London - Full Summary of Projects 20

[Langur]

Originally Posted by london lad

The good thing as well is it s a residential scheme which might just inject a little life in the area which is pretty lifeless in the evening with it all being offices, especially considering this in the heart of the city.

Yeah I wouldn't mind living in one of those rooftop apartments. It's close to Covent Garden and the River. However I'd miss the park, and I love the park.

[delores]

Originally Posted by Octoman

The existing building on the site was horrible (I worked in it for a while). Its hard to do anything that doesnt improve the appearance of that area. There was a model of this building on display a while back in the remaining part of the old building. It does look pretty good. They just need to get rid of the ugly buildings on the other side of the road and we are getting somewhere!

Sadly, just as this street improves, Aldwych has taken a whack with the ugly stick from that new bland building facing towards the strand.

I agree the building on the opposite side of the road is god awful and is being replaced by... http://www.wilkinsoneyre.com/project...ategory=office

[Octoman]

Originally Posted by delores

I agree the building on the opposite side of the road is god awful and is being replaced by... http://www.wilkinsoneyre.com/project...ategory=office

Excellent! That will be an enormous improvement.
That road will be completely transformed over the next year or so. I always thought the way it gently slopes down towards temple station with the view of the thames behind gave it potential to be a beautiful street. Sadly it was spoiled by rotten architecture.

I hope they allow a few cafes or bars to open on the ground level.

[delores]

I agree the slope is something you don't get much in London being very flat.

[Bob]

I don't think this has made it to these boards and sounds very interesting to me. For those not familiar with the area it's just behind the blue fin building, which is behind the tate. That's next to Rogers' new bankside flats and a whole host of other residential and even 5 star hotel developments. A very exciting spot in London IMO. A snippet from this is london.

"The friendly face of architecture and a plan to put some life back into a Sixties block in Southwark

Bob Allies and Graham Morrison are very nice, modest, middle-aged architects, with a tremendous amount to be immodest about.

Their 230-strong practice has designed many of those new office buildings behind Tate Modern.
Their master plan for a £4.5 billion redevelopment in Cricklewood has been laid out. Hundreds of apartments are being built to their design in Beirut — yes, Beirut.

But Allies and Morrison Architects is not just a design firm, they like to build. They are planning to develop a slim 22-storey tower, one door down from their offices at 85 Southwark Street. They can afford to do so. The partnership — established in 1984 — carries no debt, owns its own office, which is part of a property portfolio worth… well, they are too modest to say.

The partners have bought the pocket-handkerchief site. The 6000 square foot plot contains a low block of Sixties offices. The plan is to rip that down, build a double-height delicatessen, and top that with office space. Then stack a single 1000 square foot flat per floor for six floors, then three-double-storey flats. Then top the tower with a deck and pool.

The plans have yet to be submitted to Southwark council for approval. But last month Morrison displayed a rare touch of immodesty when he flashed the plans on the screen during a presentation showing the many schemes A&M are up to in Southwark. He can be forgiven. Almost the entire planning department of Southwark was in the audience."

Which must be this building:-

[gothicform]

they bought the property years ago, and it's just escalated in value since. pretty smart long-term vision there.

[Legal Beagle]

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...night-hotel.do

Doesn't look like any changes are being made to the exterior (which to my mind is a good thing), but on the other hand I can't help thinking the last thing London needs is yet another overpriced 5* hotel...

[DarJoLe]

Astonishing.

http://www.360cities.net/london-photo-en.html

[capslock]

Originally Posted by Octoman

Excellent! That will be an enormous improvement.
That road will be completely transformed over the next year or so. I always thought the way it gently slopes down towards temple station with the view of the thames behind gave it potential to be a beautiful street. Sadly it was spoiled by rotten architecture.

I hope they allow a few cafes or bars to open on the ground level.

I believe that's in the proposals for both sites. The scheme for Arundel Great Court (the link posted to the Wilkinson Eyre site) also reinstates a new east west road taken out by the 60s podium wall currently on the site. South of that there are also currently proposals for a new residential building on the site of the Howard Hotel by Horden Cherry Lee Architects. There's a thread on here somewhere...

