London Is Growing...Up

To the surprise of most Londoners it was revealed recently that up to 236 new high-rise towers over 20 stories each are scheduled for construction or are in the process of gaining approval in central London. At least 80 percent of the towers are slated to be constructed as residential along the South Bank of the Thames extending from Blackfriars Bridge in Southwark past the National Theatre and South Bank along to Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea.

The city’s new skyline has been likened to “Dubai on Thames,” and The Guardian newspaper has produced a startling digital display showing before and after images of the collective impact of these towers. There has been no public debate on such a significant change to London’s appearance; not surprisingly, this has caused concern. Unlike San Francisco, London has no height or bulk controls, so that buildings of any shape are possible, subject to planning approval from the local planning department or mayor. San Francisco, in contrast, seems to be at a polar opposite in terms of its urban design controls and public outreach, with strict and clearly defined height limits and a vigilant citizenry ready to challenge any perceived change to the status quo.

Perhaps nothing represents the changes in London’s standing as a world city as much as its dramatically emerging skyline. Up until 1953, London had a maximum height limit of 100 feet. Like Washington, D.C., with its unobstructed views of the Capitol dome and Washington Monument, London’s skyline was dominated by its civic and religious buildings like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the spires of Wren’s City churches, Big Ben, and the Houses of Parliament. Little of the city’s skyline had changed since Canaletto painted his London landscapes in the 18th century or Monet painted his in the 19th. London was essentially a low-rise city, and with the advent of the railways, it had spread out rather than up.

London has long been ambivalent about its skyline. When Canary Wharf in the London Docklands, a mile east of the traditional City of London, took off in the 1980s, it threatened the power and position of the City of London. Canary Wharf’s development as a second financial district happened almost by accident, the result of ambitious developers seeing an opportunity to create a new, American-style business district in an enterprise zone on a part of the former West Indies Docks. The deregulation on U.K. banking and financing industries in 1986 created the need for office buildings with large floor-plates. This was difficult to accomplish within the City of London’s tight street and block pattern. Canary Wharf offered the opportunity for these types of businesses to grow, and for London to have two financial centers, not unlike Lower Manhattan and Midtown Manhattan.

Once breached, a city’s skyline can never be repaired, short of war or an earthquake. The IRA’s 1992 bombing of the Baltic Exchange prompted the new wave of high-rise towers in the City of London. Fearful that even more businesses would leave for Canary Wharf, city planners gave permission for a new wave of towers within the fabric of the city’s medieval streets and blocks. Foster and Partners’ 30 St. Mary Axe, better known as the Gherkin, was the first iconic tower to start a stampede of new buildings that enabled the city to compete with Canary Wharf. Since then several new towers have been built, including Rogers Stirk and Harbour’s 735-foot high, 48-story Leadenhall Building (known as the Cheesegrater); KPF’s 665-foot high, 46-story Heron Tower; Renzo Piano’s 1,000-foot high, 87-story Shard; and most controversially, Rafael Vignoly’s 525-foot high, 37-story 20 Fenchurch Street (aka the “Walkie Scorchy,” so named after its concave façade focused the sun’s rays and scorched a parked Jaguar last summer). Still under construction is KPF’s 945-foot high Pinnacle (or “Helter Skelter”), which will be the second tallest building in the City of London. There has not been as dramatic a change as this in the city’s history since the World War II Blitz or the Great Fire of 1666.

The lessons from London’s magnificent tradition of high-density, low-rise residential urbanism (as seen in the architecture and urbanism of the 18thand 19th-century Great Estates) are being ignored in the new development patterns of Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea and others. The tradition of row houses and carriage houses arranged in a finegrained composition of streets, blocks and squares is being replaced with a new pattern of giant superblocks surrounded by arterials. Leslie Martin and Lionel March’s research at Cambridge in the 1960s demonstrated that one can build high-density housing in a low-rise form; this research needs to be revived and updated if London is to meet its substantial housing needs over the next 30 years.

The only upper limit for a building is 2,000 feet, defined by air traffic control for the flight paths to Heathrow. The “London Plan,” however, defines certain View Protection corridors that are intended to protect the panoramic views of three landmark buildings: St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London. But the View Protection Management Plan is a very limited method of controlling London’s skyline, focusing on just a handful of panoramic sites and vistas. It does nothing to control the plethora of towers being built or proposed elsewhere. San Francisco, on the other hand, has clearly defined height limits to sculpt the profile of the Financial District’s cluster of towers, to protect the scale of adjoining neighborhoods such as Chinatown and North Beach, and to exaggerate the tops of certain neighborhoods such as Russian, Nob and Rincon Hills.

London’s emerging skyline is a combination of laissez-faire development and top-down intervention. Despite the fact that the London Borough of Southwark, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and English Heritage all turned down the original plans for the Shard, the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott overruled them and gave the go-ahead to Europe’s tallest building (and then did the same for the Heron Tower, the Pinnacle and the Leadenhall Building). Similarly, Mayor Boris Johnson has the authority to “call in” a project he considers of strategic importance to London and to make his own determination. It would be as if Governor Jerry Brown was able to call-in a controversial project and overrule the Planning Commission and San Francisco’s mayor and Board of Supervisors.

While the emerging skyline in the City of London can be seen as an affirmation of its role in the global capitalist economy, filled with distinctive high-rises, the results at street level are becoming less satisfactory as more and more tall buildings are constructed. In place of a continuous urban fabric defined by street walls, the City of London’s tightly defined block pattern is being eroded into a series of amorphous spaces exposing the flanks and backs of older buildings. The result is transforming the city into a landscape of objects, or as the late Sir Richard MacCormac stated, “an architectural zoo with a giraffe, a hippopotamus and a giant ant-eater.” In contrast, San Francisco’s Downtown Plan urban design guidelines require that high-rise buildings must have a top, shaft and base and relate to the existing street wall. Bulk controls define the maximum floor plate above a certain height, and urban plazas must be figurative rather than residual. London, it seems, could learn a few things from us.