london skyline

Find that campsite!

2011-05-08T09:33:00.000Z

I’ve been very busy lately. Busy making it easier for YOU – yes YOU! – to find the perfect campsite in the UK.

As of a few days ago, my campsite listing website has some new features. And not just any new features – these are (to the best of my knowledge) unique new features. The already pretty handy map of campsites now lets you…

Filter campsites based on what facilities they have – you can either specify that your ideal campsite must have a certain feature, or definitely must not have it. Ideal for finding a campsite that allows campfires but no pesky caravans.
View only those campsites that are open during the month you’re planning on holidaying.

There are one or two additional features hopefully to go live later this month, but for now please take a look and let me knnow if you have any feedback.

Endurance

2009-03-05T12:10:00.005Z

So much has gone on in my life in recent months: Went to Amsterdam, fell in love, didn't go to India (yes, that is, believe it or not, something to note), broke up a fight, got a new dream job, formed a band that properly gets paid, went to France (twice), went to Finland, survived the economic crisis (so far)...

... as has at least one of the London new builds by the looks of this photo. Which I can non-exclusively reveal is.... The Heron Tower. Also, Broadgate Tower looks well and truly occupied (though not featured in this photograph). God knows what's happening to the Cheesegrate or the Bishopsgate Tower though. The demolition of the Cheesgrater site started well before the Heron Tower one, so it's all a bit arse abourt face if you ask me.

I'm retired from skyscraper hunting officially, but couldn't resist posting this photo, together with a link to skyscrapernews to read more about it.

By the way - and I hate to go on about it - but my new blog is starting to pick up in frequency of posts, and it is more fun writing when you have more readers, so please do take a look.

A new home

2008-09-02T18:21:00.002Z

I'm back from the dead, briefly, to say I have a new blog over at wheresrhys.co.uk

As my day job is web related it will evolve into a showcase for what I can do. So there will be a few boring web technology related articles, but I intend to also use it as a rant-board, for occassional skyscraper highlights, and also to host a new artform I've invented: The Phoku.

So if you've enjoyed reading this blog regardless of/despite the skyscraper interest then you may want to subscribe to the new one too.

Farewell

2008-03-22T13:18:00.003Z

A number of factors have combined to quieten this blog of late:

Very unreliable internet service at home
Being quite busy with life ingeneral
I'm moving to Amsterdam soon, and have been debating whether to continue with the blog at all.

#1 is now resolved, but #2 and #3 still loom large on the horizon. Delving in in more depth:

#2
I started the blog when my houseshare was less than ideal and spent a lot of time in my room hiding/plotting. Nowadays I don't have the same incentive to remain ensconced with my laptop, and writing the blog on a regular basis feels a bit like a chore.

#3
Well, it's pretty flat really, isn't it. I'll probably get bullied for not being horizontal enough in my enthusiasms if I continue with the blog. I won't be able to take any photos of the works in progress, so will be reduced to scouring the new websites for updates. This is something I haven't been doing too much of lately either as www.skyscrapernews.com does a far beter job in all honesty.

So I am retiring the blog for the time being. I don't expect the move to Amsterdam will be permanent (probably about 6 months), so I may return one day to continue the tall building commentary. It all depends on how big a public outcry there is.

I'll leave you with two things:

There is one hoarding in the city which is not, surprisingly, around a construction site: it's around an archaeological dig at a buried section of the Old London Wall near Leadenhall Market.
One last poor photo of the Broadgate Tower:

Signage

2008-02-29T11:51:00.001Z

Someone has outdone me on the building site sign front: http://www.chortleberry.com/l/photo_96710/Building_Site_Shenanigans

The fog

2008-02-12T22:25:00.000Z

Nothing much to say, other than that one side effect of falling off my bike on Saturday is that I'm getting the tube to work. Which means I have been walking from Westminster tube... through the fog.. and past Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

Spooky!

And below is another foggy photo, of Millbank Tower, but taken by Jane, not I. And looking, as is the wont of London artifacts these days, like something from the Mysterious Cities of Gold.

Music to watch fog by, by fog

A Condor in the City

2008-02-11T19:49:00.001Z

Looks a bit like the big golden bird in Mysterious Cities of Gold, does it not?

And it is to be found on Cornhill. Or possibly Cheapside. One or the other.

While I'm putting up photos of small things in the city, here also is a shop on Threadneedle Street. There's something very anachronistic about such a quaint little olde English tobacconists using fluorescent pieces of card for its pricing labels. I didn't go and have a closer look, but I dread to think they may have been written in permanent marker rather than copperplate printed.

You will also notice that though the awning proclaims "J. Bedford and Co", the plaque beneath the window says "H. Botterill & Sons, estd 1841". A cunning ruse to tempt in passing footfall who, too close to be able to see the awning, purchase their Havana cigars unaware that the claims to have been established in 1841 are of dubious provenence.

A waterfront is as good as a skyline

2008-02-10T10:11:00.000Z

Isn't the weather just great at the moment! (Apologies for any insensitivity towards any readers from Bismarck, North Dakota). So great that I spent most of yesterday's daylight hours out of bed and out of doors, and intend on a repeat performance today, once the blog's finished.

The morning involved seeing one of these, hearing one of these singing (always a good sign of spring) and nearly falling in the canal. In the afternoon I cycled along the canal to Limehouse with Tom for a couple of drinks on the waterfront, and where Beard also joined us later. Various sights along the canal:

I like this building, but I don't think it fits in London at all. Modern looking, interestingly shaped and textured apartment buildings can work in London, but this clean, pine boarded and pastel panelled construction looks awkward in grimy Poplar. Charles keeps going on about traditional styles, and building modern structures in appropriate settings and, it turns out, I agree. I just think people focus too much on the size of buildings, and assume big ones are going to be eyesores.

The Phoenix Business Centre, which is struggling - to say the least - to rise from its East London ashes.

Some interesting shadow effects on the water.

New flats going up in Bow/Stratford, near the olympic park.

Now - on to the main point if this post. There is much talk about preserving London's historic skyline. These energies would, I feel, be much better spent campaigning for the reinstatement of a public Thames waterfront.

The Morpeth, near where I work, has numerous prints of old London scenes. One that caught my eye the other day was of Somerset House before Victoria embankment was built (similar to the picture to the right). It shows a public courtyard with steps leading down to the river.

As this article explains:

"London's roads were becoming increasingly congested and its sewers unable to cope ... The Embankment was intended to carry a new road along the edge of the Thames from Westminster to the City of London and, below ground, to accommodate large sewers and a line for the Metropolitan and District Railway.

The introduction of the Embankment had the effect of distancing the river from the buildings along its north bank, particularly significant for Somerset House, which had been designed to rise directly from the water ... The dramatic waterfront design of Sir William Chambers' Somerset House had effectively been destroyed a little more than a decade since the building of the New Wing had seen its completion."

Somerset House is a particularly striking example of how there are very few places away from the South Bank where one can sit by the river. Limehouse is one of the very few. Unfortunately the view from there is blighted by the many cod-luxury low rise apartments opposite.

London surely deserves a more accessible and better, architecturally speaking, waterfront.

Speaking of Limehouse, it has a surprising sign telling boats arriving in the marina not to disembark any animals due to rabies, which reminds you that London is still technically a port.

Finally, a nuclear bomb went off in London yesterday. I have photographic proof:

Sustainable cities

2008-02-08T21:20:00.000Z

A number of disparate elements have come together to form this post.

I found a newspaper cutting I meant to write about ages ago. Across the road from me they were building an unusual looking block of flats. This turns out to be London's greenest block of flats - the award winning BowZED. The solar panels, tiny wind turbine, and ship funnels that look like roman centurion helmets on the roof are the most obvious green design features (not sure what gren function the funnels do though), but it was also built using re-used steel girders.
This article (which you can't read as the Canadian Globe and Mail don't let you read archived articles for free) was posted to me by my Auntie Eirlys, who does that sort of thing from time to time. It's about an Architect called Cameron Sinclair, who set up an organisation called architecture for humanity, which assists in the creation of sustainable homes in developing countries and disaster areas, partly through the new concept of open source architectural plans. He studied architecture in London (grew up in Peckham), but part of the reason for going off on the philanthropic tangent was due to his fellow students annoyingly trying to emulate Fran Ghery and Zaha Hadid... as if that was all architecture was about. He won the TED prize in 2006, and you can watch his prize winning talk here.

Which brings me nicely - unexpectedly smoothly really - on to TED.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. Once a year they bring together leading thinkers in many fields in order to try and cross-pollenate ideas across disciplines. I've been subscribing to their feed for a few months now (they put up videos of 10-20 minute lectures (stored up for years, though most of the ideas are remarkably fresh) at a rate of about 2 or 3 per week).

The reason I'm writing about them now is because in the past couple of weeks there's a vague, perhaps unintentional thread of being aware of the possibilities of architecture in cities.

Here is a favourite - a whimsical sketched journey through Rome:

Another related to the architectural possibilities theme are sustainable cities (a bit dull, to be honest).

Here are my other favourites:

Michael Pollan: The omnivore's next dilemma - An awe-inspiring meditative, philosophical examination of Darwinism, humanity's place in the world and - an unlikely conclusion - sustainable farming.
David Gallo: Underwater astonishments - The best octopus camouflage you will ever see. Possibly also the only octopus camouflage you will ever see.
Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids - What the title says.
Dan Dennett: Can we know our own minds? - I've read a lot of his books, but never imagined he looked like Father Christmas! A very entertaining talk on self-knowledge and consciousness, with the best magician/neuroscientist analogy you will ever hear.
Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind - very similar to Daniel Dennett's (covering, as it does, the brain's ability to fool the body) and almost as good.
Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law - An eloquent argument for changing copyright laws, which currently make most people who use the internet (minor) criminal.
Yossi Vardi: Help fight local warming - funny short talk about decreasing male fertility due to overzealous use of laptops.

The site also has the best video navigation and rating system on any site.

4.
And finally, last week I read an obituary for Hans Monderman, who believes exposing drivers, cyclists and pedestrians to slightly more danger forces them to be more aware of what's around them, and they collectively will cause less road accidents. And his ideas worked! He removes road signs and crashes decrease in frequency

I know this is a lot to take in, but every link in this post is well worth following. ANd you might also feel the vague, but just tangible, theme running through them.

When is a skyscraper finished?

2008-02-06T20:25:00.000Z

I'm not sure if I actually pointed it out the other day, but the Willis Building is still, as yet, unoccupied and is still evidently a bit of a mess inside. And yet, I have considered it finished for some time, and, looking at Broadgate Tower and considering it incomplete, I have come up with teh following criteria for a building's completion (for the purposes of this blog).

All cranes dismantled and taken down
All glazing in place

And there we have it.

The photo on the right was taken from a street I've never been down before, also home to this fetching electricity substation. It provides a good view of the rear of the building which, to all intents and purposes, looks finished (although this doesn't hold true for street level).

It also looks pretty polished from Bishopsgate Street, with the facade of 201 Bishopsgate snaking along the pavement, and now the glass reaches down to the ground (but not the cladding on the pillars, which remain resolutely gravity defiant).

A week ago on Sunday was a gorgeous day in the city, as you can see from the blue skies. I ended up in Spital Square drinking coffee, eating a slice of pizza, cycling through a mirrored sculpture and reading in the frosty sun.

Finally, to keep the blog, as ever, with it's nose to topical affairs; much of the American democratic candidate debate revolves around healthcare.

This week I have seen an ambulance with balloons, streamers and a just married sign hanging off the back (I only hope they dropped it off at the depot before going off on their honeymoon).
I cycled pasta sinister black van with "PRIVATE AMBULANCE" written on its side. That labour government and it's PFI's! What number d'you call for this ambulance service? 666? Joking aside, why would a private ambulance look so sinister?

Remember; you heard it here first.

Newsflash: Prince Charles hates modern architecture!!!

2008-02-05T13:16:00.000Z

He also makes expensive cakes and his little brother is following in his footsteps when it comes to the duty to stay out of politics.

But back to the matter in hand, Prince Charles delivered a speech last week attacking the policy of building tall buildings in London (like it hasn't all been said before).

"...will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners"

I didn't know I was going to inherit a Londoner! But more seriously... err, it's just the same old argument - that we somehow are fortunate to live in a golden age of the London view. One so precious that it must be preserved despite the fact that London is a living city.

"...buildings that express nothing but outdated sustainability."

What on earth does that mean???

"...retain the kind of human scale that attract so many people to them"

As I wrote the other day, even moderately big buildings - necessary in places like the city - are always going to obscure buildings on a more human scale. Unless you favour parkland or bungalows you're on a hiding to nothing here.

Also most of the popular buildings in London - St Pauls, Westminster, Tate modern, tower of london - are popular because of their grandiosity, not their intimacy. Possibly the only people who think they are quaint and intimate are American tourists.

"Parisian example of a high-rise urban quarter at La Defense effectively kept high-rise development away from central Paris."

What he forgets though is that Paris' old buildings are far more intact than London's due to the blitz. So Paris doesn't have the same option to demolish hundreds of 1960's modernist blots that we do.