[chest]

not sure if this has been posted elsewhere - 27 floor tower at Aldgate is to begin work

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...tough-going.do

[DarJoLe]

Tall Stories: London's Modernist tower blocks
Nina Caplan
05.11.10

Dotted between the old brick and new glass of London's architecture are a few buildings still living the 20th-century dream of communal existence. There are drawbacks: no gas, high service charges, people all around. But there are also advantages, including great views, the feeling of existing within this city's history like Jonah within the whale, and people all around.

I am an architecture nut and a Barbican resident, which is a fine combination. Six months ago, I moved into a one-bedroom flat owned by a friend whose grandmother snapped it up when they were built, in the late 1960s, on a 40-acre bombsite just north of St Paul's Cathedral. Not everything was flattened: the church of St Giles, Cripplegate, where Oliver Cromwell married and John Milton is buried, still sits at the estate's centre, while the remains of the Roman city wall ('Barbecana' was Latin for a fortified outpost or gateway) dot the area.

The Barbican was built by the Modernist architects Chamberlin, Powell & Bon under the influence of Le Corbusier, who famously wanted to level Paris and replace all those outdated old buildings with 'machines for living in' – utilitarian housing. Architecture, the Modernists believed, could change the way we lived; the Barbican was the largest-scale attempt to prove this. It was also a solution to a City almost devoid of inhabitants: only 48 people still lived in Cripplegate by the end of the war. The result was three 42-storey towers and low-rise buildings in brownish-grey concrete rising from walkways in impenetrable profusion (there are maps, but they are impene-trable, too). The layout works in the residents' favour. Not only do we have keys to private gardens, tennis courts and playgrounds, we are the only people who can reliably find the arts centre, the Museum of London, the restaurants and London's biggest conservatory after Kew.

Life here is like nowhere else, although not always in the sense the architects intended. There are full-time porters and an army of estate handymen (over 2,000 flats and 40 years old – there's a lot to fix). There is a Salvage Store, run by residents, to collect and re-distribute fixtures: the buildings are listed, so many elements (tiles, latches, dials and other such paraphernalia) are no longer made, and permission for any changes must be sought through the City of London. This makes re-decorating complicated, which may be why my landlord hasn't really attempted it. My cheery yellow shelves are too narrow for modern paperbacks; my oven is the original 1970s Credaplan (it works fine, but heaven help me if that changes, since the company is long extinct) and my sliding kitchen cupboards operate much like a Rubik's Cube and align correctly with about the same frequency. On the other hand, there is underfloor heating, daily rubbish collection and sumptuous gardens I never have to weed. Service charges, inevitably, are high, although it's the towers, appropriately enough, that have the highest. My seven-storey block varies from £2,000 to £4,000, depending on the size of the flat.

There's no charge for the views, though. The highest flats see across London, and even a humble block-dweller such as I am has the vista of the flats opposite. Although one of the oddities of the Barbican, which has a lot of second homers with City jobs, is that you rarely see real people: just figures through windows, or lost souls trying to get home, or to the arts centre. People are always at one remove – it's like a concrete version of the internet. A very concrete version.

Many people still find the design ugly, but its intentions were heroic: decoration, the Modernists believed, was decadent; less was more, and the starkness would celebrate a place with nothing to hide. Plainness of that kind is out of fashion now, but the Barbican has accrued a brutalist chic, and the prices that go with it (studios start at £250,000 and a tower penthouse is about £1.8 million). When it opened, however, incentives had to be offered to lure people in. 'The flats were pretty luxurious but the place was a building site,' says Margaret Turner, who moved there in 1969 because her father, like other bank executives, was offered inducements to take a lease. 'There were just diggers and cranes. And no shops. The whole Barbican smelled of malt because the Whitbread brewery on Chiswell Street was still operational.'

