodate the income and at the same time trying to make a better place to work in. The first example of that change can be seen in Broadgate, and Liverpool Street, where buildings of up to 10 storeys, with large floorplates designed to accommodate trading floors, began to pop up. They were grouped around wonderful spaces which were permeable and accessible, with good bars and restaurants. Good connections to transport links at Liverpool Street station. The combination of high quality spaces and conservation of historic context continued to attract a high caliber of people. SO Broadgate could be seen as the first chapter in revitalising the City.
WAS THE CLUSTER MODEL YOUR BRAIN-CHILD?
I know you're referring to the cluster of tall buildings, but the City comprises of many clusters. You could say that the City is a cluster of clusters. There is a cluster of financial activities, a cluster of insurance activities. There use to be clusters of various trades such as the newspapers based on Fleet Street. You might say a building is another cluster within that, in the sense that it brings together like-minded people. Why do we have clusters? Because clusters maintain gossip and the City is about harnessing business gossip. That is why City financial institutions started life in pubs in the medieval period. Insurance companies started life in coffee houses. They were centres of business gossip. A cluster of towers, in a sense, is a cluster of business gossip on a large scale. The City is a place where businesses and corporations have shown they wish to be located, because of the skills, but there wasn’t enough space for them. If you have limited land available and increasing demand for occupation, whether its Manhattan or the Isle of Dogs which are surrounded by water, or Hong Kong where there is very little flat land, or the City of London which is just one square mile, the only answer, once you’ve used all the sites, is to build upwards. I put it that way critically because building tall is a last resort. It’s not a good thing to do and you should only do it when there is no alternative. Because tall buildings are less flexible, you spend too much time waiting for lifts, you’re less detached from the surroundings. You’re less likely to go out into your surroundings and gossip. They’re inheritably bad building types. There are things you can do to improve these problems, you can have more flexible divisions of elevators, or have towers which are interesting forms of architecture. In the case of offices, it is more viable, as you can pack offices more closely together and take advantage of that density. And in a place like the City where you have 20 stations and 7 underground lines, it’s a very well ‘plumbed’ place, in which to increase the density. By grouping the high-rises tightly together you minimize their environmental impact and by locating them at the eastern end of the City, they have less impact on viewing corridors for important landmarks such as St Paul’s. In order to maintain a successful city, the cluster was the best way of providing office space in the City, which has run out of plots to use as a result of centuries of developing low-rise, or under using sites. So the two reasons for building tall are; one, you have run out of space and there is no other alternative. Or two, you think it’s going to change your fortunes. But simply building tall won’t change your fortunes. You don’t need to go any further than the Shard at London Bridge, where Southwark Council are trying to raise the value of their area by building a very tall building. But to do so they had to combine three uses; residential, commercial and a hotel, in order to create enough mass to build a very tall building. They could have built three shorter buildings. But they thought, if they had the tallest building in London, everyone would want to be in London Bridge. Well, I’m not sure that has turned out to be the case. I’m not saying it isn’t an attractive building, it is in some ways, but it still isn’t the centre of London. An even better example would be to look at Strata SE1 at Elephant & Castle. They decided to build a skyscraper with three phony windmills in it, on a run-down traffic roundabout. Just look at Dubai. Dubai thinks it will be the most successful city in the world because; they’ve got the tallest building in the world… this week. Next week it will be somewhere else.
HOW WAS THE SPECIFIC LOCATION OF THE CLUSTER DECIDED? WAS IT SIMPLY A RESPONSE TO THE VIEWING CORRIDORS OUTLINED BY THE GOVERNMENT?
Well, the viewing corridors were one of the key determinants. That is where the British planning system differs from anywhere else in the world, in that it’s a reactive, rather than a proactive, system. In Frankfurt, Germany, if they want to build tall buildings, the first thing they do is send the planners away to produce a masterplan to decide how many tall buildings should be built, at what height, how large the floorplates are, their uses, their services, and their specific locations. Nothing is left for the developers or architect to decide apart from the detail design of the façades. That’s proactive planning. In this country, all you're allowed to do as a planner is have a set of rules for what people can’t do, such as set rules which protect viewing corridors, and designate conservation areas or listed buildings, require the retention of open space, the retention and improvement of shopping facilities, division of quantities of housing. The architect still has free reign over the project, all of those things are just constraints for the developing process, which exist in all projects. So when the City indicated it wouldn’t necessarily be negatively disposed towards taller buildings, people were very quick to overreact. And behind us as we speak, we have the Gherkin, or 30 St Mary Axe. When an IRA bomb went off a matter of feet from where we’re sitting in the 1990s, it damaged the Victorian building known as the Baltic Exchange. It was decided by English Heritage that the listed building could come down, as it was damaged beyond repair, provided that the building replacing it was of high architectural quality. It could possibly be a taller building with space around it rather than a building that fills up the entirety of its site. Its very dangerous to make those sort of encouraging statements in front of the development industry. It’s a bit like Pavlov’s dog hearing a bell ringing and he starts to salivate. Quite understandably, Trafalgar House owned the site at the time and their architect Norman Foster, came in very quickly with a proposal called the millennium