"...in Berlin, too ... the city leaders have insisted upon rigorous limitations to the height of new buildings. These kinds of approaches can help to achieve a far more coherent sense of harmony and civic self-confidence."

Not sure what civic self-confidence is. Most of the top Google results are Prince Charles saying it in this speech and a previous one. The only other architectural use of it I can find is where civic self-confidence spawned town-planning, rather than the other way round (which seems a lot more feasible). If anyone knows what Charles means, and what mechanisms he thinks lead from smaller buildings to civic self-confidence, then let me know.

By the way, in a nod to the misuse of statistics, he quotes Kensington and Chelsea - a pretty low rise borough - as having the highest population density in London, which is true. But a bit of research suggests that it's probably the inner London Borough with the least parkland (Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are both in Westminster). I don't think he's being deliberately misleading. He's just a pretty average interpreter of statistics.

I could go on to criticize some of his other views, but it could go on for some time. So I'll just finish by saying that when Charles says, like many other people:

"My concern is that London will become just like everywhere else with the same homogenized buildings that express nothing but outdated unsustainability"

... has he not been to the many cities around the world that have many tall buildings (including, it has to be said, London, as it has a few). Does he think all those cities are the same? If he does, then he clearly has no appreciation for the diverse, street-level, intimate feel he claims to know so much about.

Oh, go on then, one final bit of Charlie madness:

"...how it can be considered sensible, or indeed rational, to implant such “congestors” [skyscrapers] into a network of streets which were designed to function with two to three storey buildings."

Last but not least, here's what the readers of the Telegraph think.

Back to bike ranting

2008-02-02T21:49:00.000Z

I've just had a narrow escape... I think. I parked my bike round the side of Liverpool Street station, away from the crowds. When I went to get my bike later there were some kids hanging about. A couple of them were starting to make their way towards me and gesturing for the others to come too, so I darted off as fast as I could.

"You're an idiot," I hear you cry. "Why didn't you park your bike out front like someone who's not an idiot, you big fat idiot?"

And well might you ask.

Most of the railings around Liverpool Street have signs saying bikes will be removed on them (
Here is another illustrative story: http://www.london-se1.co.uk/forum/read/1/21843).

I pondered earlier in the day who had the authority to remove these bikes? The bike is on the street and, as I read the other day, even the police and other officials don't have the authority to remove bikes on the street, even if they're causing an obstruction (for the moment - it might be changing). And as the bike isn't actually on private property, merely leaning against it, one has to wonder if anyone has the authority to move it, even if there is a written warning there. If the written warning counted for anything then they could also put up signs giving them the right to move anything that passed by on the pavement... even people!

From the tfl website:

Parliament Square and Whitehall security zone

There is one area in London where if you park at street level you won't find your bike where you left it - the security zone around Parliament Square and Whitehall. Here you need to take your bike to an underground car park and leave it there. If you don't it will be removed and taken to Charing Cross Police station.

The question is, would the site security be breaking the law if they moved my bike? I think having a sign like that on the railings outside someone's house is fair enough, and I wouldn't dream of ignoring it. But outside a large office building in the City it seems inappropriate, and I would really like to flout the signs... but the risk is always that security will remove it and the police won't care enough to stop them or help me get it back. In fact, the police seem to condone it even though it would probably be acting illegally:

When parking on the street ... Avoid using "street furniture"as these may be removed by Local Authorities ... Ensure you are not ... using fixtures that have signs asking you not to secure your cycle to them (or it may be removed/double locked).

Oh, and we won the rugby... or something.

Don't fence me in

2008-01-30T19:11:00.000Z

The hoarding around the base of the Leadenhall building used to be a drab, grey, wooden affair. Not any more!

Mahatma Ghandi said "Be the change you want to be in the world," and it appears that one thing this has inspired (a slightly smaller change than gaining independence for India) is the replacement of the Leadenhall Building's hoarding with something a little more glitzy.

It's an aluminium composite panel (the best in quality and service (can an inanimate object provide a service?)) in silver and yellow, and is the perfect surface on which to emblazon details of the skyscraper construction project. They have even broken with the horizontal lines at one point to include a metalworkers' impression of the finished tower.

Now - I know what you're thinking: Who said they could put up this flashy new fencing, and I come equipped with an answer: the Corporation of London (aka City of London Council). As evidenced here, and also on the boards surrounding two smaller building sites in the city. Th

But there is one anomaly; the green fencing surrounding the Bishopsgate Tower (now officially called The Pinnacle, it seems) building site stands there under the auspices of Transport for London. Not only that, but as well as being allowed hoarding or scaffolding, a gantry is also permitted. The only reason I can think of TfL getting involved is that the tower will be on a main thoroughfare... but then again, so is the Broadgate Tower. Hmm - I'm confused!

Spot the difference, Richard Rogers

2008-01-29T23:03:00.000Z

It turns out Richard Rogers may have been too quick to criticise Bovis' slow progress on demolition of the building obstructing he construction of the Leadenhall Building.

September 2007
January 2008

Changes to note (which may need a click and a zoom in to see):

The platform has risen 2-3 stories. Quite slow progress for 4-5 months' work, but they've also put up a lot of canvas and scaffolding up there.
The hoarding has been replaced by some shiny new stuff
The building has evidently been filled with helium or hot air as, in January 2008, it has had to be tethered to the ground
The crane has rotated. Proof of intelligent life, or just the wind? Who can tell.

For more up to the minute information read the September (with an illustrative diagram) and December newsletters. Interesting elements of the December news are the imminent (possibly old news by now) construction of a bridge to give better site access, and if you want to see the pile driving for the foundations in action, you will have to pop by at night.

Dialogue concerning construction of a cheese wedge

2008-01-29T22:09:00.000Z

Richard Rogers: Hello - can I speak to Charles please?

Office assistant: (may be male or female - let's not make an ass out of you and me here) I'll just get...

(Charles William Bovis Jr. gesticulates wildly for the office assistant not to reveal he's there)

Office assistant: (Not making any effort to conceal their voice from the man on the phone) But I've already started to tell him I'll get you.

(Bovis comes over and, looking daggers over at his assistant, takes the receiver from her)

Bovis: Richard... Hi! Good to hear from you.

Rogers: Hi, Charles. Listen, I'm glad I caught you because I...

Bovis: How's it hangin' Richie?

Rogers: Fine, but I don't have time to chat... I...

Bovis: How is me old mugger, eh?

Rogers: I'm very well, I told you... but about this...

Bovis: And Mary... and the kids? Are they well?

Rogers: Yes! Now, listen here Charles. If I didn't know any better I'd say...

Bovis: How old are they n....

Rogers: ...I'd say you were trying to avoid me.

Bovis: (Aghast) Well there's no need to interrupt. Why would I be trying to avoid you.

Rogers: Well, it's the construction of the Leadenhall Building,

Bovis: The what, now?

Rogers: The Leadenhall Building.

Bovis: Huh?

Rogers: (Pained) The Cheesegrater

Bovis: Oh - well why didn't you say so. Yeah, the horny dildo-wedge. What of it?

Rogers: Well, I couldn't help noticing that that... that... that ugly carbuncle of a building that used to occupy the space where it's supposed to go... well... it didn't "used" to occupy the land; it still very much does occupy the land.

Bovis: Ah yes. Right you are, my friend, right you are. Still there it is. As sure as eggs came before the chicken, there it is.

Rogers: Well, I wouldn't bring it up really... only I notice that you've had that bit hovering up there since at least May.

Bovis: Absolutely - can't rush these things you know.

Rogers: But, I was strolling round the Heron Tower the other day. They only started knocking it down... well, it seems like just the other day, and already it's cleared.

Bovis: Ah yes, but they didn't have any problems with the... with the - don't tell the papers, mind - with the old curse

Rogers: What - asbestos?

Bovis: No! The old, err, Indian burial ground.

Rogers: There's an Indian burial ground?

Bovis: Yep.

Rogers: Are there Indian burial grounds in the UK?

Bovis: This one 'ere is.

Rogers: Well, i rather wish someone had told me... before I started work on this project.

Bovis: Ah - that'll be the curse already taking effect. A pre-emptive strike if you will

Rogers: I'm sorry?

Bovis: Started to give you bad luck before you started work here.

Rogers: (After thinking for a second) But if it wasn't for the bad luck of not knowing about the burial ground I wouldn't have started working here, and wouldn't have disturbed the ground, and there'd be need for the curse to take effect in the first place. It's like the chicken/egg thing.

Bovis: Huh?

Rogers. Don't you see?! It's a rather counter-productive curse that aids and abets the very thing it's set up to prevent.

Bovis: Ah - but it's a very self-loathing Indian burial ground. Very low self-esteem. Was taken into care and then sold into foundations by its foster parents. Tragic tale.

Rogers: Oh, I'm sorry to hear it.

Bovis: You're sorry! think how I feel having to make all this up!

Rogers: Quite, quite right. I really am very sorry to bother you.

Bovis: That's OK Mr. R. You mind how you go now.

Rogers: I will do indeed. Goodbye.

Bovis: Bye Mr. R. My love to Mary.

Snowboard - Eat fresh!

2008-01-29T13:10:00.001Z

This morning I passed a man by Liverpool Street station holding a sign with a big arrow on it saying:

SALE! Ski equipment, outdoor clothing...

What's remarkable about that?

Only that attached to the same post was a sign saying:

SUBWAY - Eat fresh!

What does this mean? Subway have branched out into supplying ski equipment. That they go even further and have started selling fresh ski equipment as food. "Any sauce on that snowboard, sir?"

Or does it mean the guy holding the sign is pulling a fast one, getting paid twice for holding one stick? Moonlighting on both suppliers at once.

Or has a new alliance been formed between Ellis Brigham and Subway, recognising that nine out of ten skiiers fall in the "love it" to "don't mind it" bracket of the attitudes to subway survey?

Where are YOU going?

2008-01-28T21:17:00.000Z

How many price comparison websites do we need? Confused moneysupermarket comparethemarket pricerunner gocompare carsurance uswitch... The list goes on

I fully intend to set up a website which compares the comparison abilities of all the other comparison sites. A meta-comparer, if you will. I might set up some rival sites too and then set up a meta-meta-comparer. Pretty soon it will be impossible for anyone to say "ah - what the hell - this one seems ok," without deliberating for at least a lifetime.

So Willis, now with their shiny new headquarters (cleaned up nice, though still not quite finished), might find it difficult in future to find applicants of a high enough caliber to fill their twenty-first century desks.

"Where are you going," they ask brazenly as you walk along their newly laid cobbled sidestreet, even though they themselves are, inadvertently, helping to breed the tip-toeing, risk averse, business process obsessed dilly-dalliers of the future. And how?

See this sign:

It's in the same league as urban mythical "may contain nuts" labels on packets of peanuts, being as it is a quite unnecessary notice given the unsurmountable nature of the building detritus behind it:

Who on earth couldn't work out for themselves that that particular bit of footpath was, at this moment in time, not meant for walking on?

On the other hand... here's a thought - maybe it's a test. Maybe you're supposed to notice the incongruous nature of the sign and take it as an invitation to parkour your way around their building (they provide plenty of other props (benches) even though the road gets little to no sun). I shall apply for a job there, strut into the interview and simply say "Yeah - the sign. I know your game," and walk out as the MD.

Things move fast

2008-01-28T20:57:00.001Z

You know those signs which are rigged up to a speed detector and light up, telling you, personally, to slow down if you're going too fast; one of them just flashed at me... on my bike. Cool as!

I'm not the only things to come and go in the blink of an eye though. Take a look at this:

And now this:

Aside from one photo being zoomed in far closer, you will notice that the second is far less cluttered with sheet clad building owing to the clearing of the site to build the Heron Tower. And these photos were taken, what, 2 and a half months apart.

The upshot of this is there are now - for a limited period - pleasant vistas across to St Botolph's without Bishopsgate Church. This view has been obscured for probably the last 30 years at least by a bland concrete building and, if all goes according to plan, will be obscured once more within the next year. So get in fast!

It's a very pretty church and i'm glad it's now revealed to the world. Does this mean I wish Heron Tower wasn't being built?

It's a tricky one. If the Heron Tower wasn't going to be built then I suppose the plot of land would be a great location for a small park. I think it'd get plenty of sun and, as illustrated here, the views would be pretty.

But that's never gonna happen. That land is destined to play host to an office block of some description. A view obscuring office block. But the question remains; what sort of building should it be? Preserving the view can't be an argument against or in favour of any building higher than 1 storey. Realistically, any new building in the city is going to be at leats 5 storeys high (even the old ones tend to have at least 4 floors).

So it does make me sad to know that the view of St Botolph's from the south East will be short-lived one, at least I know the building that gets in the way has an architectural ambition that might just soften the blow a little.

Blue meanies

2008-01-26T14:57:00.000Z

This is an old photo (taken in August I think) of the fence going around the new Olympic park redevelopment area. It's a much better photo than those I took this morning (owing to me only having my phone on me this morning), hence its inclusion.

I'm not going to attempt to follow the development of the Olympic Park too closely as another blog does a far more thorough job of it. But I did come across some interesting stuff today on my way to the local nature reserve where I saw, among other things, two foxes sunning themselves in the... err... sun.

