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While the City's most talked about skyscrapers remain unbuilt, Broadgate Tower now rises 500ft above the skyline. How did it succeed where others failed?..
For all the great debates about skyscrapers, gherkins, cheesegraters, shards, helter-skelters and walkie-talkies, about what should and shouldn't adorn the kitchen table of the London skyline, almost nothing has yet been built. The Gherkin is there and the Heron Tower is inching its way out of the ground, nine years after it was first proposed, and there are empty spaces where the Helter-Skelter, Shard and Cheesegrater might one day rise. Other-wise, there is nothing to show for all the public inquiries about skyscrapers, or the Ken Livingstone vs Heritage Lobby punch-ups of recent memory.
This fact explodes the myth that towers are essential to a world financial centre. London both boomed and busted without any help from tall buildings. A list of sites where towers were proposed is also a list of places blighted by inaction. If you want nothing to happen, plan a tower.
There is one exception. Unremarked and undebated, the third tallest building in the City of London, after Tower 42 and the Gherkin, has slipped onto the stage. It's not an icon and any attempt to label it as kitchen equipment or a vegetable would slide off its smooth surface. But it is there. Called the Broadgate Tower, this is an actual monument of the great Noughties boom. What is the secret of its success?
The Broadgate Tower, along with a 13-storey block at its side called 201 Bishopsgate, is the latest instalment of Broadgate, the five million sq ft development around Liverpool Street Station that has been unfolding for the past quarter-century. Its purpose, says its developer British Land, is to provide high-quality offices for City lawyers, and other equally demanding businesses.
The tower was designed by the Chicago office of SOM, the giant, 73-year-old American practice that did for the design of buildings what Henry Ford did for the making of cars. SOM has already designed much of Broadgate, turning out a series of big office blocks on the same basic chassis, adapting the styling to suit the taste of the times. “They have a machine,” one of Broadgate's developers once told me when I asked why he used SOM.
For the design of this particular tower, the practice returned to the style of the Fifties and Sixties blocks that made its name, where the brute power of American industry was transformed into minimalist sculpture. It is a suave stela, a parallelogram extruded vertically by 35 storeys and 538 feet. The silvery structure is patterned, with big diamonds of steel set into its glass façade. Steel is forged with heat and sweat, and while the material is celebrated in the design, it is also transformed into something classier, like a prizefighter who got culture and learned how to wear nice suits. The tower is elegant but you can still sense the force behind it.
This at least is the face it presents to the City of London and from the low-lying east, where its light-catching plane of glass lifts the spirits. The other side, towards Islington and Hackney, is less assured, with shafts of lifts and stacks of toilet blocks breaking into the calm diamond pattern. It feels like a backside and, given that it is a landmark visible from several boroughs, it is a weakness.
When you get nearer, the tower is something else again. It is actually built half-hovering over the sunken railway tracks streaming north out of Liverpool Street Station, a feat belied from afar by its poise. Close to, at ground level, an avenue of jousting struts is created, heading north towards empty space where one day further development might happen. The struts are what hold the tower up, and they have their own splendour, but they seem disconnected from the smooth slab above.
The ground level is surprisingly riotous. Next door are two older blocks, which though they were also both designed by SOM in the Eighties, are completely different from each other. One is another essay in modernist steel, this time coloured black, and the other is clad in dyed concrete pretending to be terracotta and vaguely Edwardian, a sort of architectural peroxide job. A screen of greenery is now being grown to shield the latter from view.
So the tower is a mixture of Chicago confidence and London compromise and negotiation. This reflects the fact that the tower has been 10 years in the planning, with two earlier,
lower schemes proposed and then
abandoned.
The site is complex, not only because of the railway lines underneath, but also owing to the restrictions placed by planners overhead. The development is divided by invisible lines, which describe where it is and isn't permitted to build. One concern was that the tower should not intrude on views from the south of the Tower of London, another that it should not appear in the background of a famous view of St Paul's from King Henry's Mound in Richmond Park, 13 miles away.
