Before the coronation muted him, Charles, then Prince of Wales, launched several memorable broadsides against modern architects and planners. Addressing the annual dinner of the Corporation of London’s Planning and Communications Committee at the Mansion House in December 1987, he said: “You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that… Your predecessors, as the planners, architects and developers of the City, wrecked the London skyline and desecrated the dome of St Paul’s.”
With dyspepsia gurgling through the room, the Prince recharged his guns. “Not only did they wreck the London skyline in general. They also did their best to lose the great dome in a jostling scrum of office buildings, so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce — like a basketball team standing shoulder-to-shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.” The French and Italians would never dishonour their finest buildings in this manner. Can you imagine office blocks imprisoning Paris’s cherished Notre Dame or Venice’s shimmering St Mark’s?
In a subsequent BBC interview, Owen Luder, the now-deceased former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, took issue with the Prince’s speech: “I think it was most unfortunate and embarrassing… I lived through the Blitz, no comparison at all. I really resent that.”
Luder, designer of bold and controversial raw concrete Brutalist buildings that characterised the “comprehensive redevelopment” of many of Britain’s town and city centres in the Sixties and early Seventies, lived to see the most distinctive of his own buildings well and truly blitzed. The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth: opened in 1966, demolished in 2004. Trinity Square, Gateshead, whose multi-storey car park featured in the Michael Caine gangster film, Get Carter: completed in 1967, razed in 2010. Derwent Tower, the 30-storey concrete housing block in Gateshead, known locally as the “Dunston Rocket”, was forcibly brought down in 2012. The problem was, as Mick Henry, leader of Gateshead’s Labour council, articulated at the time, “people did not want to live here, and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone”.
As a result, brutalist buildings have often led dramatically foreshortened lives. As for the new buildings Prince Charles witnessed sprouting in and around the City of London, these continue to rise and fall and rise again, ever taller, and at increasingly breakneck speed. As they compete to scrape the London sky, gaggles of new City towers strip the streets they rise from of life and light and human scale. The tallest of all proposed to date, 1 Undershaft will, if given the final go-ahead by the Corporation of London this summer, reach the absolute height limit (1,016 ft) imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority.
The questionable architectural quality of the new City of London skyscrapers aside, it seems very odd indeed to witness earlier City office towers being demolished when they are no older and indeed even much younger than Luder’s Brutalist car parks and shopping centres. In its latest form, 1 Undershaft, designed by Eric Parry Architects, threatens to be not just uncomfortably high, but ugly and even silly with a roof garden sticking out over and above the street like some decolourised Rolling Stones’ tongue. What works, in vivid lipstick colour, for a rock band’s album covers and T-shirts fails in what should be a dignified, if spirited, city street.
Assuming it does go ahead, 1 Undershaft will take at least four noisy, disruptive years to build. And it will demand the sacrifice of St Helen’s Tower, formerly the Commercial Union building, a deft 28-storey Mies van der Rohe-style curtain-wall tower, designed by Gollins Melvin and Ward (GMW) and dating from as long ago, in City terms, as 1969. At 387 ft, this building was the very first in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s. It formed part of a considered modern composition, in company with GMW’s 10-storey P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) building. The P&O building, in turn, was demolished at the grand old age of 39, its place taken by Richard Rogers’s 43-storey “Cheesegrater” office tower.
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