Firstly, to recap, also in August I saw that the only thing breaching the impenetrable fortress Olympic 2012 was a tree , which happened to lie exactly along the path of the fence, and was broad and
low enough to leave the developers with no choice but to cut around it.

Now, however, there is a new spirit of openness as they have installed windows. Not much to see as yet - just a load of rubble - so it's perhaps understandable that the first glimpse the public has been permitted to have of the site coincides with the plastering of these black and white posters over a section of the fence.

Now that's what I call a community art project!

Doom and gloom

2008-01-22T20:35:00.000Z

Had Chris Morris not been given the go ahead to film the The Day Today episode where he announces "It's War!" (YouTube) ("The stretched twig of peace is at.. melting point." Ha!) he would have filmed a similar episode where he proclaimed, "It's Recession!". That much we know.

For recession is one of the few times when the press play a greater than half-share in making the news.

When I was at uni, and flirting with a career in international journalism I went to a graduate recruitment presentation by Reuters. One of the people leading the talk opted to illustrate with an example what the job was all about. He related how one day George Bush had off the cuff made a minor, equivocal comment about the US economy whilst preoccupied with other matters on a state visit to Italy. The Reuters people in Italy picked up on this and reported it as a big story. This story rocketed around the world unaltered - i.e. just the raw facts with no analysis as to whether there might be any substance beyond the childish ruminations of a befuddled president - and share prices began to plummet. About 36 hours later Alan Greenspan was forced to deliver a statement to the effect that the US economy wasn't in crisis and that the world wasn't ready to end just yet.

After relating this story the Reuters rep turned to the audience beaming. "As you can see," he said, "what we do here at Reuters really does make an impact."

What! You nearly cause a financial meltdown because of sloppy, knee-jerk reporting? And you're proud of that! That is the single example you've chosen to represent how crucial your work is. I dread to think what other calamities they've nearly foisted on the world if that was the one to be most proud of. I was always taught (always - every morning, before breakfast) that Chernobyl was caused by Russian scientists carrying out tests without proper safeguards; that the Exxon Valdez ran aground on rocks; that the famine in Ethiopia was caused by a number of dry years and exacerbated by civil strife... but I wouldn't discount the hand of global news corp Reuters behind it all.

So anyway, a very long-winded way of saying that surely I can't be the only one to wonder if booms and busts would happen at all without the media. (Yes there would be up and down fluctuations, but if so much is dependent on consumer and market confidence, would they ever reach mammoth proportions?). And that Land Securities, for one, don't seem too shaken, so a few London buildings should still get built.

Keyword of the week: Does London have a nickname?

2008-01-19T11:07:00.000Z

Well - does it? Britain's nickname is 'Old Blighty', so we're OK there, but what about the capital?

This forum seem to agree that 'The Smoke' is one... but surely that can apply to any number of cities (I'm sure I've heard it in numerous American films), so that doesn't work.

This site seems to think 'The City' and 'The square mile' count, but, although they stick to the rules of nicknames (one is a shortening, the other a physical feature), I still think they are a poor showing.

But hey - look at this (taken from here):

"The Big Smoke" (or, "the Great Smoke") is London, England -- a city known for its fog. "The Big Smoke" dates earlier than "the Big Apple," but London's nickname is used informally and much less often.

(Oxford English Dictionary)
the (big, great) smoke, a colloquial name for London. Also, any large city or town (chiefly Austral.).

The trouble is, there are so many Australians in London these days that use of Big Smoke may well be on the increase, but not in the right sense to make it a proper nickname. Our (admittedly already obscure and anachronistic) sense of national capital jocularity is being diluted by outsiders. Damn cheek. Just coz they don't have any city nicknames of their own. (Quite odd really, given the Australian propensity for nicknaming things. If I'm wrong, and there are nicknames for Australian cities, please correct me).

Next they'll be importing a non-standard use of the term cockney -chuck another cockney on the barbie, or summat - and ruining that too. We should search Australians for vocabulary when they arrive in the same way they search us for animals and plants.

Who makes the iDents?

2008-01-17T19:20:00.000Z

I make the iDents!

I've posted once before about the Channel 4 ident with the helicopter flying around new buildings going up in the Dubai desert.

Well, outside Channel 4 HQ, near where I work, they have actually built one of those fours which materialise as you pass by, and then vanish again as the pieces fall out of alignment. It's got segments of athletic torsos printed on it, though I'm not sure what the significance of this is.

Anyway, here is my home made, phone made iDent:

(More frequent, shorter posts!)

By the way, John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan - great album!

Also:

Balls!

All work and no play

2008-01-16T22:33:00.000Z

More frequent, shorter posts. More frequent, shorter posts. More frequent, shorter posts. More frequent, shorter posts. More frequent, shorter posts. More frequent, shorter posts.

If I repeat it enough it may just become a reality.

I've not been busy exactly, but writing the blog hasn't seemed like an attractive proposition somehow. It hasn't put in an appearance near near or at the top of the leader-board of my diverse lifestyle choice options.

Until, that is, I saw that they have now removed the scaffolding from Cornhill Exchange at Bank and replaced it with pinkness.

Worth noting, I thought.

If I don't leave a post about the Channel 4 offices in the next few days please leave me lots of abusive comments.

Think about it, think think about it

2007-12-19T21:56:00.000Z

Two things

I was just on the bus reading the FREE paper over someone's shoulder. On four occasions they deliberately instigated a protective tilt. What's wrong with the world today? Think about it, think think about it.
Fight!

Signs often say "witnesses needed... serious assault... sexual assualt... robbery... BLISTERS!"

This one ways "Fight".

Oh blog - why art though veering from buildings?

Broadgate Tower - an icon of our age

2007-12-17T22:15:00.000Z

It's been a while yet again since I last wrote. But the Broadgate Tower waits for no man. It's left me behind and is mingling with the stars and mythical creatures.

I do of course mean it's allstar appearance on tonight's Dragon's den.

I've never noticed it before, despite being an avid viewer. This means that either:

all the other episodes (bar tonight's, which was a recap episode, 3 months on) were filmed before the tower was tall enough/respectable looking enough to be featured as a cutaway shot or (even better) as a backdrop for Evan Harris' summation speech.
the Dragons have moved den!

Either way I know that as well as looking like it's filmed in an East End converted warehouse studio, it is actually filmed in such a place.

But despite its new glitzy lifestyle it still lacks two things.

Completion. It actually seems to be going backwards as yesterday, after the Arsenal Chelsea game, the builders had blocked bishopsgate street and were in the process of - or so it seemed - erecting a new crane!
A name. This, I admit, is all my fault. I have been remiss in not capitalising on the, albeit limited, momentum I had. I will make up for this by printing t-shirts and selling on lulu or cafepress, where you can also buy this most interesting calendar for 2008. I have seen the back of every page of the calendar and they were most white and clean, which is what you'd expect.

The Gherkin has a name and is doing well for itself. They've just illuminated an entire floor bright red (it doesn't, alas, show up too well on the photo, but it is very eye-catching). Would that ever have happened to plain old 30 St Mary's Axe? I think not.

Why Y?

2007-11-30T21:15:00.000Z

The masses have spoken, and this is what they say to capitalising this capital blog sa a result of the Willis Building - at least externally - being completed.

o = 0
n = 0
d = 1
o = 0
n = 0
k = 0
y = 5
l = 3
i = 4
n = 2
e = 0

So the Y it is.

To all those disappointed voters, here's what you could have won (and to all the winners congratulations on choosing, in my view, the most aesthetically pleasing variant, and to all those losers who voted "I" - for shame, for shame):

lonDon skyline
london skyLine
london skylIne
london skyliNe

Never mind though - Broadgate Tower looks to be nearly finished so there'll be plenty of opportunities for new capitals (and - I salivate! - the chance for me to make a branching diagram!!!)

One final thing which has surprised me, given that I haven't added to the blog for a month, is that I am now the number 1 google result for london skyline! There must be a lot of very disappointed web browsers coming here now. So, if you're one of them, please accept my heartfelt apologies.

Phew!

2007-11-30T21:11:00.000Z

Nuff said*.

*Unless you're visually impaired or using a screen reader, in which case I should probably add that I've just writtne 50,000 words in a month and they, very roughly speaking, amount to a novel of some description.

A novel idea

2007-11-08T21:56:00.001Z

Just a quick post to apologise in advance as there will be silence here for the rest of the month, for I am attempting to write a novel for national novel writing month.

Heres' a link to my novel page if you want to drop by to say hello or leave a few words of encouagement... actually - the nanowrimo site has no facility for doing that, so don't bother.

It's going quite well so far - 12,000 words, and a plot that's getting more and more fun to dream up - so hopefully will mean I persevere til the end of November... so, basically, goodbye for now.

London - a global city (2)

2007-10-30T19:24:00.000Z

I very rarely ask my readers to immediately click on an image when they visit my blog, but today is an exception. So click! (but do please come back in a second or two to finish reading).

As promised, it is the second highlight of the Global cities exhibition at the Tate Modern over the summer. Part of a larger work, (bits of which can be read here and also here), it's more of an pictorially annotated essay than fine art, but is a thought-provoking work all the same. The second link is particularly thought provoking, about how planned architecture is a thing of the past - the public sector is now less influential in developing cities, there are no grand ideological theories of architecture as there are no public purses to patronise them. 'Architects no longer write manifestos. At most they write portraits of particular cities... an absence of a utopian drive is perhaps almost as serious as an overdose of it.'

I have always had an admiration for the architects of the 50's, 60's and 70's, who built - often but not always - buildings which, by today's (and probably most eras' standards) look horrific. The reason they built those modernist buildings was because they were constructing a new utopia for all. There's an urban myth that the architect of Peckham actually hanged herself when she saw how it had turned out. I don't know whether or not it's true, but there was certainly a lot of passion that went into the new architecture.

Letters!

2007-10-24T17:28:00.000Z

I've just remembered my pledge to capitalise one letter of the header for every building that got completed.

The Willis Building is now complete, externally at least, so it's about time I capitalised on this (ho hum).

But which letter?

That's where YOU come in. Please vote below (I'm not letting you vote for the first letter of each word as that would detract from the statement).

Better safe than sorry

2007-10-22T22:30:00.000Z

Not so long ago I mentioned a safety sign at the Leadenhall Building site, which informed you about what you were and weren't allowed to do, and was critical of the fact it warns you about so many things that it all becomes a jumbled message and you're not sure what's dangerous and what's not by the time you get to the end.

I also came across a construction site proudly proclaiming their safety record of 757520 manhours without an accident.

Today I shall continue my review of safety signs.

This one is for a demolition site near Cannon Street Station, where they are demolishing fire station. It's a classic example of the "No smoking: Got that... Always wear a hard hat: Check!... Wear boots: Okey doke... High visibility jackets must be worn at all times: What was the first thing again?" style of safety sign.

One element, which may well be present on all safety signs is the phrase:

Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 all persons entering this site must comply with all regulations under this act.

Which raises 2 questions:

What is the "etc."? "...and egg!" ?
Can an act contain within it instructions that it must be obeyed? Surely not, else we'd have a strange loop of an act on our hands.

Quite a boring functional one, this. Only point of interest is the grammatical typo: "Warning sites are hazardous places."

Sorry, did I call that a point of interest? I'm getting slack.

Here is a link to something more interesting.

Here is a much better attempt at a useful sign, inspired by the first world war posters, I think.

It's a very clear design, enabling the casual labourer to systematically go over his body checking for compliance. Might I suggest that they put a full size mirror next to the sign as then it'd simply be a case of checking that the image on the left matches the one on the right.

Well done Skanska (more on them later).

London - a global city (1)

2007-10-22T13:20:00.000Z

Has anyone else seen the fantasy piccadilly line maps? I very rarely travel on the piccadilly line, but last weekend I did and saw the map, which has a futuristic vision of what London might be like.

It's not very good, but reminded me that I need to write about the exhibition Tate Modern had in the turbine hall this summer called Global cities (alas it's now been replaced by a crack - damn my tardiness!!!). I went to see it with my Auntie Eirlys, Cousin Miklos and his toddler daughter Alessandra, all three of them visiting from Canada.

I thought it was a great exhibition. As with a lot of exhibitions I couldn't help thinking that the exhibits could be split into two categories:

It's definitely art, but I don't think it's any good
It's brilliant, but I'm not altogether sure it's art

The exhibition was essentially about various cities around the world that seem to exemplify the changes of globalisation, ranging from the very poor (Delhi, Cairo), to the rapidly developing (Mexico City, Beijing), to the fully developed (London, Tokyo). It compared things such as standard of living, density of population, levels of immigration... very much the kind of exhibition you'd expect in a museum, not an art gallery.

The 'it's definitely art' bits of the exhibition I thought generally fell short of the Chindia exhibition I saw a few months ago. The more borderline 'not art things' fared better though. The highlight by a long way was the population density models. They looked like man-made termite mounds. In the photo, London is in the bottom right, Mexico city top left, and delhi and cairo the other two (not sure in which order). So, if you think London is densely populated, think again! Delhi and Cairo are about 10 times more packed. (More photos)

They are art, aren't they. I know they are essentially just graphs made out of plywood, but they also cause a sense of astonishment and wonderment, and impress the meaning behind the numbers upon you far more effectively than a conventional representation could.