tower, which was over twice the height of what was eventually built and it frightened everyone in London, to the point where it was quite obvious he couldn’t be granted planning permission. I don’t think it was particularly distinguished architecturally, it had two sort of ears at the top, and looked a bit like a frightened rabbit in Hampstead Heath. It didn’t get anywhere, it actually set back the idea of taller buildings for quite a while. Santiago Calatrava had redesigned a tower called City Point, but at roughly the same time he was asked to cut off some of the top of his building and redesign it, but he ran away in a huff. So it had a negative impact on lots of tall buildings. For quite a while after that, Foster worked on this site looking at low rise proposals, and I can remember an occasion when Ken Shuttleworth, the then partner of Foster, came into my office, carrying something that looked rather like a melon. It was a low round building, and I said to them, ‘Well don’t you think it would be better if it was taller.’ And they practically fell off their chairs because up until then we had been saying it needs to be lower. I suggested that if it was squeezed, making it more narrow, but taller, it would look more elegant. So a combination of very practical constraints like being kind to the micro-climate, so that the wind passes easily around the building. Making a building which could be naturally ventilated, and naturally lit. A building which is smaller at the base to allow for more open space. All of those concerns led to a very unusually shaped building. But when the public saw it, they fell in love with it. They gave it a nickname, an indication they liked it, and it became an icon of London. It’s important to clarify that nobody set out to design an icon, because you can’t. If you try, you only end up with a wacky building with a weird shape and there’s lots of that around the world. An icon is something which the public adopts. Tower Bridge isn’t a brilliant piece of design, but it has become an icon because it is popular with the public. So the Gherkin became an icon, one way or another. So that changed public opinion on tall buildings. Remember up until then tall buildings had been built from slab blocks to create something very boring and unoriginal. The Aviva Tower, on the otherside of where we’re sitting, was a building from the early 1970s designed by GMW Partnership, very much of the Mies van de Rohe style. That’s an elegant example of what was being produced in the 60s and 70s. Most of them didn’t have that degree of architectural quality to them. So people were very fed up with tall buildings, but the Gherkin changed that. In fact following on from that, people started asking me, ‘Where’s the next one?’, ‘What shape is it?’, ‘When will it be built?’, ‘What’s its nickname?’ Which takes us on to the Cheesegrater. Because at that time, Rogers was preparing his proposal for the Leadenhall Building. The Cheesegrater had to slope from the base to the top, on its southern face, in order to avoid clashing with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral when looking from Fleet Street. When I was first presented with the proposals, it also had horizontal fins on the southern façade to protect it against solar glare. Later on, an adapted design meant they no longer needed them. When I first saw the model with its horizontal fins, I said to Ruth Rogers, Richard’s wife, you should use something like that to grate my parmesan. And the nickname, ‘Cheesegrater’ stuck, just like nicknames tend to. The Walkie-Talkie came from a telephone conversation between myself and AJ (Architect’s Journal) who hadn’t seen the scheme, and they asked me to describe it to them. At that time it had a podium section at the base swelling out to the south. So I described it as one of those Ericcson telephones from the 1960s, and from that AJ referred to it as the Walkie-Talkie. The fact that the public use the nicknames suggests that they like them and find them distinctive. So if you must build tall, distinguished architectural design of a high quality will help you win over the public.
YOU SPOKE HIGHLY OF THE AVIVA TOWER. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SUGGESTED PROPOSALS TO REPLACE IT?
Although it’s occupied by AVIVA, it’s owned by a Malaysian man who made his fortune by cornering the cooking oil market in China. And as it sits in the centre of the cluster, it offers an attractive business venture for him and his associates. There have been a number of proposals which have made it onto the shortlist.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE PROPOSAL BY AVERY ASSOCIATES PUBLISHED BY AJ?
That didn’t make it onto the shortlist which rather surprised me. As you say, it was published in the AJ, so everyone knew about it. But the shortlist didn’t include Avery’s design. I think it includes David Walker, Eric Parry, and PLP. I’m not sure which one they have chosen but there is potential for that to be the tallest building in the City, if the revised scheme for the Pinnacle is a lower building. And it (the Pinnacle) is likely to be shorter, even though they have already constructed the foundations and begun work on the lift cores. But construction stopped two years ago when the developers and the funders fell out over the design. But that seems to have been resolved, with the funders now in the driving seat engaging PLP Architects, who confusingly was part of KPF, the architects who provided the initial scheme, but went off and set up his own practice. I haven’t seen the updated proposal as I’m no longer on the inside. But it’s quite likely that the new proposal will be a more economical one for the investors, with more practical and profitable floorspace. Bearing in mind, the Pinnacle was going to be a very unusually shaped proposal with every floorplate different. If you have a more rectilinear building, a more pragmatic building, it’s likely it won’t be so tall or rise to a point. But the City cluster will still need a focal point and luckily the position of the AVIVA tower provides a perfect opportunity to have the ‘New Pinnacle’ as it were.
HOW MUCH FURTHER OUT DO YOU THINK THE CLUSTER WILL GROW?
There’s not much scope because of the constraints of St Paul’s viewing corridors and the St Paul’s Heights Policy, which was set up before the last war. The corridors were set up by the government but handed over to the Mayor of London when the post was created. He now operates the strategic view framework. And these shafts stretching across London effectively preclude tall buildings in any other part of the City.