The Modernists' worship of Le Corbusier can seem weird, now that he is best known as the forefather of sink estates that give com-munal living a bad name. But go to Highpoint in Highgate and the best of his theories rise before you in gracious, unadorned white. Berthold Lubetkin, one of several émigré proponents of Modernism in 1930s London, was a disciple who surpassed his master ('an achievement of the first rank,' said Le Corbusier of Highpoint), creating this early example of the International style, engineered by Ove Arup, in 1935 for office machinery tycoon Sigmund Gestetner to house his staff. However, the two buildings, with their lush private gardens, tennis courts and heated pool, became too expensive for him. 'It was intended as communal living for the middle classes,' says Carolyn Parmenter, who, with her husband Dave Rowley, has lived in seven-storey Highgate I for 17 years. She is a civil servant,
he is a university lecturer; both are passionate about architecture. In September, during Open House weekend, they let in the hordes to admire the concertina-ing windows, latched kitchen cupboards (with zinc-lined flour drawer) and the bathroom suite with 'Shanks “Highpoint” ' printed on the sink. There is also a tiny laundry chute, just big enough for a lady's gloves.

Lubetkin's stylistic descendants couldn't afford some of his innovations, such as a cruciform structure that leaves the next flat's giant TV clearly visible (and, when the windows are open, audible) but means no adjoining walls. 'It's such a comfortable way of life,' says Carolyn. 'We have a full-time porter, apples from the garden, impromptu pool parties. And the intention was utopian: to design a better way of living, which we find incredibly cheering.' Bertolt Brecht once said that the carnage of the First World War trenches left survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom: in Highpoint, Lubetkin attempted to make that future literal.

Erno Goldfinger, another émigré Corbusier disciple, who finished Trellick Tower in 1972, surely learned from Lubetkin. 'This building is designed on a human scale, based on the way people like to live,' says Ash Drees, 54, a professional mandolin player who has 'watched the weather going past' on the 27th floor of Trellick since just before the 1987 storm hit – 'and we saw great patches of London go dark with the power cut.'

The views are extraordinary, the rows of little houses below a contrast to the slender brutalist slice of concrete. The Modernists didn't like embellishment but a side effect of building high is beauty outside – and for free, which appealed to their anti-hierarchical ethos.

Trellick's really clever innovation is the staggering of levels: corridors come every three floors, dotted with cheerily non-conformist front doors, of which one in three goes up a floor inside, one goes down and only the intermittent one-beds are on that floor (so Ash is really on level 28). There is no lush landscape but all flats boast a south-facing balcony. During a party, Ash once spotted two white-knuckled hands clutching his balcony's bars: someone had decided to execute pull-ups off the building 'and found he couldn't' so had to be hauled back in.

'Unlike vertically designed buildings, here you can ask your neighbours for a cup of sugar,' says Ash. Trellick, like the Barbican, still has council tenants ('Nobody buys on the lower floors, because they don't have views').

At Highpoint, too, there is interaction between the 70 flats, with New Year's Eve parties on a roof terrace that is still London's highest residential space ('It's freezing: we all take champagne but the people who bring brandy are really popular!'). Parmenter is re-versing the previous resident's heresies (the building was given Grade I status in 1970) and will rein-state the foyer wall's curve, which was designed to reflect that of a grand piano. There is probably no way to incorporate glorious detail like that into public housing developments. But it's easy to understand why the next generation of architects tried their best.

[DarJoLe]

What to do with the Royal Docks?
Kieran Long Kieran Long
17.11.10

As cuts to local government bite, many regeneration plans are on hold - but the one project that will continue is the Royal Docks.

If Londoners know the place at all, stretching for four miles or so east of Canary Wharf, it will be from infrequent visits to the ExCeL exhibition centre or City airport. There are few other reasons for the casual visitor to go to this vast area of east London - but transforming it is a challenge that Mayor Boris Johnson himself, and Clive Dutton, the high-profile new boss of the London Borough of Newham, are staking their reputations on.

The borough's latest wheeze is to organise an open competition for ideas for temporary projects on three sites around the docks. Members of the public, charities, developers and anyone else can submit applications to make projects that will open next summer. It's all very Big Society - ie, there's no money for the winners, just moral support and the use of the land for free - and the borough hopes for projects that will focus attention on the Royal Docks in time for the Olympics in 2012.

