Remember the Tulip? The proposed Vegas-like 305 metre-high tourist viewing platform next to the Gherkin in the heart of the Square Mile was heralded by the City Corporation in 2020 as a “powerful icon for London in the 21st century” in an area that could not “sustain itself solely as a place for offices”.
That scheme was kiboshed by Sadiq Khan and Whitehall over its poor design and sustainability credentials and the heritage harm it was feared it would cause to the setting of the Tower of London. The Guildhall has changed tack since then, betting instead on “grade A” office space and now backing a new 310 metre office monolith close by, as high as the Shard. But is this, like the Tulip, a step too far?
The massive 1 Undershaft tower, big enough to accommodate almost 9,500 jobs, would squeeze into the heart of the so-called City Cluster between the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, the Lloyd’s building and two historic Grade I-listed churches, St Helen’s and the St Andrew Undershaft.
The Undershaft site has long been seen by Guildhall planners as appropriate for a tower that would constitute the “totemic centrepiece” of the cluster, an area designated by the Corporation for the bulk of the 1.2 million square metres of new office space it reckons it needs by 2040 to meet demand and maintain global competitiveness.
Site owners Aroland and development managers Stanhope might therefore have expected an easy ride when the scheme went before the Corporation’s planning applications sub-committee last month, with approval recommended. But it wasn’t to be. Facing a chorus of high-profile objections, committee chair Shravan Joshi pushed through a proposal to defer the decision.
The issue wasn’t so much the height of the building – permission for a 73-storey tower had been granted in 2019. But the new plan, designed by Eric Parry Architects to “better respond to post-pandemic needs, revised market demands and the changing context and aspirations of the City of London”, was significantly biggerthan the original, swallowing up a third of the adjoining St Helen’s Square, with an elevated 11th-floor garden cantilevered over much of the rest.
It would “seriously degrade” the public realm and encroach on historic buildings, said Historic England. It would “rob” the Square Mile of a “really important convening space”, said Lloyd’s of London chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown, custodian of one of those buildings, the Grade 1 listed Richard Rogers’ landmark. Committee member (and planning barrister) William Upton notably described the high-level protruding garden structure as looking like a “plastic spoon”.
The developers now have a job ahead making sufficient changes to convince the committee their scheme has struck the right balance between making the most of the site financially and protecting the city’s heritage and open space. And there’s a lot at stake.
Joshi said it was for Stanhope to consider “minor adjustments in relation to the ground floor public realm”. But those minor adjustments could be of major significance. In a statement after the meeting Joshi also felt the need to offer wider reassurance: “This is not a message to industry that we are against development, or that we do not need to densify the eastern cluster.”
The Guildhall is hoping to have revised plans for 1 Undershaft back before the committee “before the end of the year”, a spokesperson told On London. But there are broader considerations beyond the specifics of the current design.
For a start, while the Corporation’s City Plan 2040, the blueprint for future development, seeks to corral new tall buildings into the cluster, safeguarding the rest of the Square Mile from high-rise densification, planning officers themselves pointed out that it is a “tiny area that could be walked through in five minutes”, with limited sites available.
Objectors at the meeting highlighted the importance in this crowded patch of “free, safe and open spaces, where people could simply enjoy the sky and fresh air regardless of age, wealth or background”, and former Royal Institute of British Architects president Ben Derbyshire has called on Guildhall planners to give more weight to the “civic value” of the area’s heritage, urging them to see it as an “asset, not an obstacle, in the creation of wealth and wellbeing”.
The draft Plan still has to face public examination by a planning inspector later this year and then Whitehall sign-off, so these arguments are far from over. Concern around the need for more robust protection of the City’s deep-rooted heritage has already focused around the impact of new skyscrapers on the Bevis Marks synagogue just to the east of the Gherkin, the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the country, dating from 1701.
There are still doubts too about the longer-term health of the office market, with Bloomberg reporting recently something of a lack of investment interest in “trophy” properties, and the 36-storey One Leadenhall scheme now under construction likely to be the last to be completed in the coming three years.
Answering members’ questions at the planning committee meeting, the Undershaft developers said that their tower would take between six and seven years to complete. Funding was secured for two-years’ worth of preparatory work, they said, with the client “working hard” to put in place funding for the development as a whole.
There’s certainly a significant queue of big schemes in the pipeline for the area, but analysis in Building magazine in June suggested that limited construction capacity, high costs – 1 Undershaft was expected to cost more than £1 billion to build, it said – and “lingering uncertainty” over office demand in the future was casting doubt on how many schemes would actually get built. “Watch this increasingly congested and competitive space”, Building concluded.
In another move of concern for the City’s plans, UNESCO has confirmed that it will be investigating the impact of new high-rise on the Tower of London, whose world heritage site status it oversees. The investigation was prompted by concerns about “cumulative impacts” from new tall buildings and lack of protection for the Tower and its “outstanding universal value”, the agency said.
Next year will also see Mayor Khan embarking on an update of his London Plan, setting out planning policy for the capital as a whole. There is no shortage of voices calling for a more interventionist mayoral stance in respect of the City skyline. As New London Architecture founder Peter Murray put it in his foreword to the group’s latest London Tall Buildings Survey published in May: “Skyline changes impact on a wide area, sometimes pan-London, and they should form a part of Mayoral rather than borough policy.”
More immediately, any decision by the Guildhall to approve the 1 Undershaft application is automatically referable, as a proposal of “potential strategic importance” to the Mayor, giving him the option of taking over the decision-making himself or, as in the case of the Tulip, directing the City Corporation to refuse it. City Hall has already flagged up the balance between the scheme’s benefits and its heritage harm as a key question. And new Secretary of State, of course, is waiting in the wings too.
Responding to the UNESCO announcement, Joshi said the Guildhall’s City Plan 2040 recognised the “exceptional significance” of the Tower of London and took a “bespoke and exhaustive” approach to tall buildings and heritage. It remains to be seen whether the “minor adjustments” he has requested to the 1 Undershaft scheme can satisfy the doubters.
X/Twitter: Charles Wright and OnLondon. Support OnLondon.co.uk for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details here. Images from Eric Parry architects.