WHAT INFLUENCED YOUR PLANNING DECISIONS MORE? WAS IT THE EXPERIENCE AT STREET LEVEL? OR WAS IT THE LONDON SKYLINE?
I would say the experience of the place. Architecture only has a marginal impact. I tell my students that a place is a space plus people. It’s people that make a place, not architecture or planning. Planners and architects have to provide the ingredients. If between us we design places that are accessible, permeable, have the right proportions, are comfortable to use, and have an appropriate mix of uses within and around them. Then people will gather in them, and those people will make it feel like a place. And that will happen even if the buildings within a place are simply portacabins, as long as the other rules are followed. If you manage to create a place then why not add architecture as well…. If you’ve made a cake then you might as well put icing on top. But if the cake is rotten, it doesn’t matter how good the icing is, nobody will eat it. So my focus was always to create good places, to maintain and improve pedestrian permeability, maintain a good balance between development and conservation. So that you retain the flavour, character, and activity patterns of the past while adapting them for the future. And on top of all that, you need to try and persuade developers to use better architects… to produce more interesting buildings.
WHAT IS THE MAIN ADVANTAGE AND MAIN REASON FOR THE CLUSTER MODEL?
There was never a point when the City said, ‘We will have a cluster.’ There was a degree of pressure towards the end of the 20th century, which built up in the same way that the pressure did in the 80s for expansion. There had been a boom in the late 80s, and into the 90s, which was met with places like Broadgate, Paternoster Square and other low-rise campus developments that happened in Fleet Street for Goldman Sachs. Because a number of developers were happier in a campus, or a group of buildings than they were to go to Canary Wharf and move into a giant building. There are disadvantages of developing single buildings such as skyscrapers for corporations. You put all your staff in a single building and lock them in from 9 till 5, or later, and say don’t worry guys you’ve got restaurants, free food, gyms, swimming pools and everything you need inside the building. What then happens is, people only socialise with their colleagues. They only hear gossip from their colleagues and it then becomes a sterile organisation and can only draw-in outside information electronically. If you work in a smaller building or a shared building, when you go for meetings you have encounters where you become involved in, or overhear the hottest gossip. It’s like the difference between sitting at home and scrolling your way through tinder, or actually going to a bar and eyeing up the local talent. We all know which way works better! It’s the same in business. Most people understand the importance for financial workers being situated in a place with lots of pubs and secret medieval alleyways. Even American banks like Goldman Sachs have come to appreciate the importance of gossip spots, and they saw that City’s model offered more of this compared to an area like Canary Wharf, or somewhere in North America.
WAS THE CITY EVER IN COMPETITION WITH CANARY WHARF?
The City has been in friendly rivalry with Canary Wharf, like two brothers knocking six bells out of each other, but they’re still brothers. The City had adapted planning policies for evolving the place before Canary Wharf happened. When I was appointed in 1985, the government had just announced the deregulation of financial services, and so my first task was to revise the planning policy in the City. That process had begun before the redevelopment of Canary Wharf was announced. An American developer called G. Ware Travelstead was engaged by Credit Suisse First Boston Bank to develop a site in London. He had the idea of buying a large block in the centre of the City, about 100m from where we are right now, and clearing it to build a one million square foot skyscraper. Every American bank only wants a one million square foot skyscraper. But that couldn’t be incorporated on the site they had chosen, because it included listed buildings , ancient monuments, and most of it lied in the conservation area with a medieval street pattern. There was no way you could knock it all down and build a typical American, large floorplated tower. So rather than negotiate what could be done within the City, he took his business to the docklands where there was much more freedom to build whatever you like, due to a planning policy which was set up to rapidly replace the jobs lost in the docklands. Before Canary Wharf happened, nobody ever envisaged the docklands would become an office centre. But G. Ware Travelstead looked at it and realised there was nothing to stop him from doing that. And the rest is history. But it is jolly good it happened, as the demand for office space in London in the 80s was so huge, and that meant all the development went steaming ahead in the City, with Canary Wharf only just being able to keep up. Remember Canary Wharf is only a satellite to the City, it’s not a replacement for it. Its not the first time London has built a satellite because it ran out of space. Croydon was built in the 1970s for exactly the same reason. Just 10 minutes from the West End, 10 minutes from the City, 10 minutes from Gatwick Airport. A great place for overspill office accommodation. We all know what happened, the buildings were all built within 10 years, they all wore out at the same time. And now it is very difficult to get occupiers interested in Croydon. The joke I usually tell is; ‘When I go down to Croydon, I say, “Do you know, you guys were the first Canary Wharf?” And they smile from ear to ear. Then I go on down to Canary Wharf and say, “You’re gonna be the second Croydon.” And they don’t seemed too pleased!’ But it’s true, satellites come up quickly in a boom, but fall fast in a recession. So Canary Wharf isn’t a reason against revitalising the City, it can only ever serve as an addition.