The Royal Docks was once the heart of an empire. Its 12 miles of quaysides were built between 1855 and 1921, and it was London's most important dock for the first half of the 20th century.

The Royals closed for business only in 1981, leaving a legacy of high unemployment and social deprivation in the communities around it: North Woolwich, Beckton, Canning Town and Silvertown.

The last is barely identifiable as a place today, replaced by a monocultural housing development called Britannia Village.

This Prince Charles-inspired development is just one of the projects that have tried to regenerate the area since the docks closed, and there are others - the isolated and gated residential developments near Barrier Park, for instance.

But what really characterises the place, and sits as a potential obstacle to Newham's dream of a future of green technology and executive housing, is the industry in the area. The area around Silvertown Way and North Woolwich Road is a rare London place where things still get made - most notably at Tate & Lyle's refinery, which has been there since 1921 and still operates. There are working wharves along the river, valuable places where raw materials can be transported into central London by boat.

There are yards full of sand and gravel, there are stonemasons, scaffolding warehouses and animal byproduct processing plants. In short, the Royal Docks is where stuff happens that London needs, but that many of us would rather not see.

This summer, Boris Johnson and Newham jointly authored a "vision document" aimed at persuading international developers to invest in the area.

There's lots of talk about making the docks a "world-class" destination and a "centre of vitality", dreams of green business districts and pictures of flashy building proposals.

Perhaps the most significant of these is the new "visitor attraction", designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, to be built at the west end of the docks by German technology company Siemens. There are even visuals of the mooted cable-car connection across the river, connecting the O2 with the ExCeL centre.

The main observations about the existing communities and assets of the areas around the docks are confined to infrastructure ("excellent road and rail connections"). You also get an idea how the success of the redevelopment will be measured. Under "challenges", the vision document laments that "the area has yet to attract a five-star hotel or top restaurant".

While Clive Dutton and Boris Johnson dream of Nobu in the Royals, a trip there today reveals something quite different. Walk west down Woodman Street in North Woolwich, past the tower blocks, the glazed brick bungalow of the Royal Oak pub, and you arrive at a tired modernist town centre.

The place feels bereft: Church Street has no church, Station Street no station. The place has an unstable population of residents who would live elsewhere if they could, and it is poorly connected to amenities and facilities. North Woolwich has been entirely passed over by the march of London regeneration in the past decade.

Meanwhile, popular culture is becoming more interested in the stories of the area's past.

Melanie McGrath's popular memoir, Silvertown (2002), is full of old East End memories of overbearing but charismatic fathers, long-suffering and sickly mothers, tribes of children, the war and the grey economy that helped the people living around the docks survive. It is also a portrait of the uncomfortable intimacy of the slum housing that has now disappeared from the perimeter of the docks.

More recently came the film No Place/Good Place: The Rime of the Modern Mariner, narrated by Carl Barât of The Libertines and directed by journalist Mark Donne, which was premiered this summer at St Anne's Church in Limehouse.

Interviews with the old men who worked in the docks are cut together with footage that is entirely absent from Newham's vision document - fragments of dock wall, the derelict pubs, the memories, good and bad, of a place that has meant so much more in its time than the banal categories of leisure destination and tourist attraction.

These are personal takes on the docks but they are more than mere nostalgia. These are real memories, real meanings and real people who understand this part of London better than the Siemens executives in their UFO-like building. Whether Newham, in its rush for attention and investment, will have the time or inclination to pay attention to some of these deeper cultural roots remains to be seen.

To submit an idea for a temporary project around the Royal Docks, email sitelife@propertyweek.com.

[ismail]

Also in todays Es was a small article in the financial section about Barrat starting work on a 27 floor tower in Aldgate.

Any body know about this project?

[gothicform]

Originally Posted by ismail

Also in todays Es was a small article in the financial section about Barrat starting work on a 27 floor tower in Aldgate.

