Establishing London’s Democratic Skyline
30/11/24
The City of London has dramatically changed over the past 2,000 years as the growing population and needs have evolved. But the more things change, the more things stay the same, with the London's obsession with height as prevalent as ever.
Tom Nancollas, Assistant Director of Design for the City of London Corporation, takes a look at the past and the future of tall building design.
The City is a square mile at the heart of the capital, it is the ancient core from which the rest of London developed. For most of its 2,000-year history, it has been an international finance centre with a global reach and an impact across the London skyline in more ways than one. It is a place where the ancient and modern are always meeting.
Early Heights in the City
The City's had an affinity with heights since the ancient times, for two very obvious reasons. Because of its financial role it had the resources to build elaborately and impressively, and it had just a little more than a square mile in which to do it.
The Roman wall which originally stood at six metres-high very much met the Greater London Authority's definition of a tall building, which is substantially higher than its surroundings. Height is relative of course, and it is interesting to consider what a tall building really is in the City.
Compared to the rest of London, the City was a place of spires, with 120 churches in the Square Mile alone. Less well known were the private merchants' towers, perhaps interpreted as the forerunner of the commercial office. And then St. Paul's Cathedral which had the tallest spire in Europe we think, at least until it burned down in the 16th century.
And then speaking of fire, obviously the great fire of 1666 destroyed most of the Square Mile, and it was rebuilt on its old medieval street plan in brick and stone instead of timber. One major change was the employment of Christopher Wren and his office to rebuild the city churches.
They rebuilt fewer of them, but arguably did them a lot better, vastly increasing the skyline's elegance. It would have looked like a series of church spires united by a common design language but each saying something slightly different on the skyline.
Sometimes it seems that our detractors wish we had stopped here, but we are strongly of the view that the City has always been defined by change and that is at the heart of our significance, endless inventive and surprising change.
Our challenge is how you thread modern development into a skyline of this sensitivity.
The St. Paul's Height Code
Until the 20th century or so, the city skyline was largely like this until changes to building regulations, technology and imperial levels of wealth. A particularly notorious example of this is the Faraday Building in Queen Victoria Street. Completed in the 1930s, it crashed into view of St. Paul's from the South Bank in a way which was immediately controversial and was developed without any kind of view protection system in place.
This created the St. Paul's Height Code, which has been remarkably successful ever since at suppressing heights around the cathedral.
This started a debate about where tall buildings should be located and what kind of heights were appropriate, accelerated by the NatWest Tower. The tower was finished in 1981 and was kind of obsolete from the moment it was completed but there is something about its pinstripe elevations that give you a flavour of the rakish 1970s and 80s City at that time.
The City in its post-war decades did build towers. It just didn't build very many of them and it built them kind of badly.
The eminent architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner writing in 1973 said of views like this: "These skyscrapers are not as high as those of America and they rarely come in clusters. So the result is not dramatic. It does not remind one of New York or Chicago, but of some medium-sized city of the middle west," which is a pretty stinging thing to say about London.
The Future of the City
So what is next for the City, what does the future hold?
In our City Plan 2040, we are putting out more detail than ever before as to how we expect tall buildings to come forward in the City over the next 20 years.
Our new city plan includes a huge amount more detail about tall building development. Previously we have tried to keep it as simple as possible and negotiate schemes on a case-by-case basis.
Whereas here we are setting out for the first time the areas where we think the maximum height should be and how the overall shape of the cluster should be modelled. The complexity reflects the intricacy of the constraints of the medieval street planning.
In the City we like to bang the drum very loudly for elevated public spaces, for viewing galleries in the tops of buildings. We think these are fundamental now going forward, to make the tall buildings socially sustainable, giving people a stake in the sky, and the usage of these spaces speaks for itself.
Since they opened last year, Horizon at 22 Bishopsgate and the Lookout at 8 Bishopsgate have seen around 500,000 visitors between them and the Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch Street averages 3,000 people a day.
We see an insatiable demand for these spaces. We know they are difficult to deliver in schemes, but they give back something that cannot be measured in money, a stake in the skyline for all. The city has had an ancient affinity with heights since the earliest times, but only now in recent years does it have a democratic skyline.