Well, the viewing corridors were one of the key determinants. That is where the British planning system differs from anywhere else in the world, in that it’s a reactive, rather than a proactive, system. In Frankfurt, Germany, if they want to build tall buildings, the first thing they do is send the planners away to produce a masterplan to decide how many tall buildings should be built, at what height, how large the floorplates are, their uses, their services, and their specific locations. Nothing is left for the developers or architect to decide apart from the detail design of the façades. That’s proactive planning. In this country, all you're allowed to do as a planner is have a set of rules for what people can’t do, such as set rules which protect viewing corridors, and designate conservation areas or listed buildings, require the retention of open space, the retention and improvement of shopping facilities, division of quantities of housing. The architect still has free reign over the project, all of those things are just constraints for the developing process, which exist in all projects. So when the City indicated it wouldn’t necessarily be negatively disposed towards taller buildings, people were very quick to overreact. And behind us as we speak, we have the Gherkin, or 30 St Mary Axe. When an IRA bomb went off a matter of feet from where we’re sitting in the 1990s, it damaged the Victorian building known as the Baltic Exchange. It was decided by English Heritage that the listed building could come down, as it was damaged beyond repair, provided that the building replacing it was of high architectural quality. It could possibly be a taller building with space around it rather than a building that fills up the entirety of its site. Its very dangerous to make those sort of encouraging statements in front of the development industry. It’s a bit like Pavlov’s dog hearing a bell ringing and he starts to salivate. Quite understandably, Trafalgar House owned the site at the time and their architect Norman Foster, came in very quickly with a proposal called the millennium tower, which was over twice the height of what was eventually built and it frightened everyone in London, to the point where it was quite obvious he couldn’t be granted planning permission. I don’t think it was particularly distinguished architecturally, it had two sort of ears at the top, and looked a bit like a frightened rabbit in Hampstead Heath. It didn’t get anywhere, it actually set back the idea of taller buildings for quite a while. Santiago Calatrava had redesigned a tower called City Point, but at roughly the same time he was asked to cut off some of the top of his building and redesign it, but he ran away in a huff. So it had a negative impact on lots of tall buildings. For quite a while after that, Foster worked on this site looking at low rise proposals, and I can remember an occasion when Ken Shuttleworth, the then partner of Foster, came into my office, carrying something that looked rather like a melon. It was a low round building, and I said to them, ‘Well don’t you think it would be better if it was taller.’ And they practically fell off their chairs because up until then we had been saying it needs to be lower. I suggested that if it was squeezed, making it more narrow, but taller, it would look more elegant. So a combination of very practical constraints like being kind to the micro-climate, so that the wind passes easily around the building. Making a building which could be naturally ventilated, and naturally lit. A building which is smaller at the base to allow for more open space. All of those concerns led to a very unusually shaped building. But when the public saw it, they fell in love with it. They gave it a nickname, an indication they liked it, and it became an icon of London. It’s important to clarify that nobody set out to design an icon, because you can’t. If you try, you only end up with a wacky building with a weird shape and there’s lots of that around the world. An icon is something which the public adopts. Tower Bridge isn’t a brilliant piece of design, but it has become an icon because it is popular with the public. So the Gherkin became an icon, one way or another. So that changed public opinion on tall buildings. Remember up until then tall buildings had been built from slab blocks to create something very boring and unoriginal. The Aviva Tower, on the otherside of where we’re sitting, was a building from the early 1970s designed by GMW Partnership, very much of the Mies van de Rohe style. That’s an elegant example of what was being produced in the 60s and 70s. Most of them didn’t have that degree of architectural quality to them. So people were very fed up with tall buildings, but the Gherkin changed that. In fact following on from that, people started asking me, ‘Where’s the next one?’, ‘What shape is it?’, ‘When will it be built?’, ‘What’s its nickname?’ Which takes us on to the Cheesegrater. Because at that time, Rogers was preparing his proposal for the Leadenhall Building. The Cheesegrater had to slope from the base to the top, on its southern face, in order to avoid clashing with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral when looking from Fleet Street. When I was first presented with the proposals, it also had horizontal fins on the southern façade to protect it against solar glare. Later on, an adapted design meant they no longer needed them. When I first saw the model with its horizontal fins, I said to Ruth Rogers, Richard’s wife, you should use something like that to grate my parmesan. And the nickname, ‘Cheesegrater’ stuck, just like nicknames tend to. The Walkie-Talkie came from a telephone conversation between myself and AJ (Architect’s Journal) who hadn’t seen the scheme, and they asked me to describe it to them. At that time it had a podium section at the base swelling out to the south. So I described it as one of those Ericcson telephones from the 1960s, and from that AJ referred to it as the Walkie-Talkie. The fact that the public use the nicknames suggests that they like them and find them distinctive. So if you must build tall, distinguished architectural design of a high quality will help you win over the public.
YOU SPOKE HIGHLY OF THE AVIVA TOWER. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SUGGESTED PROPOSALS TO REPLACE IT?
Although it’s occupied by AVIVA, it’s owned by a Malaysian man who made his fortune by cornering the cooking oil market in China. And as it sits in the centre of the cluster, it offers an attractive business venture for him and his associates. There have been a number of proposals which have made it onto the shortlist.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE PROPOSAL BY AVERY ASSOCIATES PUBLISHED BY AJ?