Any body know about this project?

it's on alie street but i dunno which one it is! could it be this one ? 27 floors including basement, i guess L+Q bought it off inoder? barratt is putting up the capital for it to continue and acting as development manager, 50/50 share...
http://www.skyscrapernews.com/buildings.php?id=4680

[Ciudad Bristol]

Posted on the Chancery Lane failed Pedestrianisation scheme in the Transport forum.

Basically, the ped zone received "mixed responses" and it is not being taken forward.

All other improvements going ahead for completion in March 2011: Footway widening, new public spaces in side streets, tree planting, enhanced lighting etc.

[connorwilliams]

The standard has this:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...he-cucumber.do

Billionaire brothers Simon and David Reuben have unveiled plans for a new skyscraper, nicknamed “the Cucumber”, which is set to rival the 591ft-high Gherkin as a landmark on London's skyline.

The property tycoons, whose empire also includes Millbank Tower, want to build the 460ft glass tower on their Paddington Basin site. It will be the capital's 17th-tallest building if revised plans are approved.

The 41-storey block, officially to be named 1 Merchant Square, will include 222 flats, a 90-room boutique hotel and a public roof bar. An earlier scheme featuring more than 500 flats has been scaled down in an area where planning permission has traditionally been difficult to obtain for skyscrapers.

It's going to be 460ft in Paddington Basin, this is probably the best place to post it since it doesn't say whether it's part of the Merchant Sqaure project.

[delores]

new images of Guy's & St. Thomas' Cancer Treatment Centre, looks good.
http://www.architecture.com/UseAnArc...eriorView.aspx

[Jim856796]

At London Wall, there were originally six parallel-aligned tower blocks which were identical in size.

Bastion was the westernmost
Lee House (north side of London Wall, demolished to make way for Alban Gate, the first of the towers to be demoed)
Royex House (S. side, at the top of Wood Street - demolished in 2004)
St. Alphage House (N. side, still standing, though there are plans to demolish that block)
City Place House (south side, still standing with distinctive blue reclad in the mid 80s) Moor House (demoed in 2001 to make way for new building of the same name).

All of the blocks should have been demolished for new buildings.

[woodgnome]

£1bn facelift to get West End in shape for the 2012 Olympics

-- Link to London Evening Standard article --

The West End will have a £1 billion makeover before the Olympics, it was announced today. Business leaders said the investment, to benefit the capital's retail and leisure sections and infrastructure, is a sign of “growing confidence” in the area. They said the developments, which are being funded by public and private-sector investments, will ensure visitors will be able to enjoy “world-class” entertainment during the London 2012 Games.

New retail developments, including a shop devoted to M&Ms in Leicester Square, are planned on the back of major investment in projects such as the £22 million Hippodrome overhaul, turning it into a “leisure casino”. A raft of new hotels will also open, including Britain's first W Hotel and the first St John's Hotel. The Grosvenor Hotel, Hyatt Regency London and Saint George's Hotel also plan large-scale refurbishments, and a £145 million redevelopment will see the Trocadero house a 495-bed “pod” hotel. Westminster City Council, Transport for London and other partners will inject £100 million into improving public spaces and infrastructure.

Sarah Porter, of Heart of London Business Alliance, which represents Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, said: “There have been lots of elements that have worked towards people thinking it's a good time to be investing in the West End. When the private property owners in the area saw that we were investing in the infrastructure, it encouraged them to invest as well.” She said that investment has also helped to attract new retailers, such as Mars which is opening the first M&Ms World outside America next year.

Richard Dickinson, of New West End Company, representing businesses in Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street, said: “London's West End is the shop window to the world and will be under particular scrutiny during the Olympic Games. These multi-million-pound refurbishments will ensure that the world's most famous shopping district looks great when the eyes of the world are on London.”

Robert Davis, Westminster City Council's deputy leader and cabinet member for the built environment, said: “The West End is undergoing a huge transformation which will ensure, come 2012, when the eyes of the world are upon us, it acts as a showcase for the country.”

[DarJoLe]

Using an example of an M&M store opening in the West End as a sign of its rejuvenation really is taking the piss. Westminster just don't seem to get it, do they?