Rather than challenge these rules and fight a public inquiry, British Land accepted them and worked with them, and its scheme obtained planning permission with barely a murmur. This is why it has a tower and others haven't, along with the fact that a 500ft building is much easier to build and make viable than the 1,000-footers that are still hovering like stacking aeroplanes in the realm of the unbuilt. Even so, the tower is currently 40 per cent let, compared with the lower building next door which is 88 per cent let. One suspects that it is not British Land's most profitable work.
The SOM Chicago office also designed the Burj Dubai, the still-rising tallest building in the world, but where the latter could grow unfettered out of sand, driven by the boundless ambition of Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed, the Broadgate Tower rises from terrain already built on, into a much-contested sky.
The story of Broadgate Tower demonstrates that there is nothing essential about tall buildings to successful modern cities. It shows that London's planning system is complex and sometimes eccentric.
One could wish for clearer, simpler, saner rules and a less torturous process, such that the confidence which is the tower's strength would prevail over its inconsistencies. But this wonky planning system is also a form of democracy, and the best way through it is to work with it rather than confront it.
Reader views (7)
We live in one of the worlds biggest Cities with some of the best architecture in the world. Certain groups like English Heritage and the Royal Parks constantly complain about tall buildins planned in London yet the average Londoner loves the Gherkin, nobody comments on the towers at Canary Wharf nor the newly built Broadgate Tower. Londoners love seeing the new skyline emerging over the City and soon Southwark with the Shard. Lets hope the Helter Skelter, Cheesegrater and the new breadsticks planned for the adjacent site next to the Shard get built soon so we can have something breathtaking to look at rather than the lonely old 1960's tower 42 standing alone smack in the middle of the financial centre of the world for the last 30 years. Lets face it London, these new towers hardly boring buildings with knicknames like that. English Heritage look after our heritage and the Royal Parks look after the parks, you dont own the airspace.
- Dean Rodgers, London England
Whilst the tower looks reasonable from my office, when you see from the top of the hill above Greenwich, it is an ugly blot on the landscape and stands out like a sore thumb!
- David, London
Well argued Rowan. It is a great expose of the myth that the City of London needs these ridiculous novelties. I have no objection to this type of development at Canary Wharfe, and if bigger banks want to move there let them - surely it's the fact that they are in London that is important, not which side of the river they are on?
- Clive Fletcher, Nottingham, England
Very well said Lee, the City clearly does need tall towers and has lost out to Canary Wharf for not having them.
Skyscrapers, especially the likes of the Shard, Pinnacle and Leadenhall building, are elegent and graceful, and draw the eye away from the bustling, congested streets to the open sky. They can be truly majestic. People in this country (Tom, with that ridiculous comment, being a prime example) really need to get a grip and realise that if done well (without continually being compromised), skyscrapers in certain areas would vastly imrpove our great city.
By the way Rowan, the Burj Dubai is no longer rising, it actually topped out at 818m a couple of days ago.
- Jono, London
I have often wondered how on earth this got approved, it is not part of any cluster standing alone, ugly and aptly but horriby broad.
- Stephen, London
Don't worry Rowan. Piling has begun on the Bishopsgate Tower site and the Shard site is almost clear. Contracts have recently been signed with both meaning they will go ahead. Suprisingly, Piling has started for 20 Fenchurch street as well which was supposed to be on hold.
In regards to the tall building argument, I'd say Canary Wharf proves that the City needs taller buildings. All the big business used to be in the city. Now, the likes of HSBC and JPMorgan flee to Canary Wharf because only there are buildings built tall enough to accommodate them. They don't want to be spread across many smaller buildings.
Frankly though, I'm happy the City isn't going for big American style boxes (most of the time). The likes of the Shard and the Cheesegrater are designed to be visually appealing and not to intrude too much on view, despite being so tall. They hulking beasts like the towers proposed in Canary Wharf. This could potentially mean they prove harder to let, but it means London will end up with a skyline that is unique and has grace, and isn't just another American City clone like La Defense or Frankfurt.
- Les Ferris, Portsmouth
Boris should scrap all these towers now the economy is down the pan, they are all ugly and a waste of money. Another of Ken's toxic legacy hellbent on destroying London's history for the sake of more power and money.
- Tom, London