I noted in an earlier post that the population of the City of London (i.e. the square mile) is tiny. This model really highlights that with a deep depression right in the centre of London.

I'll write about the other piece of art in another post as this is getting quite lengthy.

More considerate constructors

2007-10-21T16:44:00.000Z

Broadgate Tower is being built by considerate constructors, that much we know. But what of the other building sites in the city. Do they also display the telltale signs of being of considerate construct?

The answer is a resounding "YES!" on the whole. (Now, what with the use of " " to denote irony in popular culture, you're probably not sure if that was a sincere quoted yes, or a sarcastic yes, but one paying no heed to grammar. It was, I can assure you, a sincere quoted one.)
Here's a breakdown of considerate and inconsiderate constructors:

Considerate

Inconsiderate

Bishopsgate Tower
A site on Bevis Marks, near the Gherkin

The considerate constructors scheme is 20 years old this year according to one poster (*edit* it turns out that this is for the considerate contractor scheme - a different thing entirely). Curiously the scheme's website claims it's only 10 years old, which makes sense to me as if it was any older it would have been set up under a tory government, and I can't see the tories ever doing anything considerate. the website also has a useful guide to what being a considerate constructor entails; there is a 108 point checklist!

The Leadenhall building participates in the scheme, and here are a couple of examples of exemplary considerate practice.
Painting steps yellow so that people see they're not just a piece of fence.

Covering the temporary fence sealing off the building site with strips of metal where it brushes up against a coffee shop's outdoor seating area in order to give a calming, glittery effect. It's unlikely to completely convince diners that there isn't a huge demolition site on the other side, but nice try all the same.

Zoning out

2007-10-21T14:08:00.000Z

This is a picture of zone 2. The reason I made it is because I was going to write a post about one of my major bug bears, that the zone extends much further out to the affluent west than it does in the poor east (judging by the number of stations contained within the zone on the tube map).

However, drawing it out on an undistorted map shows that both zone 1 and zone 2 are fairly equitable with regard to how far out they extend to East and West from central london (central London being Oxford Circus). Took the wind right out of my sails. I was going to write a barnstorming polemic about the unreported discrimination against London's poor by the wealthy inhabitants of Hammersmith, Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea. I was going to write to Ken Livingstone, asking him to add restructuring the zones to his election manifesto.

But it turns out they're pretty much ok as they are.

Citizen's band

2007-10-19T23:05:00.002Z

*edit: If you're looking to download and mp3 of Citizen's Band by Super Furry Animals, it's now here: http://wheresrhys.co.uk/2009/03/citizens-band-by-sfa/

Not related at all to skyscrapers, this post, but I think someone should put it up somewhere on the web as I serached way too long and hard for an answer.

A while back I transferred all my CDs onto my PC, and this is how I now listen to music. However, there were always a few tracks (Citizen's Band by Super Furry Animals (hidden track off Guerrilla)) and even whole albums (Hail to the Thief by Radiohead, Lazer Guided Melodies by Spiritualized) which I could not rip using any standard music software.

A painstaking search of the internet last night (after realising I hadn't listened to citizen's band since disposing of my clapped out stereo nearly 3 years ago) found an answer to downloading pregap and protected tracks from CDs. In short:

Download and install Exact audio copy
When prompted, download and unzip the LAME.EXE encoder
Stick the CD in the drive
Either:
Go to Actions>Copy range and select the bit before 0s to record pregap tacks
or
Select all the protected tracks you want and click on mp3

To save anyone who's specifically looking for citizen's band (one of the very best super furries songs) the effort, here is a link to where I've uploaded it: ~~http://www.fileshost.com/en/file/10294/Citizen-s-band-mp3.html~~ (after typing in the numbers scroll to the bottom for the download link).

Shapes

2007-10-11T16:06:00.000Z

A very quick (and slightly late) post to highlight that this week and next the Guardian is giving away free poster booklets on great works of modern architecture.

A deliberate attempt to undermine Simon Jenkins' opposition to children's toy shape architecture?

I've been collecting them and so far the Guggenheim Bilbao is my fave. Mainly because it is mostly on one side of a flyover, but defiantly pops up a tower on the other side.

Why build a tower when you can build an arch

2007-10-08T16:52:00.000Z

I was watching Michael Palin's New Europe on Saturday and noticed that Bucharest in Romania, as well as having the world's heaviest building, has a Marble arch type structure. Which got me thinking... Paris... London... Bucharest - these arches are everywhere!

Pyongyang - Arch of Triumph
Originally uploaded by p!ng.

After a bit of research, it turns out they really are. Wikipedia lists probably over 100 examples. The tradition began in ancient Rome to commemorate success in battle. The tradition was then resurrected - like so many other Roman traditions - during the renaissance. The largest in the world is in Pyongyang. Perhaps surprising they've saught to emulate such a western tradition, but they give the design an interesting Oriental flavour.

I wonder if any arches were ever built pre-emptively, so as to give the soldiers the opprtunity to march through it on their way back into the capital (that surely is the motivation - in thought if not in deed - behind building a symbolic or ceremonial march). Do soldiers who won the war the arch commemorates make a point of visiting it once in their lives to march through it with honour?

London has two such arches. Marble arch, obviously (which is also where the A5 - heading all the way up to North Wales - begins as Edgeware road), but also the Wellington Arch in Hyde Park. No others anywhere else in the UK.

To change the subject, i was going to blog about the recent Barclaycard/Oyster adverts, which feature reinventions of the London skyline, but Londonist beat me to it. The Battersea power station one in particular is pretty clever.

Size is everything to a mayor consumed by edifice complex - a riposte (part 1)

2007-10-05T14:05:00.000Z

Yesterday's ramble was a preamble to writing about the Guardian article by Simon Jenkins from the other week. Matt texted me asking what my take was, and I replied saying I didn't have one yet, but by golly I would!

So below it is

Originally uploaded by zakgollop.

But before I begin, did anyone see the absolutely spectacular sunset over the city last night? Clouds looking like black snakes against a red sky. Awesome. (God Bless Flickr for providing a photo).

Size is everything to a mayor consumed by edifice complex

The title is what prompted yesterday's tirade. 'Edifice complex' is code for building phallic symbols, isn't it? If not, then maybe my interpretation says more about me than I would like.

Londoners worldwide have no idea what is about to hit them. They have not been shown. They have not been told. Today they may stand on Waterloo bridge, look east and see a city that has been familiar to them all their lives. Tomorrow they will see something completely different, thanks to their mayor, Ken Livingstone.

I doubt Londoners worldwide will today be standing on Waterloo bridge as they are most probably busying themselves with being worldwide, but even if they were, the city they see won't have been familiar to them all their lives. A lot of the skyline dates from post war years, and a lot of this is unenviable: Guy's hospital, the London stock exchange (before it's almost complete facelift) to name but two.

By the way, that 'have no idea what is about to hit them' is a key line from my favourite TV programme of all time: Shooting the Past. Watch it!

On my estimate 20 towers each more than 300ft high are planned, or proposed, to rise within half a mile of the Thames in inner London, with another 20 situated at random further back. Towers will be visible from every open space and down every street. The horizontal skyline of the capital will be transformed into a series of point blocks set in piazzas, shrinking the scale of what has always been essentially a street-based, intimate urban landscape.

Towers already are visible from every open space! It's just that most of today's towers are ugly. Seeing a taller glass spire rising beyond the nearby the concrete monoliths is something, as you know, I look forward to. JOIN ME!

London intimate?! Yeah - not like the brash metropolises of the Cotswolds and the Quantocks. Let's keep London nice and quaint, the way it's always been. Our slogan: "London for the Hugh Grant's and American tourists." Does he consider St Paul's, the Tate Modern, London Eye, The Houses of Parliament to be intimate? Yes having a few intimate areas is possible in cities, but the skyline is not the place to look for intimacy!

The horizontal skyline transformation scaremongering is also molehill mountaineering. Look at most cities with skyscrapers (I haven't been to many - Boston, Toronto, Melbourne, but I can't imagine others are too different) and the skyscrapers are limited to small areas. Boston, for instance, has acres of low-rise buildings and this is the general impression you get of the city, but it is invigorating to occasionally stumble upon a taller building.

Oh, and a flat city with only low-rise buildings can't really be said to have a skyline, can it. It has a gently receding horizon, which you may want out in the country, but in the middle of a big city it isn't necessarily the landscape you would want. Sure, many cities, like Istanbul, are low-rise and proud, but they didn't have a great deal of their traditional architecture destroyed over the past 60 years. And they are hilly too. Low-rise buildings on

Giants Causeway HDR
Originally uploaded by DaveyD-UK.

rolling hills are reminiscent of the Giant's Causeway, but on the flat it's a little dull. The overall impression being of an extended warehouse.

Downstream of Waterloo bridge the view will be dominated by a 43-storey tower of flats opposite the Temple, approved over the summer, immediately behind the National Theatre on the South Bank. Dwarfing even the 440ft wheel of the London Eye, this building will thrust itself into every London vista from the Embankment and the Thames bridges to Trafalgar Square and St James's Park. I have yet to meet anyone aware of its coming. It is of no published architectural quality and serves no public or ceremonial purpose. It is just a block of flats.

I'll have to look into this. I think someone left a comment the other day about it. It's called '123 Bankside' I think.

Beyond it will rise a visual wall of glass skyscrapers along the river's south bank, two at Blackfriars, another behind Tate Modern, a higher King's Reach tower at London Bridge and at Bermondsey the 1,000ft "glass shard", taller even than the highest structure at Canary Wharf. Behind this wall on the curve of the river will be the new City of London. The box-like blocks of the 1980s will be overwhelmed by a forest of "shape architecture", parodies of Norman Foster's Gherkin by designers eager to impress the ever pliable City planners.

The Serpentine Pavilion
Originally uploaded by *-*-*-*-*-*.

"Parodies of Norman Foster's Gherkin" is a terrible dismissal of buildings which seek to go beyond the standard 4-walls + roof model. Is the serpentine gallery pavilion a parody of the Gherkin. Is the... damn! - out of examples! But anyway, I look forward to the days of the box-like 80's blocks being overwhelmed.

Actually, that's not quite true - you do need a balance. The Toronto skyline, with one 'shape architecture' tower (CN Tower) and lots of block towers forms a good view. Too many wacky shapes is probably a bad thing but, apart from the Walkie Talkie (which I hate) and the Helter-Skelter, there really isn't too much wackiness around. It's mostly straight lines, a lot of glass and a healthy reluctance to settle for a completely straight-laced 4-wall tower.

There will be the 1,000ft "Helter-skelter", the "Cheesegrater", the "Pinnacle" and the "Walkie-Talkie" [*edit* showing his lack of proper research here - the Pinnacle and the Helter Skelter are actually one and the same - Bishopsgate Tower]. These children's toy pastiches will be accompanied by banal Mies van der Rohe copies such as the Heron Tower. There has been no public debate or consultation on any of this. There is no vision or declared ideal of how new and old should marry in the future city. It will just happen because no authority has the guts to set individual developments in any wider context.

I agree in a way with his no public consultation statement; there was a public inquiry into the Walkie Talkie but, though I tried and tried and tried, I found no way for an actual member of the public to contribute views.

There is, however, a vision and a wider context for the individual developments. I think it's called the London plan. You can quibble about whether it really does put forward a vision (It's general gist is build in the city and at train stations, and don't impinge too much on historic areas), but do we really want a vision? We're talking aesthetics here. You can't really legislate an aesthetic vision. All you can go for are a few do's and dont's, and then hope try and be sensible and avoid instances of flagrant disregard for the landscape, surroundings and populace. And what else would the vision be if not some kind of legislative planning structure: a bland platitudinous tract about cohesiveness and respect and our ancestors' graves and so on. A PR consultancy's dream assignment. And of no use whatsoever.

I shall resume the discussion later.

Erecting buildings

2007-10-02T16:53:00.000Z

Joseph Conrad wrote lots of books about people on boats. You could say it was his thing. One of these books happens to be set in Africa, and in particular on the River Congo. This book is called Heart of darkness. Travelling up the river is, as far as I can see, a good way for Conrad to get to grips with a story set in the dense jungles of central Africa, while simultaneously sticking to what he knows best; things with keels.

Nevertheless, when I once tried out a lecture exchange with a friend of mine at uni (I went to one of her English lectures and she'd go to a maths one (she still owes me 1 maths lecture)) on the subject of Heart of Darkness, one of the girls attending the lecture felt the need to speculate that the river was actually a big phallic symbol and therefore represented the white man, quite literally, fucking Africa. The lecturer thought this was an interesting viewpoint and worth persuing.

Then a bunch of people burst through the door and proved them wrong using nothing but an axe, a chainsaw and several hockey masks.*

Phallic symbolism is rife in the arts, of course. And in architecture, it seems. Would you just look at the Gherkin! And all the other tall buildings springing up left, right and centre. Why on earth do all these men feel the need to plant huge manly cocks all over the shop?