That didn’t make it onto the shortlist which rather surprised me. As you say, it was published in the AJ, so everyone knew about it. But the shortlist didn’t include Avery’s design. I think it includes David Walker, Eric Parry, and PLP. I’m not sure which one they have chosen but there is potential for that to be the tallest building in the City, if the revised scheme for the Pinnacle is a lower building. And it (the Pinnacle) is likely to be shorter, even though they have already constructed the foundations and begun work on the lift cores. But construction stopped two years ago when the developers and the funders fell out over the design. But that seems to have been resolved, with the funders now in the driving seat engaging PLP Architects, who confusingly was part of KPF, the architects who provided the initial scheme, but went off and set up his own practice. I haven’t seen the updated proposal as I’m no longer on the inside. But it’s quite likely that the new proposal will be a more economical one for the investors, with more practical and profitable floorspace. Bearing in mind, the Pinnacle was going to be a very unusually shaped proposal with every floorplate different. If you have a more rectilinear building, a more pragmatic building, it’s likely it won’t be so tall or rise to a point. But the City cluster will still need a focal point and luckily the position of the AVIVA tower provides a perfect opportunity to have the ‘New Pinnacle’ as it were.
HOW MUCH FURTHER OUT DO YOU THINK THE CLUSTER WILL GROW?
There’s not much scope because of the constraints of St Paul’s viewing corridors and the St Paul’s Heights Policy, which was set up before the last war. The corridors were set up by the government but handed over to the Mayor of London when the post was created. He now operates the strategic view framework. And these shafts stretching across London effectively preclude tall buildings in any other part of the City.
WHAT INFLUENCED YOUR PLANNING DECISIONS MORE? WAS IT THE EXPERIENCE AT STREET LEVEL? OR WAS IT THE LONDON SKYLINE?
I would say the experience of the place. Architecture only has a marginal impact. I tell my students that a place is a space plus people. It’s people that make a place, not architecture or planning. Planners and architects have to provide the ingredients. If between us we design places that are accessible, permeable, have the right proportions, are comfortable to use, and have an appropriate mix of uses within and around them. Then people will gather in them, and those people will make it feel like a place. And that will happen even if the buildings within a place are simply portacabins, as long as the other rules are followed. If you manage to create a place then why not add architecture as well…. If you’ve made a cake then you might as well put icing on top. But if the cake is rotten, it doesn’t matter how good the icing is, nobody will eat it. So my focus was always to create good places, to maintain and improve pedestrian permeability, maintain a good balance between development and conservation. So that you retain the flavour, character, and activity patterns of the past while adapting them for the future. And on top of all that, you need to try and persuade developers to use better architects… to produce more interesting buildings.
WHAT IS THE MAIN ADVANTAGE AND MAIN REASON FOR THE CLUSTER MODEL?
There was never a point when the City said, ‘We will have a cluster.’ There was a degree of pressure towards the end of the 20th century, which built up in the same way that the pressure did in the 80s for expansion. There had been a boom in the late 80s, and into the 90s, which was met with places like Broadgate, Paternoster Square and other low-rise campus developments that happened in Fleet Street for Goldman Sachs. Because a number of developers were happier in a campus, or a group of buildings than they were to go to Canary Wharf and move into a giant building. There are disadvantages of developing single buildings such as skyscrapers for corporations. You put all your staff in a single building and lock them in from 9 till 5, or later, and say don’t worry guys you’ve got restaurants, free food, gyms, swimming pools and everything you need inside the building. What then happens is, people only socialise with their colleagues. They only hear gossip from their colleagues and it then becomes a sterile organisation and can only draw-in outside information electronically. If you work in a smaller building or a shared building, when you go for meetings you have encounters where you become involved in, or overhear the hottest gossip. It’s like the difference between sitting at home and scrolling your way through tinder, or actually going to a bar and eyeing up the local talent. We all know which way works better! It’s the same in business. Most people understand the importance for financial workers being situated in a place with lots of pubs and secret medieval alleyways. Even American banks like Goldman Sachs have come to appreciate the importance of gossip spots, and they saw that City’s model offered more of this compared to an area like Canary Wharf, or somewhere in North America.
WAS THE CITY EVER IN COMPETITION WITH CANARY WHARF?
The City has been in friendly rivalry with Canary Wharf, like two brothers knocking six bells out of each other, but they’re still brothers. The City had adapted planning policies for evolving the place before Canary Wharf happened. When I was appointed in 1985, the government had just announced the deregulation of financial services, and so my first task was to revise the planning policy in the City. That process had begun before the redevelopment of Canary Wharf was announced. An American developer called G. Ware Travelstead was engaged by Credit Suisse First Boston Bank to develop a site in London. He had the idea of buying a large block in the centre of the City, about 100m from where we are right now, and clearing it to build a one million square foot skyscraper. Every American bank only wants a one million square foot skyscraper. But that couldn’t be incorporated on the site they had chosen, because it included listed buildings , ancient monuments, and most of it lied in the conservation area with a medieval street pattern. There was no way you could knock it all down and build a typical American, large floorplated tower. So rather than negotiate what could be done within the City, he took his business to the docklands where there was much more freedom to build whatever you like, due to a planning policy which was set up to rapidly replace the jobs lost in the docklands. Before Canary Wharf happened, nobody ever envisaged the docklands would become an office centre. But G. Ware Travelstead looked at it and realised there was nothing to stop him from doing that. And the rest is history. But it is jolly good it happened, as the demand for office space in London in the 80s was so huge, and that meant all the development went steaming ahead in the City, with Canary Wharf only just being able to keep up. Remember Canary Wharf is only a satellite to the City, it’s not a replacement for it. Its not the first time London has built a satellite because it ran out of space. Croydon was built in the 1970s for exactly the same reason. Just 10 minutes from the West End, 10 minutes from the City, 10 minutes from Gatwick Airport. A great place for overspill office accommodation. We all know what happened, the buildings were all built within 10 years, they all wore out at the same time. And now it is very difficult to get occupiers interested in Croydon. The joke I usually tell is; ‘When I go down to Croydon, I say, “Do you know, you guys were the first Canary Wharf?” And they smile from ear to ear. Then I go on down to Canary Wharf and say, “You’re gonna be the second Croydon.” And they don’t seemed too pleased!’ But it’s true, satellites come up quickly in a boom, but fall fast in a recession. So Canary Wharf isn’t a reason against revitalising the City, it can only ever serve as an addition.
