wjfox
July 27th, 2005, 08:50 PM
Is this how we want London to look?
Rowan Moore, 26 July 2005
SOMETIMES politicians make decisions that seem so remote from reason or common sense as to leave ordinary citizens asking, in profound bewilderment, "Why?"
One of these came last week, when John Prescott granted consent for the 600ft Vauxhall Tower, on the south side of Vauxhall Bridge, in the process overruling the London Borough of Lambeth and his own inspector at a planning inquiry.
Almost everyone except Prescott, and the towers' architects and developers, thinks that it will be a monster. It has even prompted an unprecedented debate in the House of Lords.
The Deputy Prime Minister's stated reason for his intervention was that a modest number of "affordable" flats will supposedly be provided there, so that nurses and other deserving types can live alongside the Premiership footballers, soap stars and Russian businessmen at whom the development's luxury apartments are presumably aimed.
Some suspect that Prescott is panicking: he has set himself ambitious targets for new housing that he is signally failing to meet, so he is desperate to support anything that might make a dent, however symbolically, in the statistics.
But the rest of us are bound to ask why the skyline of London, and the setting of the Thames and the Palace of Westminster, can be trashed for ever in order to get a minister out of a hole. Surely, you might think, there is some framework or policy that says where towers can and cannot be built, that stands above the whims of politicians. This would not happen in Amsterdam or Paris, in Rome or even New York, where they have workable controls over their skylines. Why can't we have what they're having?
We are getting familiar with the silvery, computer-generated ghosts of prospective towers being waved before us, destined for different parts of the capital. So far, none except the Gherkin has been completed outside Canary Wharf, but it is said that developers are planning (and hoping) for the next big upturn in the property market, a few years from now, when skyscrapers will become profitable. So we have to take these proposals seriously.
Seriousness, however, has not until now been much in evidence in the planning of tall buildings.
Too often it has been a case of different developers trying their luck, looking for the winning combination of uncertainty in the planning system, affordable housing quota, bigname architect, skilled lawyer and sheer persistence and determination.
Some of the towers to come out of this process will be well sited and good-looking, others the opposite, but what is lacking is any apparent logic or pattern to the decisions.
If, for example, you can go to 600ft in Vauxhall, which is about the height of the BT tower, why not in Clapham, or Hammersmith, or Bexleyheath, or anywhere else whatsoever? And if one, why not several, a long rank of non-matching spikes along the south shore of the Thames? If the owner of one site can cash in with a towering planning consent, why not the owner of the one next door?
At present, the planning system is largely silent on these subjects. Since lawyers thrive on vagueness, this leads to a proliferation of expensive public inquiries, in which assembled experts debate the aesthetic nuances of this or that pointy shape.
In terms of legal or technical precision, it is not too different from discussing the arrangements of ornaments on a mantelpiece, but the victory of expert A over expert B, or vice versa, can have consequences of dozens of storeys, and hundreds of millions of pounds. The whole process is ultimately a huge waste of time and money, from which only lawyers benefit.
The nearest we have to a policy is something with the worthy, if unpunctuated, name of Draft Supplementary Planning Guidance London View Management Framework, recently put to public consultation by the Mayor's office. This defines the "protected vistas" where it would be unacceptable for towers to intrude, and those "significant views" where any changes should at least be carefully considered.
The framework pays particular attention to views of St Paul's, from as far away as Alexandra Palace and Richmond Park, and as close as the Millennium Bridge. It also concerns itself with views from most of central London's bridges, and those of the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
It sends invisible rays across from one side of the capital to the other, zones in which prospective towers will, if the document is implemented, wither. It rightly identifies as sacrosanct the view of the Houses of Parliament from the Serpentine Bridge in Hyde Park, which - such is the geometry of London - rules out tall buildings in Elephant and Castle, which would lie directly behind it.
THIS is fine as far it goes, but it is not enough. It raises the possibility that, outside the framework's zones, tower-building will be as anarchic as ever. It also leaves plenty of room for argument by saying that, in some important views, "developers may be able to contribute to the qualities of the view through high-quality design".
This is true, but it returns the debate to the flimsy definition of "quality". And Prescott's Vauxhall decision has already driven a large hole through the framework, as the tower will stand smack in the middle of a view identified as "important", and therefore requiring special care.
Most importantly, the Framework does not demonstrate what a new, tower-decked London might look like, because this is beyond the document's scope. It is likely that clusters will develop in the areas deemed less sensitive, which may either add to, or detract from, the skyline. The point is that it is impossible to tell because no one, neither the Mayor nor developers, has shown us the total effect of a series of individual towers, even though there is ample computer imaging technology to do so.
A few boroughs are also showing that it is possible to bring some reason and order to the subject, by creating guidelines for their own territory.
The City of London has one that concentrates towers in clusters away from views of St Paul's. The City of Westminster has one that rules out towers almost anywhere, and Southwark has one in preparation. Criticisms can be made of the details of these policies but, if Lambeth had had such guidelines, it might have been harder even for Prescott to overrule them.
London is already a city of towers, and the popular, if not commercial, success of the Gherkin shows that it would be fatuous to ban all new ones, but there is no absolute necessity to build them. London could become more vibrant and economically successful, and accommodate the pressure for development on its land, without anything new above 15 storeys.