But isn't all this, like the wayward interpretation of the river in Heart of Darkness, over-analyzing? Real estate in the City is expensive so building reasonably tall makes sense. Building very tall is attention seeking, but building an impressive and prestigious office is just about impressing clients of the company involved and showing off the company's wealth; nothing to do with the penises of the people who comission the building. What personal kudos do they get anyway. No one ever hears about them. Just the company name and the architect.

So maybe it's the architects that give the phallic-theory of towers its justification. Why do architects rush to compete for these contracts and drool at the prospect of being the winner?

Because they are some of the biggest, most visible building projects in the world, and serve to make the architect a lot of money and, possibly, a little fame. These very same architects also build stadiums, bridges and other less phallic buildings too, y'know, and make them as eyecatching as they can. The only reason they seem obsessed with building tall is that these are often the most controversial buildings, and the ones they are forced to strenuously defend.

Oh, and they have teeny tiny cocks.

*May have been a dream.

PS - I wrote this last night and it seemed coherent at the time. Oh well.

Beneath the skyline: Part 1

2007-10-01T12:41:00.000Z

When I go around the city looking at skyscrapers other things will inevitably catch my eye. Accordingly, I take a photo, thinking, "that'll make a nice addition to the blog too," but all too often I just don't have time to write about them. Thus, I have amassed a collection of images of varying interest, which I always intended to share, but never got around to doing so.

Well, all that's going to change now, with this occasional series "Beneath the skyline".

Today's subject: A splash of paint.

But no ordinary splash of paint. It looks uncannily like an anime man firing a bazooka through an oversize scary clown mask. Or something like that. In case you can't see it (which I find very hard to believe), here is an annotated version.

Should you wish to see it with your own eyes, it's located here.

By the way, here's a newsflash (as yet unsupported by photographic evidence. BBC style, I invite you all to go out with your mobile phoney-cams and submit YOUR NEWS). At least some of the inside of the Broadgate Tower looks like being painted salmon pink judging by the view from the top of a double decker.

My beautiful galleria

2007-09-27T16:57:00.000Z

Gorilla, galleria, lager, regal, logger...

Those are about the only words I can think of with those 3 consonant sounds and no others (garullous has an s, and grilled has a gr not a g and an r).

I doubt that was a criteria when the architects of the Broadgate Tower were thinking what to put between the tower and 201 Bishopsgate. A gorilla would've been nice, and exotic rather than continental. Lager would have been downright irresponsible in these days of bingeing, and probably structurally unsound (unlike the gorilla - no one could claim a gorilla is structurally unsound!).

It's very clever what they've done. The railway running underneath the site means no weight can go straight down through the middle, hence the steel girder buttresses propping up the tower from the side. But these girders by themselves do look rather stark and industrial, and it's quite obvious that what they're doing is holding up the tower.

But just look at the effect now. Looks like a prism, a short section of DNA, or a half completed spirograph drawing. The top level of beams aren't structural at all - they are in fact held up by steel cables - but it's important they're there in order to convince the walk through galleria goer that they're inside a great big sculpture. Maybe they'll wonder since when Antony Gormley or Thomas Heatherwick have built skyscrapers.

You can see the tiered rear of 201 Bishopsgate in the photo too. Or would it be better termed an overhang. Either way I like the way it looks in general, but I wonder, looking at this particular photo, whether it'll defeat the object of having a big airy covered space in the gap between the buildings by crowding the space a little.`

As a final aside, the other day I was riding the top deck of a bus home. Looking out of the window I saw an elderly asian shopkeeper and what looked like several generations of his family gathered outside the shop. There was a very cheerful atmosphere. The kids were doing that thing where they look slightly upwards and swing their heads from side to side, grinning, to check if the adults are enjoying themselves as much as they are.

The reason for all this glee?

They were putting up a sticky banner in the window which proudly proclaimed they were now an "Oyster ticket stop."

And if that doesn't deserve a photo of a patch of blue sky, I don't know what does.

The Devil is in the details

2007-09-24T11:54:00.002Z

A wise man (David Gest) once said 'When you come to know somebody as well as I know Michael, years can pass without seeing each other, and yet we still recognise each other like old pals when we meet again. It's like the time never passed!'

He was lying when he said that as both he and Mr. Jackson are plastic freaks who never look the same from one week to the next. For most people, however, it would be a true statement; the little changes brought on by the ravages of time don't wear away your familiarity with someone. That's exactly how I feel about the Broadgate Tower.

When I look at it I see some things that are familiar:

The things still don't extend to the ground for some reason. By 'things' I mean the grooved cladding put around the main supporting beams. On 201 bishopsgate the glazing is in place behind them, so I think when they finally extend to the gound they will be kept in the open air, as decorative modern pillars. Talking of pillars, I only realised recently that the reason the Greeks are so pissed off about the elgin marbles is that they were taken from the Acropolis. Bloody cheek we had! Give 'em back, I say.
For some reason the builders have still neglected to peel away the backing plastic from the lower reaches of the fire escape. They've also missed a bit higher up. It'll be a devil to reach that now. they'll have to hire a trapeze. Or Spiderman, but unless the Green Goblin's really getting on his tits he doesn't take kindly to being distracted by requests to do such menial work.

But also a lot that is new:

Bits of wood boarding up spaces where there should be panes of glass. Down the road from where I used to live they built this hideous 3-storey block of flats. On the ground floor the windows were floor to ceiling. Now - what Hackney teenager can resist hurling a brick through such an inviting target? Idiotic design decision.
The 10th floor of a building you'd think woud be safe though wouldn't you, but even windows all the way up there get broken. Or maybe it's just not glazed for access reasons.

The galleria is taking shape at last... but that's for another time

Baptism or How to make up names and influence people

2007-09-24T11:54:00.001Z

It's really quite amazing how short the tower looks from the street. It only just peeks out from behind 210 Bishopsgate, despite being more than twice the height. The word tower doesn't seem appropriate when seen from this angle. 'Slab' would be a better word.

But then again, the other night I was at the Light Bar with Paul and his friend Marie from New York, and from that angle it looked very thin; she said it herself: "What's that thin building?"

This whole fat/thin dichotomy makes me think the nickname "Razor" is appropriate. the shape is particularly emphasised in the promotional poster.

The question is, though, how do I propagate this nickname? I missed a trick by not spreading it to New York via Marie, but there you go. My ideas so far are to:

Phone Jonny Vaughan's breakfast show every day, using a number of aliasses (Chris the orthodontist from Harrow, Beverley the Chauffeur from Peckham Rye, Denis the Balloonist from Thamesmead), and wedging in a mention of the tower by its nickname.
Jonny: So, Charlotte [the amateur cricketer from Enfield], what d'you think of Boris? Has he got what it takes to be mayor, or is he just a bit of a joke?
Charlotte [aka me on helium]: Well, Jonny, I was walking past The Razor the other day, down by Liverpool Street station, and I have to say I think he's a bit of a joke.
Starting a hate campaign against all things with Broadgate in their name, therefore forcing a reappraisal of the tower's name by British Land.
Printing some posters and sticking them on the hoarding.
Recording a novelty rap/children's song, in the style of The Budgie Man ("I'm the Budgie Man, I'm the Budg-, Budg-, Budg-ie Man"), who can often be seen outside the Tate Modern.
Paying various minor clebrities, such as Prince, to use the name as part of their clothing range.

Please put any ideas you have in the comments. (Even though my ideas are silly, I am sort of being serious about getting the name to catch on).

PS - I know this completely ignores the results of the nickname competition I held a few months ago, but what can I say - I'm an arrogant ignoramus. (Maybe I should join the American presidential race).

Return of the prodigal son

2007-09-24T11:53:00.000Z

Every time I've gone past the Broadgate Tower over the past few months I've felt very strong feelings. I went to see a therapist about it and she told me my feelings of guilt at having abandoned it at such a tender stage were eating away at me, and would probably eventually result in a horrendous crime on my part. Such as a string of unexplained shopliftings.

Horrified by the prospect of the good proprietors of East London being terrorised and out of pocket, I made it a priority to visit the tower just as soon as I got my arse into gear.

I have now fulfilled my pledge. I think I'll get a few posts out of the visit. First, a general overview.

As you can tell from the photo the tower is considerable more glazed than it used to be. Less obvious in a daytime photo (I'll have to take a night time one soon), is that once they glaze a floor they also put in lights and, maybe, partitions within the floors. The top two-or-so unglazed floors shine one very bright light out at night, but the lower floors twinkle with lots of smaller lights.

Speaking of the glazing, it really does emphasise the difference in the pattern of struts between the sides of 201 Bishopsgate and The Broadgate Tower. The Tower's Diamonds look a lot more balanced than the 2 vertical zigzags of 201 Bishopsgate. Why they chose to include them at all is a mystery as they don't make an apperance anywhere else on the building - clean vertical lines dominate elsewhere. Re-looking at the photo now, I think just verticals would look like a harsh 80's tower block - something to avoid - but the zigzags don't work either. Perhaps extending the tiered/faceted look of the rear around to the side would have worked better. But what's done is done.

On the back of the tower, however, the broken diamonds look works quite well. Quite cleverly done, really.

Back in the saddle

2007-09-24T08:55:00.000Z

Well, today (Sunday) has seen my first skyscraper seeking jaunt for a while. As I don't have internet at home at present (I'll be uploading this to the blog at work on Monday) I can't double check when exactly the last one was, but I think it was roughly at the end of May.

Since then a lot has changed:

The Willis Building has been finished, more or less. I took one last photo of the uncompleted spine of the building in May/June, and that's now been glazed over. But the hoarding is still up and the artist's impressions of people milling around the entrances in the sunlight look like being a distant dream. Also an improbable one; my photographing of the building has been an ongoing challenge as it's pretty much permanently in the shade.
There are several new buildings shooting up, or having builings knocked down to make way for them, including:
- One behind the Broadgate centre
- One by the old stock exchange (which itself is almost completely reclad in glass)
- Demolition of the building where the Bishopsgate tower will go
- Ditto for the Heron Tower
- Reglazing and extending upwards of a building by St Botolph's without Bishopsgate Church. (Karen tells me that St. Botolph is patron saint of travellers, hence his presence near each of the old gates to the City)
There is now a tower crane where the Shard of Glass is to be built.
Monument and The Royal Exchange are both surrounded by scaffolding for cleaning.

And finally, skyscraper chasing is a tiring old business, so I bought some cakes for sustenance. The cakes I opted for were Tesco's finest carrot cakes with a cream cheese icing (very nice indeed). It has become something of a cliche in this day and age to mock serving suggestion pictures on packaging for being obvious (eg. the words 'serving suggestion' emblazoned across a picture of jelly in a bowl on the packaging for some jelly), but the carrot cake packaging has truly excelled itself.

It gets the obviousness down to a tee - put the cakes on something - but then, looking at the picture more carefully, it appears to suggest that you take a bite out of the cake then spit it back out on the plate before offering the cakes up for serving.

I am of the fairly strong opinion that this is a crap serving suggestion.

PS - thanks for the welcome back messages.

My second youth

2007-09-17T16:17:00.000Z

Ok - you win.

Complete strangers have used the words 'wicked' and 'mate' in the same sentence when commenting on the blog. I think it's about time I came out of retirement.

So much has happened since I last wrote. So much so that I can't even hope to write it all up, so, for the sake of brevity, I'll unfortunately have to leave out the bit about my amazing adventures in space. Here is a recap (in rough order of importance) of some of the other significant things I made a note to write about:

I have a new bike which, thus far, has not been stolen.
The Walkie Talkie has been given planning permission. The Times headline is "St Paul’s, meet Darth Vader cathedral", which I quite like. Ruth Kelly didn't actually get around to makinga deceision and it was left to her successor (Oh yeah - we have a new government since I last wrote!) Hazel Blears to give a couple of weeks' deliberation to the months of case files before giving the stamp of approval. Is there a stamp, I wonder? Or is it all digitised these days?
(such and such a number) Bishopsgate street has been cloaked in scaffold and demolition rags. Don't think the actual; knocking down has begun yet, although it's possible they've started gutting the interior. That's always a possibility.
I have moved house. Back to Bow, my original London haunt, but in a nicer bit next to the park and canal.
Broadgate Tower is now nearly fully glazed, though I don't have a photo to prove it as yet (but cycle past there daily, so who knows what could happen!)
I missed yet another chance to go inside the Gherkin.

That's all for now. My blogging stamina is waning.

Unlike my cycling stamina. I rode all the way to Enfield yesterday, where the canal smells of dog biscuits.

*edit* Blogger thinks I've turned German:

Blog anzeigen (in einem neuen Fenster)

That's what happens; you go away for a while and it's like your friends don't even know who you are any more.

A castle under siege

2007-06-20T21:02:00.000Z

English Heritage love the Tower of London.

And it's not surprising, what with it being such a pivotal place for the heritage of England, and they sure love that English heritage.

Not to mention a clear line of sight to the walls which contain that English heritage for miles around. They love the notion of that too. But they can't have it, as the building is already surrounded by blots, blights and carbuncles.

Eugh! This is undoubtedly the worst offender. It was voted London's second most hated building during architecture week 2006 (a very representative 512 people - approx 0.0064% of the London population - cast votes).

