It’s called the “Shard of Glass” tower, a “spike through the heart” of London, its critics cheered on by those like Simon Jenkins who say London doesn’t do tall buildings, thank you. We do polite squares, teashops. These romantic fools clearly haven’t noticed London’s gap-toothed skyline in half a century. But facing them there’s Ken Livingstone, going goo-goo over skyscrapers like a lovestruck teenager, meeting proponents at secret trysts, and turning on opponents with adolescent spite. English Heritage the English Taleban? Come now.
Next week’s public inquiry on the tower is going to be fun. A shame, because the important issue isn’t about phalluses looming over London, it’s about evil property developers. Stop that hissing at the back. You’ve had four centuries to get used to them; they aren’t going away. In fact they’re just going to get more powerful. Until we have world peace, socialism triumphant and pigs with wings, we have chosen, in Britain especially, to have private capital gamble with our space.
It’s property developers who give us most of our architecture. The hoo-hah over London Bridge Tower, or last year’s Heron Tower inquiry, is no different from that which has greeted any big development since Britain invented property speculation in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then, landed aristocrats battled it out with nouveau wide-boys such as Nicholas Barbon and Henry Holland, to carve up cities and countryside into Belgravias and Baths. Today it’s the likes of Irvine Sellar, London Bridge’s developer, who swagger across the map. But they’re essentially the same type, some dodgier than others, but all in the intricate business of making money out of space.
The process of development is also essentially the same: how much freedom do we give the developers, and how much do they have to bribe us for it? In the 18th century their gifts came in the form of a nice square for the promenading bourgeoisie. Today they might be a skypark on the 66th floor for the promenading bourgeoisie, pretty bollards, or wishier-washier ideas like “regeneration” and “local jobs”. Government lays down the ground rules, throws a few gifts (tax breaks, infrastructure) to yank developers one way or another — but mostly keeps its nose out.
But what’s different today is how vital property development has become for the economy. It’s up there with shopping and call centres. So it’s trickier for the state to avoid. Go and get The Long Good Friday (1980) out on video. Forget all the shenanigans about the Mafia and IRA. It’s really about town planning, set at the exact moment when all our mills and factories scarpered from Bradford to Bombay, and Britain became just another place for international investment to land. There’s Bob Hoskins as poor old Harold, gangster-cum-Docklands property developer, trying his best to go straight. He sees Britain’s future, and it’s in land. And hotels. And Starbucks. Back then economists called it footloose capital. Now we call it globalisation.
Buildings are footloose, too. Not quite literally (though architects are working on it). As local and national government becomes ever more reliant on private finance to fund public and private development, places must compete for investment. Developers whisper: “If you don’t make us feel welcome, we’re off to Tower Hamlets.” Or Liverpool, or any other spot beleaguered enough to grab developers’ titbits at almost any cost. Fred Manson, the former head of regeneration in Southwark, said as much when London Bridge Tower was unveiled a couple of years back: “If we don’t do it, Croydon will.” Or maybe Shanghai, Shenzhen, or anywhere where the natives are friendlier. Rumours had it that Irvine Sellar threatened to take his tower elsewhere if he wasn’t granted permission. He rebuffs them. “I have a loyalty to Southwark. But,” he adds, darkly, “obviously there are options. You could, for instance, put the Gherkin (the new, Foster-designed, gherkin-shaped building in the City) anywhere.” I suspect he wasn’t talking about the Gherkin.
Sellar is smallish beer, globally, but even he has more power these days than he might admit. The fact is that Blair, Livingstone and councils the length of the land rely on private capital far more than Thatcher ever did. She may have kickstarted privatisation, of land as much as utilities, with anything-goes enterprise zones and tax breaks to goad developers into sinking industrial areas. But Blair has intensified it.
He can’t help it. Mega-buildings, like mega-brands, are a fact of life. A couple of years back Britain’s land was a very juicy morsel for international investors, which is why planners’ in-trays are now groaning with applications to build towers from Vauxhall to Birmingham, and, less noticeably, groundscrapers, wholesale redevelopments popular in the 1980s that seem to be making a comeback in sly new forms. Blair needs this international capital more than it needs him, to finance big public jobs such as mending the Tube or building hospitals. So he needs to mollycoddle it.
But we do need to control it. And this is the issue at London Bridge Tower. It’s not simply a case of saying yes or no any more. We don’t have that luxury. It’s about working out the exact tightness of the ropes with which we bind developers, to ensure that (a) they don’t run screaming to Shanghai, and (b) we get as much benefit from them as possible in the form of those “bribes”. A jot too loose and you end up with dross plastered across the country. Too tight, and you risk fossilising the environment. The balance has to be perfect.
This is the year the balance will be determined. Some fear the Government is already making the ropes too loose, with its plans for an Eighties revival of enterprise zones, all those new homes to build and plans to speed up public inquiries after that potty, five-year Terminal 5 case. I’m hoping it will listen to its own Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), the lone, moderate voice of reason over London Bridge Tower. “People want us to say things in back and white, which we refuse to do. And that causes some consternation,” says its head of design review, Peter Stewart.
It doesn’t shout headlines. It’s made up of a slightly racier breed of planning officer, dressed in Armani, rather than Mr Byrite, out of proximity to Blair, labouring quietly in the background over sub-paragraphs and committees, to convince developers of the long-term value of those planning gains, for themselves as well as for us. Cabe has already had results with Sellar, improving the design, and getting him to sign the architect Renzo Piano to the bitter end (developers have a nasty habit of gradually edging out architects, so that what gets built rarely resembles what was designed). They just need more time.
As it is, the tower should not be approved. But stick around, Mr Sellar; that doesn’t mean we don’t like it. It just needs a tad more work on the inducements, nicer design at street level, the little important things. That’s how the day-to-day of planning happens. It’s rarely about grands projets and shouting yah boo from the rooftops. It’s about negotiation. Dull, eh? But it works.