It is therefore up to the developers who would build them, and the politicians who would encourage them, to work out what the big picture is, and show it to us, the people who will be most affected.
http://skyscraperpage.com/gallery/data/622/9119stgeorgeswharftower_pic9.jpg
Rowan Moore, 26 July 2005
SOMETIMES politicians make decisions that seem so remote from reason or common sense as to leave ordinary citizens asking, in profound bewilderment, "Why?"
One of these came last week, when John Prescott granted consent for the 600ft Vauxhall Tower, on the south side of Vauxhall Bridge, in the process overruling the London Borough of Lambeth and his own inspector at a planning inquiry.
Almost everyone except Prescott, and the towers' architects and developers, thinks that it will be a monster. It has even prompted an unprecedented debate in the House of Lords.
The Deputy Prime Minister's stated reason for his intervention was that a modest number of "affordable" flats will supposedly be provided there, so that nurses and other deserving types can live alongside the Premiership footballers, soap stars and Russian businessmen at whom the development's luxury apartments are presumably aimed.
Some suspect that Prescott is panicking: he has set himself ambitious targets for new housing that he is signally failing to meet, so he is desperate to support anything that might make a dent, however symbolically, in the statistics.
But the rest of us are bound to ask why the skyline of London, and the setting of the Thames and the Palace of Westminster, can be trashed for ever in order to get a minister out of a hole. Surely, you might think, there is some framework or policy that says where towers can and cannot be built, that stands above the whims of politicians. This would not happen in Amsterdam or Paris, in Rome or even New York, where they have workable controls over their skylines. Why can't we have what they're having?
We are getting familiar with the silvery, computer-generated ghosts of prospective towers being waved before us, destined for different parts of the capital. So far, none except the Gherkin has been completed outside Canary Wharf, but it is said that developers are planning (and hoping) for the next big upturn in the property market, a few years from now, when skyscrapers will become profitable. So we have to take these proposals seriously.
Seriousness, however, has not until now been much in evidence in the planning of tall buildings.
Too often it has been a case of different developers trying their luck, looking for the winning combination of uncertainty in the planning system, affordable housing quota, bigname architect, skilled lawyer and sheer persistence and determination.
Some of the towers to come out of this process will be well sited and good-looking, others the opposite, but what is lacking is any apparent logic or pattern to the decisions.
If, for example, you can go to 600ft in Vauxhall, which is about the height of the BT tower, why not in Clapham, or Hammersmith, or Bexleyheath, or anywhere else whatsoever? And if one, why not several, a long rank of non-matching spikes along the south shore of the Thames? If the owner of one site can cash in with a towering planning consent, why not the owner of the one next door?
At present, the planning system is largely silent on these subjects. Since lawyers thrive on vagueness, this leads to a proliferation of expensive public inquiries, in which assembled experts debate the aesthetic nuances of this or that pointy shape.
In terms of legal or technical precision, it is not too different from discussing the arrangements of ornaments on a mantelpiece, but the victory of expert A over expert B, or vice versa, can have consequences of dozens of storeys, and hundreds of millions of pounds. The whole process is ultimately a huge waste of time and money, from which only lawyers benefit.
The nearest we have to a policy is something with the worthy, if unpunctuated, name of Draft Supplementary Planning Guidance London View Management Framework, recently put to public consultation by the Mayor's office. This defines the "protected vistas" where it would be unacceptable for towers to intrude, and those "significant views" where any changes should at least be carefully considered.
The framework pays particular attention to views of St Paul's, from as far away as Alexandra Palace and Richmond Park, and as close as the Millennium Bridge. It also concerns itself with views from most of central London's bridges, and those of the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
It sends invisible rays across from one side of the capital to the other, zones in which prospective towers will, if the document is implemented, wither. It rightly identifies as sacrosanct the view of the Houses of Parliament from the Serpentine Bridge in Hyde Park, which - such is the geometry of London - rules out tall buildings in Elephant and Castle, which would lie directly behind it.
THIS is fine as far it goes, but it is not enough. It raises the possibility that, outside the framework's zones, tower-building will be as anarchic as ever. It also leaves plenty of room for argument by saying that, in some important views, "developers may be able to contribute to the qualities of the view through high-quality design".
This is true, but it returns the debate to the flimsy definition of "quality". And Prescott's Vauxhall decision has already driven a large hole through the framework, as the tower will stand smack in the middle of a view identified as "important", and therefore requiring special care.
Most importantly, the Framework does not demonstrate what a new, tower-decked London might look like, because this is beyond the document's scope. It is likely that clusters will develop in the areas deemed less sensitive, which may either add to, or detract from, the skyline. The point is that it is impossible to tell because no one, neither the Mayor nor developers, has shown us the total effect of a series of individual towers, even though there is ample computer imaging technology to do so.
A few boroughs are also showing that it is possible to bring some reason and order to the subject, by creating guidelines for their own territory.
The City of London has one that concentrates towers in clusters away from views of St Paul's. The City of Westminster has one that rules out towers almost anywhere, and Southwark has one in preparation. Criticisms can be made of the details of these policies but, if Lambeth had had such guidelines, it might have been harder even for Prescott to overrule them.
London is already a city of towers, and the popular, if not commercial, success of the Gherkin shows that it would be fatuous to ban all new ones, but there is no absolute necessity to build them. London could become more vibrant and economically successful, and accommodate the pressure for development on its land, without anything new above 15 storeys.
It is therefore up to the developers who would build them, and the politicians who would encourage them, to work out what the big picture is, and show it to us, the people who will be most affected.
http://skyscraperpage.com/gallery/data/622/9119stgeorgeswharftower_pic9.jpg