View of Canary Wharf from Lloyd's, which sits in the heart of the cluster.
HOW WOULD YOU COMPARE THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE SKYSCRAPERS IN THE CITY VERSUS CANARY WHARF?
Over the years, George Iacobescu, the CEO of the Canary Wharf Group, use to joke to me and say, ‘We’d really like to do some developments in the City.’ He appreciated the importance of development in the City, and that Canary Wharf would only ever be the City’s little brother. And I used to say, ‘Yeh. That’s fine we’d love you to develop in the City. But it’s no good emulating what you’ve built at Canary Wharf, you’re going to need to do architecture as well.’ To me, Canary Wharf’s buildings are nothing more than functional boxes. And although he (Richard Rogers) complained to me over the years, about dealing with planners in the City, Richard Rogers once said to me, he found it a lot easier than dealing with developers at Canary Wharf, because they were even more restrictive in that they wanted to dumb everything down into a mundane box. So the architects themselves approved of working as part of this creative partnership. I think anyone would be hard-pushed to walk around Canary Wharf and identify which box is by Foster, which one is by KPF, etcetera. They’re great architects but their best work doesn’t live in Canary Wharf. Canary Wharf is a great piece of planning and developing, in terms of finding a practical quick fix solution to providing more office space, and fulfilling the requirements of the companies that want to be there, but it’s heavily lacking in flavour. And I’d hate to see that kind of building randomly scattered across the City. Whereas what we have got, and of course people will have their favourites, are these unique office towers which make the place even more interesting.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE?
I try not to have favourites. But when I was the City planning officer, I always used to say, ‘My favourite is the next one.’ And to an extent, that was the truth. But I never thought it was important for me to have a favourite, because as long as they were well designed, and even if they weren’t to my taste, I would still fight to give them planning approval. I didn’t mind if it was a well-designed classical building or a superb piece of modernism. Whether it was a gothic design by Rogers, with all of its services hanging off the envelope like buttresses on a medieval cathedral, or whether it was a cooler, calmer Foster scheme. Its good to have both. I thought it was great to have architects like Viñoly, Rem Koolhaas, Nouvel, desperate to build something in the City. They realised it was an architectural showcase. I didn’t necessarily like all the designs, but I thought they were good examples of what they were trying to do. Planning shouldn’t be about imposing your own taste, but too often it is. It has to be about making places better. You can have a good place without good architecture, just as you can have good architecture in a bad place. So like many journalists, you still haven’t got me to answer that question.
DO YOU HAVE ANY REGRETS OR DISAPPOINTMENTS?
I have loads. There are some buildings which are absolutely awful. The Barclays Headquarters at 54 Lombard Street, built in the 90s. I recommended refusal. But the developers at Barclays got hold of the planners and told them that if we refused it, they would take their business to Canary Wharf. So we gave them permission, they built their building, but they didn’t like it and so they moved to Canary Wharf. So we’re now left with three mating jukeboxes.
SO IT WAS PART OF YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION TO INCREASE AND MAINTAIN A LUCRATIVE CITY?
Yes. To maintain the future of the City, by providing accommodation for businesses here. And of course to attract more business to the City. Please don’t imagine for a moment that the only people we were concerned about were a handful of global banks. The City is an international business centre, as well as a financial centre. 80% of all the firms in the City occupy less than 10,000 square feet, or 1000 square metres. They’re clustered together because of the extra strength it gives them. The buildings which were being constructed had to be flexible to accommodate small businesses. A giant tower isn’t a good place to put a single cooperation. Once they’ve signed it off, it will be another 5-7 years until they’re able to move in. And by the time they do, the building will either be too small or too big for them. So it isn’t a flexible way of meeting your future needs, because you can’t predict what they’re going to be. So tall buildings are best used when they’re sub-divided and shared. They also give extra credibility for small businesses. If you go for a meeting with a consultant in a small office, which happens to be on the umpteenth floor through a grand lobby. You won’t know how much of the building they occupy, but you’d probably be prepared to pay them a larger fee than you would if they were working in some little backroom in Willesden.
I THOUGHT THE CLUSTER WAS MORE OF A RIGID PLANNING MODEL?
Actually no. It’s very loose. There isn’t even a line on a map. It’s where there isn’t a line on the map actually. It’s the strategic view paths which prevent it from spreading outwards. Other than to the west, which takes you into the historic core of the City. Which is problematic. People seem confused by the bit to the south where the Walkie-Talkie sits outside the cluster. And that is deliberate. Because the top three floors are a public space.