Is Prince Charles right to condemn the 60's and 70's as the worst architectural period? Probably, as very many concrete buildings built in those times are already being knocked down. 30 years is a very short life span, which indicates that something was critically wrong with them. And it's certainly not the building materials. Concrete - as the concrete society (nearly as absurd an organisation as the Egg Information Service ("Hello - I'd like to know about eggs please" "Well you've certainly come to the right place.")) would no doubt back up - revolutionised construction when discovered by the Romans due to its strength.

These two are also... well, not too bad to be honest.

But they shouldn't be there. No, no, no, no, no! Get in the way of the heritage you see. Just look at that Indian fella there; looks proper distressed he does. Some people would say he's a bit alarmed at being the apparent subject of a photo taken by a complete stranger, but I think it's unlikely. No - heritage it is. Can't concentrate on it, what with a living city going on around him.

Hang on - wasn't this supposed to be about eyesores around the Tower? Isn't that Tower Bridge, icon of the City of London, probably far more recognisable, elegant and beautiful than the Tower ever has, is or will be?

Ah yes - but it is of modern construct - Victorian era - so is a bit of an impostor. And would you just lok at the garish blue, and the quite frankly silly idealised faux-medieval turrets. It's worse than garish I tell you. Has no place next to that great bastion of British history - the Tower of London.

But... but... but... it looks nice

That's no matter - it has to go. How are people supposed to appreciate the heritage with that frilly monstrosity next door? It'll put them right off their Tudors!

(*Plays trump card*)Well - I'm English Heritage, so I'm right about everything to do with architecture even though heritage and architecture are by no means synonymous... and I say it can stay... so there!

How the Willis was

2007-06-19T21:21:00.000Z

Not that it matters any more as I'm out of touch with the whole London skyscraper 'scene', but here are a few several week old photos of the last remaining incomplete parts of the Willis Building exterior.

Cunningly located at the rear (which looks rather like a 500ml beer can) is the external service lift. I may already be too late to take photos of it being dismantled, but I imagine it would have to be dismantled from the top down, which will mean that glass is added to the building from the top down. In conclusion, it seems likely that the last floor to be completed will be the ground floor. How topsy-turvy!

Here's another topsy-turvy feature. I can't work out if either a) the facade isn't quite finished, and there is still a pane of glass to be added once the need for a drainage pipe no longer exists; or b) it's a permanent feature, and the architects have developed a clever method of expelling air from the Lloyds Building's ventilation ducts via its reflection in the Willis Building. They both seem pretty likely to me.

The internet is bad!

2007-06-18T21:37:00.000Z

And I'm back in the game!

Sorry for the lengthy hiatus. It can be explained in both the following ways, but you must use your nous to judge which one is the truth.

I was captured and interrogated by Sir Norman Foster vis a vis my unrelenting quest to get to the truth;
Adam moved out, taking his wireless router with him. Following this Becky (short haired girl...hails from Torquay...lives in Clapham...hangs around London Fields...cons unsuspecting French youths out of £300...if you know her, know that her name is now mud) didn't move in and my evenings have been one long replacement finding hassle, interspersed with escapes to the pub to avoid the dreaded housemate interviews which don't even affect me as I'm moving out soon anyway.

Without giving too much away, I can reveal that not having the internet for a little while has opened my eyes to how much I have been overusing it since a) getting wireless; and b) transferring all my music to my laptop so it's on quite a lot of the time. I used to read before bed. Often bulky, absorbing, tomes that were too weighty (in both senses) to read on the tube. More recently I have taken to watching the daily show and Jeeves and Wooster online... neither of which are that good.

So I have generally been trying to stay clear of the internet.

But now I'm back (but you'll be glad to hear I'm nearing the end of Catch-22 and am spoilt for choice for what to read next).

Here are a couple of photos I took yesterday whilst wandering around Broadgate Tower and waiting for Emily to arrive so we could watch Half Nelson at Rich Mix and marvel at their mix and match animal wallpaper (probably the first wallpaper I've ever noticed since running my fingers up and down Nain's rough 'n' drab when I was little (and also ignoring the wallpaper on an external wall I noticed on Saturday whilst playing pool at the Elbow Rooms)).

The happiness guaranteed poster has accidentally been put up using non-transparent paste and that's why it looks like it's covered in semen. At least, I presume that's why it is. It does, now I think of it, compell the passer-by to 'love us'.

By the way if, like me, you use picassa on your PC but flickr online, you'll like this little utility.

Hanging around at the demolition site

2007-05-30T21:04:00.000Z

'Y'see that there?'
'That there what?'
'That. There!'
'Oh - that.'
'Yes - that.'
'What about it?'
'Well - what is it?'
'Looks like a spot of clear sky to me.'
'But... but... but how did it get in there... below the building?'
'Well, if I didn't know any better I'd say what's happened there is that three floors have been demolished down to the podium level and the concrete and steel removed from the site. And - if I was to push the boat out a bit - I'd also guess that the external scaffold has also been progressively dismantled and has exposed to view the existing lift and stair core.'
'And do you know any better?'
'No'
'In that case, that would explain it.'
'Yes it would. But the trouble with the present state of affairs, of course, is that it leaves the transfer slab at the top of the building from which the remaining floors are hung. If you ask me, them folk who'll be demolishing the remainder of this building to make way for the Leadenhall Building, aka The Cheesegrater, will have to come up with a design for the temporary deck that will support and aid the demolition of the upper hanging floors post haste!'
'Ah, I see.'
'Oh, look - here's a newsletter. Let's see if it can either confirm or deny my theory, shall we?'
'Print's a bit small - can't really make it out.'
'Oh - how I wish it were an image in a blog following progress on the London skyline. Then we could probably just click on it to see a bigger version.'
'Oh - you and your zany schemes. You play too many video games.'

Property bulls and property bears

2007-05-30T19:47:00.001Z

My local chippie has acquired a large teddy bear that sits upon Alex's moped. But that's not what I mean by a property bear.

Jenny and me at work once had a pub quiz fuelled discussion about how you can remember, in financial market lingo, which is the bull and which is the bear. In the end we didn't answer the question (it was the wipeout round!), but a bull is bullish - i.e. confident - and a bear is the other thing.

Armed with that knowledge I now feel ready to tackle a detailed analysis of the property market as it now stands in the City of London (with the aid of a couple of articles).

On 22nd May British Land took the actual decision to go ahead with building the Leadenhall Building, which is a bit of a surprise as I thought it had already been taken; the building it will be replacing is already pretty messed up! But the decision to build was not taken lightly, and the reason it's newsworthy is that - like the Broadgate Tower - it will be built before a tenant has been found, and this at a 'challenging time for the British commercial property market as price inflation tails off and landlords have to work on rental growth to achieve better overall returns.'

'The Leadenhall Building will not be ready until the first quarter of 2011, by which time many property agents fear that rents could start to fall because of oversupply, especially if the list of skyscrapers with planning permission progresses to construction.'

Quite!

This is money (financial website of the year!) has a more gloomy take, opening with the headline The roof falls in on property. It talks a lot about bonds and equities (but god knows what fictional spies and neckwear for horses have to do with property?), which I shall ignore, highlighting instead their glorious use of a graph.

But on a more sensible note, their headline is prompted by Francis Salway, the chief executive of Land Securities, who want to build the Walkie Talkie: 'Mr Salway has said that he may not start construction without a prelet in place.'

So - are you listening English Heritage? - a surefire way to prevent construction of the Walkie Talkie is to support the construction of other, more elegant skyscrapers. In the increasingly competitive property market these will draw potential tenants away from Land Securities, the Walkie Talkie won't get its pre-let, and won't get built.

If you hate skyscrapers as much as English Heritage then this will be a difficult route to stomach, but needs must when Rafael Vinoly drives.

Sky high tower

2007-05-30T19:26:00.000Z

Just a very quick - alas, imageless - post to announce that the pinacle of the 'third diamond' of Broadgate Tower has recently appeared. Which means that, aside from maybe a lift shaft head or something, the Tower is as tall as it's gonna get.

Waiting for Willis

2007-05-30T18:37:00.000Z

If you have good eyesight you'll see that either side of the door is a plaque saying 'Willis'. The building which houses the door is none other than 10 Trinity Square, the former Port of London Authority building, and, for the time being it is home to Willis' UK and Ireland operation. Interestingly, on the Willis website (Willis are insurers, by the way) the address is spelt Ten Trinity Square, as opposed to using numerals. Does this mean the building at 10 Trinity Square has been named Ten Trinity Square. I suppose you could take any address and name the building at that address by its address. You could, in such a way, start an infinite regress in which the name of the building is the whole address which includes the name of the building which is the whole address ...

But I can't see why you'd want to do a silly thing like that.

As we all know by now, Willis won't be at Trinity Square (Ten, 10 or otherwise) for very much longer. The last photos I posted showed significant progress, and the facade was, as far as the eye can see, complete. Here's a photo to remind us of that.

There will however be one hell of a cleaning job before the building is deemed presentable. The amount of dust that builds up is made perfectly clear by the clarity of the recently added windows (where the lift track used to be) as compared to the opacity of the more established glazing. I wonder if the builders will clean it, or if the first act of any property developer once a building is completed is to hire some window cleaners. Quite a specialised profession I imagine.

Keywords of the week

2007-05-29T19:28:00.000Z

~~where in the south bank is the flat by the thames in woody allen´s match point~~

Dunno. Sorry.

There were also 14 references to ~~egg shaped buildings~~, so there is clearly widespread dissatisfaction with the moniker Gherkin.

The others I think are best left as a surreal list which sums up why people like you come here.

~~post barnsley y picture a city alsop~~
~~gherkin is a dog~~
~~y fronts~~
~~mps against tall buildings in yorkshire~~
~~shard shouldn't~~
~~radio sketch re faulty rolls royce in australia~~
~~is a cuttysark a bike~~

Egos "a threat to skylines"

2007-05-28T12:45:00.000Z

Using Google News I recently subscribed to be sent updates about articles containing Walkie Talkie London so that I might be the third to know the outcome of the planning inquiry for 20 Fenchurch Street. No news yet, but what is interesting is that 'Walkie Talkie' has become a byword for all argument about London architecture, in much the same way that Bin Laden is a byword for bearded terrorists, and Brian Blessed performs the same function for all other bearded people.

A particularly vituperative and entertaining read picked out of the inter-ether by its mentioning Walkie Talkie is this Guardian interview with new English Heritage Chief Simon Thurley, evocatively titled 'Egos "a threat to skylines"'. It's very short, so I recommend reading it in full, but here are a few choice nibbles.

'We have been treading a very difficult path over the past five years, trying to balance the absolute necessity to protect and preserve and conserve with...

... with the need to have a living city which provides employment for its citizens?

... with the absolute necessity to convince people that that activity is not holding the country back in some way,' he says.

Oh. So, you're more talking about the internal distribution of funds between activism and PR. What a broad perspective this new guy at English Heritage has.

'It is an expression of a small number of individuals' extraordinary ambition and desire to create a monument to themselves,' he argues,

I think not. The architects in question are generally chosen by the developers who commission the buildings as they are already world renowned, with plenty of other 'monuments to themselves' dotted around the globe. It's far more to do with London firms, and increasingly government, wanting the city to appear modern and world-class. A nebulous aim if ever there was one, but reducing it to individual egos is hardly the right outlook.

he does go on to admit that these forces were also at work when Salisbury Cathedral or St Pancras station went up. The situation in the 21st century is more hazardous though, he believes.

He is indeed a skilled rhetorician, using the immensely sophisticated 'but that was different' argument.

Do we want London to be defined by a massive residential tower belonging to a foreign national who has bought it as an investment? Is that how we want London to be defined? My answer to that is no.'

a) Lots of people live in London. Why shouldn't its most significant building be residential? Buckingham Palace is residential. Should we put a big police banner across it saying 'Move along. Nothing to see here'. OK, so Buckingham palace is inhabited by important people, but why limit grand residential buildings to just them?
b) Mmm. Foreign nationals are pretty bad aren't they, and should have no involvement in the construction of city landmarks. Take Monsieur Eiffel for instance - completely ruined the New York skyline with that big statue. And good architecture is often the result of cross-polination of differenrt architectural heritages. St Paul's - with it's strong Italian look -is a classic example.
c) Wake up Mr. Thurley, and stop being so naive. Most buildings are bought as investments, and this is no criteria for judging the worthiness of constructing them.
d) No single building - no matter how big - can define a city. As head of English Heritage he really should have more confidence in the iconic status of many of the capital's existing buildings.

Thurley hopes the work of English Heritage can 'finally slay the dragon of the so-called 'dead hand' of conservation. Conservation is not a dead hand. It is a living hand. It is not about the past, it is about the future,' he said.

And you, sir, are a buffoon!

Cutty Sark: After the film crews left

2007-05-26T22:22:00.000Z

It's fair to say that your average news story has a life cycle very much shorter than your average water vole. It may not be particularly illuminating, but it is certainly fair.

It was with this sad fact in mind that I went there today with Matt, Giles and Tessa (who learned to fly like Peter Pan) to survey the damage, take stock of the lasting repercussions, and meet some of the real people affected by this tragedy.

As you can see from the photo to the left, the boat - or what remains of it - is on sale for the measly sum of £2; a fraction of its previous value. I tried to find out if this price included the hoarding or not, but no members of the restoration committee were available for comment. I understand they are in discussion with the ship restorers' union - SHIPSHAPE - after the industry objected to the rather blunt manner in which rope-coilers, plank categorisers, and gimlet polishers were informed of their redundancy. Particularly stinging was the restoration committee's reneging on its promise to pay employees their bonuses in hard hats and safety boots. SHIPSHAPE spokesmen claim their employers have squandered much of their pay-packets on specially commissioned abstract art, an example of which can be seen below.

Rhysickle, reporting from a community torn apart by self-doubt... and fire.

Port of London Authority

2007-05-24T19:17:00.000Z

Grand ol' building in't it.

It's the old Port of London Authority Building, a reminder of the days when the Port of London was the source of much of the city's wealth, and the regulator merited a building of such pomp.

The building was only built in 1915 though, when the Port was only 50 years from its decline (apparently 1967 was the year when supply of dock space started to outstrip demand). Technically, the Port of London includes the whole of the River thames, and there are ports along the river closer to the sea, which means that officially the Port of London is one of the 3 busiest in the country. But you can no longer walk across the Thames, hopping from deck to deck, in the Pool of London.

The Authority is now housed in a waterfront building in Gravesend. When the authority was established in 1909 it was 'obliged to provide quays, wharfs and warehouses.' Now its duties are 'ensuring navigational safety along the Tidal Thames, promoting use of the River and safeguarding the environment.'

Quite a rousing tale!

Or not, as is more the case. But an impressive building all the same. The interior's not too bad either. And before the post war reconstruction if the City, the PLA building must have been one of the tallest buildings around, as you can sort of work out from this photo (PLA building is just visible on the right).

Man alive - what an utterly dull post this has been!

ULTRA BOOM

2007-05-23T10:00:00.000Z

At first glance it looks like the architects underestimated the weight of the Broadgate Tower and have had to enlist the help of a JLG ULTRA BOOM to take the strain. But that's not what it's really there for.

'JLG Industries, Inc. is the world's leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of access equipment', and the ULTRA BOOM is merely a telescopic boom lift, which I think is business speak for cherry picker (I didn't know what a cherry-picker was (unless you count Jordan) until watching that Simpsons episode). I thin kJLG give the best description of what the boom is for though:

When you're reaching for the sky, reach for JLG's Ultra Series Telescopic Boom Lifts, and the powerful performance geared towards operator convenience.

The main reason I'm bothering to write a bout the ULTRA BOOM is the name, which has whispers of Cillit BANG! about it. 'Fed up of being stuck on the ground floor when all the action is up on the 10th? BOOM! and you're there.'

S'pose you could use it hold up a skyscraper though. If you were desperate,

Run, run, run to the Centre Broadgate

2007-05-22T19:43:00.000Z

British Land - the developers of The Broadgate Tower - have suddenly gone upmarket, replacing the dingy little British Land signs with larger, glossier signs more befitting the venue.

They've also opened a marketing suite. This strikes me as a tad late as the Tower is now almost (if not completely) fully pre-leased. I suppose there may still be a lot of space to let in 201 Bishopsgate.

What do they do in the marketing suite? Do they have an endless stream of top city executives popping by to chew the letting cud; unlikely I think. I may pop round during the week sometime. Finish work a bit early, slip my trusty suit on, and start talking in figures. I wonder if you can go on a site tour yet? Not sure how much use it would be to a potential tenant as it's probably still quite messy and dusty, but I'd damn well like to see inside the place!

This would probably be a good place to demonstrate how far away 201 Bishopsgate is from having photos of it included in a glossy brochure. Work on the facade has actually slowed, with only half a floor glazed in the last month (although large swathes round the back of the building are looking a lot more shipshape these days).

A scaffold is for life, not just for construction

2007-05-22T18:52:00.000Z

I was scathing in my views the other day of the eventual surface the Broadgate Tower is to have; all silky smooth transparent pale glass. I think it would look much nicer were it to be surrounded by something a bit like the cluttered cross-strutting of the cranes and lift tracks.

Bear with me.

Since Richard Rogers built the Centre Pompidou and the Lloyds Building it is no longer shameful to unabashedly include the utilitarian parts of a building as an integral part of its aesthetic design. It's not too big a flight of fancy to suppose that leaving bits of structure resembling cranes etc. when the building is complete could have similar aesthetic appeal.

Well, I think the mixture of clutter and regularity is pleasing to the eye anyway. Almost like a Jackson Pollock.

There is a recent precedent to a London City Building having a wireframe type structure around its exterior, namely 1Plantation Place (pictured. The building to the right is the "will they/won't they replace it with an oversized communication device 20 Fenchurch Street). The outer layer of glass - set a good metre or 2 out of reach of the inner one - is designed to stop rain getting in through the inner windows, which open to allow air to circulate. The end result is something that looks a bit like pinhead from hellraiser... but I like it. There's a recent upstart to the mechano/lego throne called k'nex, and it looks almost as if it's built out of the stuff, which is a good thing.

As demonstrated in this photo (click for much bigger) 1 Plantation place does tower above most of its riverside neighbours. It also only finished construction in 2004, but went unnoticed by me, even though in 2004 I did walk regularly home from work along the More London side of the river.

The point being, I should be a bit more liberal about my 100m minimum for buildings covered in this blog. I see plenty of cranes around and I really should show a lot more verve in investigating them.

I don't see enough dead people

2007-05-22T18:25:00.000Z

I mentioned before that I ended up at the Tower of London on Sunday. To get there from the City you pretty much have to go via Tower Hill, where I popped into Trinity gardens, where there are 2 memorials.

The first is for sailors in the merchant navy killed in the second world war. This is because Trinity gardens are overlooked by the Port of London Authority building (which I will write about some other time as it's an impressive edifice). This memorial is fairly big, and purports to list the names of every seaman lost in the Battle of the Atlantic.

The second memorial (pictured below) is a more subdued affair. A small square of Land holds about 6 plaques with the names of a few of the people who were beheaded or hanged at Tower Hill. As the plaque says, many of the 125 executed died a martyr's death, but curiously it only names some of the people.

Now, given that thousands of dead sailors are listed nearby, would it have killed the authorities to give a comprehensive list of the 125 martyrs of Tower Hill? Would it? I don't begrudge the merchant navy their full inventory (my godfather was in the merchant navy during he war, and he died*.), but I think we should end the iniquity here!

*long after retiring admittedly, but I'm sure he'd still back me 100%. He was a very down to earth man, with no airs and graces. The sort of person who never threw a piece of wood away.

Two-things-only-safe

2007-05-22T12:47:00.000Z

Combisafe - who provide safety netting for Broadgate Tower - are proud to announce that they have just exhibited at 'The most successful Bauma of all time.'

Good for them.

It is a silly name for a construction industry event - sounding more like an innuit coming of age ceremony, or the name of a crime-fighter in a hurry - , but as you can see from the photo the event is full of big machines, and is basically a schoolboy's dream. So I shan't mock something which I damn well wish I could go to.

Combisafe have the following to say about their range of netting and fences:

Our edge protection systems don't comply with safety standards.

What?!?

They set them.

Aaaah. Clever.

And reassuring too.

Their site safety solutions include some that are 'based around a square concept', and others which incorporate 'a "zero" factor fall arrest system.' Perplexing though these product descriptions are, the most bizarre thing about the company is why they call themselves Combisafe? It's surely a bit self-aggrandizing to suppose that using two different kinds of thing - namely nets and fences - is justification enough to use the prefix 'combi'. A greengrocer - with his myriad varieties of fruit and veg - could perhaps justify calling his stall 'Combiveg', but I think if you only peddle 2 kinds of wares you're over-egging the point a bit. Here's what the world would be like if the practice was widespread:

Bikes would be known as combiwheels. (Bike thieves would still however be known as 'bike-thieving bastards' as the alliteration really helps exorcise those bilious feelings).
Trousers would be known as combitubes
Twins would be called combipeople
Newton's third law would be renamed 'Newton's law of combi-ness'

I'm sure you get the idea by now?

Ok, one more then. But only because I'm quite enjoying this.

Fences would be known as combisides

Keywords of the week

2007-05-21T19:20:00.000Z

I have a few favourites this week. I also took the afternoon off work due to a banging headache and am now so bored that I will write about anything.

funny looking cone shaped glass building in london

Damn! I thought I covered all the angles. If this was you, you're probably looking for information about The Gherkin.

~~gareth gates spotted in london pub~~

Someone wanted to find information about this. Fair enough, ogle the photos if you come across them in the Sun/Heat... but can there be any justification at all for searching the web for more??? Is that you, Jordan?

~~rubik's tower~~

It begins!

~~wrexham in the 1800's~~

A sad one to finish. Wrexham was quite a dashing town back in the day, and as recently as 2002 it was highly commended in a best high street in Britain contest, partly due to the well-preserved period architecture (it matters not that the street called High Street no longer really functions as the high street since the town centre has moved West towards Hope Street).

It's sad because although there are lots of books full of period photos, my coming near the top in a google search would indicate that very little of this archive material is online.

If only they'd had blogs back then!

Cutty Sark/bike parallels

2007-05-21T16:37:00.000Z

When I was travelling in Australia I bought a battered country and western guitar in Tamworth, home of Australian C&W music. That guitar travelled with me everywhere I went after that, all through the outback and down the East Coast, and it was covered with stickers to reflect that. It was also my only company when I injured my leg in Melbourne and was housebound for a month. I loved that guitar, and called it Fred.

British Airways, the clumsy bastards (bring on the litigation), broke it on my journey back. When I opened the box at the airport to find the neck snapped my mum - bless - tried to empathise by saying she knew how I felt because there was a cardigan she bought from a mail order company a week or so earlier and she'd just snagged it.

It is with similar flawless logic that I say 'Greenwich - I know what you're going through with that whole Cutty Sark burning down thing as I've just had my bike nicked.' I also have no qualms about claiming that the fact that the fire was suspicious points to involvement by the little tykes that stole my bike. The tyres were, in fact, probably used as an accelerant in their destructive bike/boat arson spree.

My attitude to the bike reminds me of a Stephen Fry sketch.

Stephen, a politician (fittingly, he recently sat down for a chat with Mr. Blair), is stood behind a podium:

It is with a heavy heart that I stand here today to announce that someone has stolen my car. As a result I and my government have decided to tighten the law to prevent people from stealing my car. It is hoped that with the new measures we are bringing in I will no longer have a problem with people stealing my car.

I must, however, stress that this policy has a sound moral basis, which is stopping people from stealing my car. Some people would argue that people stealing their cars is also wrong and should be taken into account, but I feel that that detracts from the main moral concern, which is to stop people STEALING MY CAR...

And it goes on, rising to a crescendo. Haha.

By all this I really mean to say that it's sad the Cutty Sark has gone, but when the story is covered by the BBC I don't think there's really much I can add.

PS - Fred is now fixed. Apparently a large proportion of the Cutty Sark's timbers were off site for restoration, so there's hope for the boat too.

The white tower

2007-05-20T18:44:00.000Z

As you can probably already tell from your aching cheeks and sides, and from having co-workers give you uncomfortable stares which can only mean 'Why are you laughing?', I have turned my hand to what is popularly known as comic photography, but for which I have coined the term wittography (derived from the roots 'wit' and 'graph' in the original English and Greek, which literally mean 'funny picture').

The Broadgate Tower, as I have pointed out before, dwarfs all the buildings around it. In fact, you could say it's upstairs of everything.

But as I also pointed out the gradual increase in height is only half the story. The glaziers started work months ago, and are still going strong. Since mid April they have covered over another half-diamond with glass (the half-diamond being the standard unit of measurement for the Broadgate Tower).

I'm afraid I'm going to have to be critical of the glazing though. Not just the glazing, but the cladding on the structural elements. As the glass is just clear glass, and the cladding on the beams is virtually white the end result is going to be a very pale tower (unless they fill it with very dark things - millions of undertakers' offices - in which case the effect will be like a negative of a tudor building). Pale glazed tall buildings are relatively rare; the only one I can think of is HSBC Tower in Docklands, but that is in very glitzy metallic surroundings. I'm not sure how well a squeaky clean Broadgate Tower will harmonize with grimy Shoreditch. Even if, as London Lite claims, Shoreditch is virtually the West End now, the area will continue to look grubby unless the buildings are knocked down. Or sand-blasted, like St. Paul's. And that ain't gonna happen. Unless I launch a campaign. I'll make spurious claims that unsandblasted buildings are carcinogenic. People will believe me. I'm well-trusted about town.

Also, the fire escape is being put together at an impressive rate. But for some reason the sticky back plastic at the bottom is yet to be removed. A minor criticism, but my Mum always told me to clear up one mess before starting to make another, and ignoring that advice has left me in the many messes (mostly bedroom floor based) I find myself in today.