Over the years, George Iacobescu, the CEO of the Canary Wharf Group, use to joke to me and say, ‘We’d really like to do some developments in the City.’ He appreciated the importance of development in the City, and that Canary Wharf would only ever be the City’s little brother. And I used to say, ‘Yeh. That’s fine we’d love you to develop in the City. But it’s no good emulating what you’ve built at Canary Wharf, you’re going to need to do architecture as well.’ To me, Canary Wharf’s buildings are nothing more than functional boxes. And although he (Richard Rogers) complained to me over the years, about dealing with planners in the City, Richard Rogers once said to me, he found it a lot easier than dealing with developers at Canary Wharf, because they were even more restrictive in that they wanted to dumb everything down into a mundane box. So the architects themselves approved of working as part of this creative partnership. I think anyone would be hard-pushed to walk around Canary Wharf and identify which box is by Foster, which one is by KPF, etcetera. They’re great architects but their best work doesn’t live in Canary Wharf. Canary Wharf is a great piece of planning and developing, in terms of finding a practical quick fix solution to providing more office space, and fulfilling the requirements of the companies that want to be there, but it’s heavily lacking in flavour. And I’d hate to see that kind of building randomly scattered across the City. Whereas what we have got, and of course people will have their favourites, are these unique office towers which make the place even more interesting.
WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE?
I try not to have favourites. But when I was the City planning officer, I always used to say, ‘My favourite is the next one.’ And to an extent, that was the truth. But I never thought it was important for me to have a favourite, because as long as they were well designed, and even if they weren’t to my taste, I would still fight to give them planning approval. I didn’t mind if it was a well-designed classical building or a superb piece of modernism. Whether it was a gothic design by Rogers, with all of its services hanging off the envelope like buttresses on a medieval cathedral, or whether it was a cooler, calmer Foster scheme. Its good to have both. I thought it was great to have architects like Viñoly, Rem Koolhaas, Nouvel, desperate to build something in the City. They realised it was an architectural showcase. I didn’t necessarily like all the designs, but I thought they were good examples of what they were trying to do. Planning shouldn’t be about imposing your own taste, but too often it is. It has to be about making places better. You can have a good place without good architecture, just as you can have good architecture in a bad place. So like many journalists, you still haven’t got me to answer that question.
DO YOU HAVE ANY REGRETS OR DISAPPOINTMENTS?
I have loads. There are some buildings which are absolutely awful. The Barclays Headquarters at 54 Lombard Street, built in the 90s. I recommended refusal. But the developers at Barclays got hold of the planners and told them that if we refused it, they would take their business to Canary Wharf. So we gave them permission, they built their building, but they didn’t like it and so they moved to Canary Wharf. So we’re now left with three mating jukeboxes.
SO IT WAS PART OF YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION TO INCREASE AND MAINTAIN A LUCRATIVE CITY?
Yes. To maintain the future of the City, by providing accommodation for businesses here. And of course to attract more business to the City. Please don’t imagine for a moment that the only people we were concerned about were a handful of global banks. The City is an international business centre, as well as a financial centre. 80% of all the firms in the City occupy less than 10,000 square feet, or 1000 square metres. They’re clustered together because of the extra strength it gives them. The buildings which were being constructed had to be flexible to accommodate small businesses. A giant tower isn’t a good place to put a single cooperation. Once they’ve signed it off, it will be another 5-7 years until they’re able to move in. And by the time they do, the building will either be too small or too big for them. So it isn’t a flexible way of meeting your future needs, because you can’t predict what they’re going to be. So tall buildings are best used when they’re sub-divided and shared. They also give extra credibility for small businesses. If you go for a meeting with a consultant in a small office, which happens to be on the umpteenth floor through a grand lobby. You won’t know how much of the building they occupy, but you’d probably be prepared to pay them a larger fee than you would if they were working in some little backroom in Willesden.
I THOUGHT THE CLUSTER WAS MORE OF A RIGID PLANNING MODEL?
Actually no. It’s very loose. There isn’t even a line on a map. It’s where there isn’t a line on the map actually. It’s the strategic view paths which prevent it from spreading outwards. Other than to the west, which takes you into the historic core of the City. Which is problematic. People seem confused by the bit to the south where the Walkie-Talkie sits outside the cluster. And that is deliberate. Because the top three floors are a public space.
Looking up to the apex of Rafael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street, or 'Walkie-Talkie', where there will be a three storey Sky-garden open to the public.
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DO YOU THINK THAT WILL BE USED A LOT BY THE PUBLIC?
[REFERRING TO THE SKY-GARDEN OF THE 'WALKIE'TALKIE'] Yes. The whole idea is that you get to see London from up there. If it was absorbed into the cluster you would loose those views. So that’s why it is deliberately set outside. And I know people seem upset by that building because it’s bigger at the top. I’ve lost count as to the number of times I’ve tried to explain; it isn’t, it’s smaller at the bottom. And that’s because we had to remove a section from the bottom to enlarge the pavement space. And add a pedestrian route through the site to the south. The top of it is the same size of the site. It doesn’t overhang the roads. |
IS IT POSSIBLE TO BUILD A TOWER WITH A TOP THAT OVERHANGS ITS SITE?
Well they would have had to have bought the air-rights over the roads. I don’t think we would have wanted to encourage it. If they had wanted to do that, they would have had to pay. Which would have an impact on the profitability of the building. But obviously it makes more sense for them to have larger floorplates. And the more valuable floorplates are higher up the building. So it made good economic sense to bulge at the top. But equally we wanted the top three floors to serve as a large open and attractive sky-garden. People will say it isn’t real public space, you won’t be able to go up whenever. But its free. And equally, by having more restaurants and bars up there, it makes the City a more attractive place for businesses.
SO WITH INCREASINGLY SMALLER FLOORPLATES AS YOU GO UP, DOES THE CHEESEGRATER MAKE SENSE ECONOMICALLY?
Well perhaps not. But because of the viewing constraints, that was the only way to achieve a tall building on that site. There’s no doubt that the floorspace at the top, although smaller, is more valuable. People pay premium rates for real estate with good views. It does mean that you effectively rule out public space at the top though. Or alternative uses at the top of the building. So the alternative offer was to calve five floors out of the base of the building, to create an open public space under the building. Which will also benefit from the re-landscaping of the directly adjacent piazza, in front of the AVIVA Building, which is part of the scheme. So there’s continuous local enhancement coming out of that project. And of course it’s a stunning piece of architecture. And there will be a new pedestrian route running right through the building linking Leadenhall Street directly to the sites to the north of the Cheesegrater.
There’s also the Can of Ham going up to the north. And in that case there’s very little scope for anything other than a few retail units at the base. It’s another interesting piece of architecture, but not as tall as the other schemes. There’s 100 Bishopsgate by Allies and Morrison Architects. That scheme offers new pedestrian space and retail units at the base. A new public library. So with any of these new schemes, the City planners would make sure it benefited the public realm. Making the City more permeable, or offering more facilities to the public. The Heron Tower of course has two restaurants at the top and an open bar on its roof. If you’ve been partying the night away in Shoreditch, you can go there for dinner or breakfast, or whatever you’d choose to call it at 4 in the morning. And that’s something you’d never have dreamed of in the City 20 or 30 years ago. There are nightclubs on Cornhill now. Nightlife forms a very good partnership with business. Because when one ends, the other starts. And of course there are no residents to complain about the noise. That’s why I’ve always believed the City should be London’s nightlife centre.
DO YOU THINK THE CITY WOULD LOOK LIKE A DIFFERENT PLACE IF SOMEONE ELSE HAD TAKEN YOUR JOB?
Probably. Because you might have someone who didn’t have an architectural training, which would be more restrictive. When people don’t have their own design confidence, they sometimes find it harder to let architects fulfil their flights of fantasies. They may not realise the importance of supporting the architect as opposed to the client, or investor. They wouldn’t appreciate the need to persuade developers to employ better architects. And clients left to themselves would use the cheapest architects. And frankly, without planning, they wouldn’t use architects at all if they could get away with it. Architects very much depend on planning as a reason for getting jobs. Because the primary concern of the developer is achieving planning permission. The fact that I was interested in design, meant that the developers quickly realised that I had a very low threshold for boredom. If they came with crap architecture, or an architect who would do anything he was told, I’d get bored very quickly and I wouldn’t fight for their scheme. At the end of the day I was the one who had to present the scheme to the elected members on the committee, and try to persuade them it was the right thing to do. If I’d spent months negotiating a scheme and working closely with the designers to produce a good scheme, I felt it was my job to fight for it till the end. A non-architect planner, perhaps would have found that harder to do, or may not have been as involved in the process. But it does have down sides. There were occasions when Lord Norman Foster handed me a pencil and said, ‘What would you do then.’ I would just hand him back the pencil and say, ‘I would give you the pencil because you’re the architect.’
SO DID YOU INFLUENCE THE DESIGNS?
Regularly. If I was asked for a suggestion where I’d raised an issue, such as saying, ‘I don’t think that design fits the location.’ Or pointing out practical problems with the design. I would hand the problem back to the architect, but not without giving them some suggestions which I thought might be helpful to them. And that’s where my architectural training has benefited me the most. Occasionally they would come back and say, ‘That was a very good idea and we’ve incorporated it.’ But it never worried me when the architect came back and said, ‘Your idea doesn’t work, but we’ve taken the idea and done something better.’ And if you're working with good architects, you never have to worry that they’ll just do whatever you say. They’ll want to justify it and think it through for themselves. And they will only incorporate that idea if it works well. Otherwise they’ll think of one of their own. And the other thing about a good architect is that they won’t be too proud to take someone else’s idea. Whereas a second rate architect is often so protective over their credibility, that they can’t cope with somebody else coming up with ideas. Good architecture is team effort. I used to say to developers, ‘Come to see us at the back of the envelope stage. But please make sure the architect hasn’t drawn on the envelope first.’ In other words, day one, sit down with us, you’ve got the brief for what you want as a building, and we have the brief for what we need for the place. And if we put all of these things on the table at the same time, the architect has a good chance of designing something that suits, and you’ll be granted permission. So if you work together from the start, you should end up with a better product. We can’t do it alone.
How the cluster looks from the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London.