Transport problems

2007-05-20T18:05:00.000Z

Well, what a great day! I woke up fairly early and, on looking out of the window to see the bright blue sky, decided to pack a large bottle of water and a salami salad sandwich, and then head off on the bike; first to the City, then to Docklands, then maybe back along the south side of the Thames.

Except that's not what really happened because last night some little fucker nicked my bike. Which means I have to take public transport for a while. The omen's are good though; I've just seen a bus on fire, and earlier in the day I passed two friendly bus drivers arguing about whose fault it was they nearly crashed. On the bright side Ken Livingstone has -finally - got around to passing legislation which exempts bendy buses from the standard 'no-bending' traffic bylaws in the capital, so bus journeys should be quicker now.

Without the bike I feel .
I just feel like I suddenly have a huge burden to bear .
It's just a shame the world's such a .

But as my mate Rimmsy would say: "Hey ho." And how about listening to this cheery summer song by Karl Blau.

As you can tell from the photos I did get out and about despite the de-wheeling. Quite an epic journey, all the way to the river. Your reward for reading through my sob story is to play a great new game I invented at the Tower of London called 'Achilles Heel'. The way it works is: I show you a picture of a building (most likely a castle or a disused fort), and you have to work out where the achilles heel of the fortifications is. (I am preoccupied with chinks in armour at the moment given that my bike lock was evidently not as impervious as advertised.)

A tricky one to start:

Can you tell what it is yet?

Keyword of the week - london sky line egg

2007-05-16T06:23:00.001Z

Couldn't find sensible results for london sky line egg? You might be looking for information on The Gherkin (official name of 30 St Mary Axe), which is a slightly egg-shaped building in London. As its name suggests, though, it's actually shaped a lot more like a pickled cucumber (although a pine cone is probably the best approximation mother nature has to offer).

Or you might mean City Hall, aka The Mayor's office.

I feel sorry for whoever typed london sky line egg into Google.

Other people have done it before, with variations such as 'Liverpool Street Egg'. It seems they're looking for information about that egg shaped building on the London skyline.

I've never seen an egg shaped building on the London skyline, so I presume they mean The Gherkin, aka 30 St Mary Axe. So I've performed the public service above of linking to some comprehensive information about it. Here also are my posts tagged with Gherkin.

The miracle of the Olympics

2007-05-12T23:39:00.000Z

Despite its being the biggest regeneration project/white elephant since the Millenium Dome, I have steered clear from commenting on the Olympics construction site. This is partly because it won't impact on the London Skyline, so is technically beyond the remit of this blog, but it's also partly due to the fact I very rarely head over Stratford way. I probably should make the effort every few months though.

But I'm breaking my silence now, in advance of any site visit, as I have received a communique from the Olympic Delivery Authority regarding changes to the planning application originally approved. All very, very dull. But there are a couple of illuminating maps. I've chosen to focus on just one detail.

You'll all have heard the spiel about the Olympics generating long-term employment and development in one of the UK's most deprived areas (I typoed 'moist deprived areas' then. Which is pretty funny, but not as funny as 'moist depraved areas'. But I didn't type that). But there are doubters who deny the Olympics will have the impact claimed on inner-city poverty. They argue that there's no real sustainability to be found in the jobs the Olympics will create, and that everything is founded on a set of vague hopes. But these maps prove them wrong once and for all

Before:

After:

See!

28 synergies later

2007-05-12T22:44:00.000Z

Diamond Geezer is/writes a blog about London and other things, and according to his site he lives right near where I did 2 year sago. He has also recently been thinking about bicycle bells on canals, as have I, and has watched new zombie film 28 Weeks Later at West India Quay in Docklands, which is basically right in the middle of where it was filmed. And guess where I've just returned from.

Coincidentally (almost), it's been 29 weeks since I started the blog, but as far as I'm aware I didn't start the blog because I contracted a rage-inculcating virus (although I was a bit annoyed at how difficult it was to find info about skyscrapers under construction).

Back to the film.

It's a great showcase for the London skyline (albeit jumbled up in the editing room - cross Tower Bridge south to get to the Gherkin, anyone? I don't care; I'm all for artistic licence. But it does provoke an involuntary grimace unfortunately. i wonder if Woody Allen played similar tricks with New York's geography, and do New Yorkers flinch when they watch his films?). And the whole of docklands gets over-run by zombies (I don't think I'm giving away any surprises there), before being set ablaze.

I was a tad disappointed it wasn't dark when we exited the cinema. Due to planned engineering works (wich the Transport for London website said nothing about!) I had to walk down some fairly dimly lit alleys to get to All Saints to catch my bus and was perversely looking forward to a doubtless unnerving walk through darkened streets which - moments before - had been heaving with the living dead.

The reason for starting this post with a mention of Diamond Geezer is that he's kindly put me as the official blog of the City of London on his 'London by blog' map, which is nice. I pipped Pepys to the podium, which is better than nice.

It's very nice.

I must remember to visit Samuel's grave to check whether it's rotated at all recently.

Church theft

2007-05-11T21:12:00.000Z

One area I've been meaning to investigate is whether the London Skyline of yore... the Wren skyline... the one that everybody seeks to preserve, received much opposition when it was constructed.

Slightly different kettle of fish given that the whole city had just been incinerated, and the idea that there were many people concerned about preserving the view when there were fish and spices to sell is a bit of a whimsy to be honest. But I do know there was opposition to St Paul's Cathedral as it was considered to be too catholic looking. I wonder if his other churches were similarly opposed by traditionalists?

In doing some preliminary googling I have the following to report:

Church theft

The Church of St Mary, Aldermanbury now resides in Fulton, Missouri (satellite picture). It was bombed during the blitz and rather than rebuild it all themselves the canny Cockneys thought they'd ship it off to America where 'visitors from around the world may enter Wren's beautiful, light-filled sanctuary.' But why Fulton?

'The structure would be rebuilt on the campus of Westminster College as a permanent reminder of Churchill's visit to the college and his prophetic speech.'

The speech was in fact the one where he became the first Western leader to openly accuse the Soviet Union of being... well... sorta evil, and coined the term 'Iron Curtain'. Bit of an odd way to permanently remind yourselves of Churchill; import (at huge cost) a church which he had nothing to do with. I dunno - Americans.

Another stolen church feature I came across in Perth, Australia a few years ago. The original bells from St Martin-in-the-Fields are there in a striking bell tower (satellite image) which looks a bit like the maelstrom boat from the forgettable 'Pirates of dark water' cartoon from the early nineties. It is appartently one of the largest musical instruments in the world (if you can call that racket music. Honestly - it's just noise! Give me some punk over bell-ringing any day). I've seen (but not heard) the largest musical instrument in the world. It's some disused grain silos in Montreal which I believe work a bit like mammoth organ pipes. They call it the silophone. Maybe they should aim for a similar thing for Battersea power station. I could then nip down there in my lunch hour to tinkle the old turbine halls.

Hawksmoor's seven

Found this fact about Hawksmoor's contribution to church-building in London:

All seven were constructed under the Act of 1711 which proposed to build '50 new churches of stone and other [1]proper materials with towers or steeples'. This scheme was put forward by the Tories, [2]partly to celebrate the [3]fall of the Whigs after 22 years but also because [4] law and order in the suburbs was thought to be suffering for want of churches.

What an excellent act of parliament! It's got the lot: [1] vague, almost mystical terminology, [2] the bizarre practice of splashing out by indulging in a bout of piety, [3] inter-party pettiness, and [4] the almost childlike naivety we know, love and expect in politicians.

Keyword of the week

2007-05-08T18:33:00.000Z

~~london skyline explained~~

Quite innocuous, this week's. But I just like the idea that somebody thinks it needs explaining. I have this image of Hugh Laurie doing his best upper middle class twit gesticulation and saying 'Well, this won't do. I demand an explanation!'

Tell you one thing that does need an explanation though. The strange protrusion in the photo. Aside from looking a bit like a shark, and maybe having some use as a deterrent to passing tuna, I can't think what its purpose is.

Any ideas?

Who will buy my sweet docklands building

2007-05-05T11:52:00.000Z

The Guardian today has a two page spread on the price of London's skyscrapers. Click on the title of this post to read it in full, but if you just want a summary...

The HSBC Tower in docklands (surprisingly only finished in 2002, only a year or so before the Gherkin - it's easy to forget just how recent the docklands developments are) has jsut been sold for £1.1bn, making it officially the most expensive building in the UK.

HSBC are still staying there though - renting from the new owners - but the windfall profit of £500m they get from the sale (it only cost £580m to build and furbish) was tempting enough to take.

Dribble to the sea

2007-05-01T20:34:00.000Z

I reckon about 3% of blogs (possibly more; there may have been a recent explosion) are concerned with people reviewing the books they've read. Today it's (sort of) time for me to enter the fray. But first some preamble:

I love to see footballs floating down the Thames. Clearly, some little kid upstream would have been at least a little upset at losing it (unless they were Rod Stewart's son or something, which would be pretty cool as he would probably fill the entire estate with footballs just in case you kicked one in the river. That's the kind of thoughtful thing Rod does.) but if these children, distraught though they must be, were to consider for one second that their ball is on its way to the sea (!) it might inspire a sense of wonderment, and repress those football related suicidal urges.

Was that overly damatic? No? Thought not.

Also, they should know that every time somebody notices the ball floating by they think of the child that lost it. Myself, I like to cackle evilly at thir misfortune, but I know for a fact that others emit a simple 'Ohhhh' of empathy.

Through that lost football you are touching the souls of thousands.

Which brings me on to the book, called Paddle-to-the-Sea. My Auntie Eirlys (who called herself Jane as no one English could pronounce her name (which means snowdrop), and who emigrated to Canada in the early 70's) bought it as a present for my brother one Christmas. I was eternally jealous as I loved the book, and I think always will have fond memories of it.

The book starts in the thawing snow of Nippon country in the wilds of Canada, where an Indian boy has carved a little wooden canoe with a little wooden man sitting in it. On the bottom (of the boat, not the man) is carved the statement (or something like it):

'I am Paddle-to-the-Sea. Please help me on my way.'

The jist of the story is that the boat gets swept away with the thawing snow, and gradually journeys through the Great Lakes, and then along the St. Lawrence River and out to sea. On its journey various people find it and repair it, and lots of animals snuffle at it.

It's a great children's story, full of evocative illustrations. Perhaps I should write a British, football related version. With the ball getting hassled by water voles and having cans of Tennents chucked at it by tramps. And then passing through the grandeur of London. Yes Yes Yes! It'll be a children's classic. There'll be a film adaptation; Kevin Spacey will star as the ball. Audrey Tatou will make a cameo appearance as a French human statue who is longingly reminded of her past love with Zinedine Zidane as the ball bobbles past.

It won't have Rod Stewart in it though. Football hoarding bastard.

How wide is a piece of River Thames...

2007-05-01T20:12:00.000Z

Above is the view I had whilst waiting for Mark to arrive when we all went for a few drinks on the South Bank on Friday night (on Sunday I found lots of photos I took of us in front of St Paul's of which I have no recollection). Care to hazard a guess as to how wide the Thames is here? Here are our predictions:

Keith - 400 yards
Mark - 250 yards 'tops'
Me - 200 yards
Katy - 300 yards
Lisa - 250 yards

Mogg's New Picture of London and Visitor's Guide to it Sights, 1844 tells us that

Waterloo Bridge. - To the spirited exertions and unceasing perseverance of the late Mr. George Dodd, an active, enterprising, and skilful engineer, the public are indebted for the erection of this distinguished ornament of the metropolis which was commenced by him, but completed by Mr. Rennie.

Get to the point!

Its length, within the abutments, is 1240 feet, and its width, within the balustrades, is 42 feet, seven of which, on each side, are appropriated to foot passengers. ... The views from this edifice are extensive and beautiful, and are much enlivened by the perpetual passage of steam boats and other vessels, that, in the summer season, considerably heighten the panoramic beauties of this delightful promenade.

I wonder if English Heritage campaigned to save the 'perpetual passage of steam boats' in order to preserve the view?

That length turns out to be an overestimate. Another Bridges over the Thames website confirms that the Millenium Bridge is only 330m long. Subtract a fair bit for the overlap with the banks and the river is probably about 280m long. Which makes Lisa and Katy the winners. So much for the male genetic predisposition for spatial awareness.

The same website has this astounding fact.

Hungerford Bridges

In 1840 Brunel built a suspension bridge across the River at this point but it was replaced by the current bridge in 1864. The chains from the first bridge were however, used in Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge across the River Avon in Bristol.

2 things here:

The Clifton suspension bridge is really famous, rated as being a paradigmatic example of how to 'do' a suspension bridge. But it turns out it's jsut recycled junk (shhh - don't tell the Bristolians)
Apparently we lead very wasteful lives nowadays. But at least we don't go around building entirely new bridges every 24 years!

Apparently the River Thames lifeboat is the busiest in the country. I can well believe it - every time I go to the Youngers Arms on the Thames I see it speeding past.

Keyword of the week

2007-04-30T21:48:00.000Z

Most unlikely search term used to find this blog last week:

~~pornographic pictures~~

I don't like to be crude...

Well, OK - yes I do like to be crude. The particular crudity I have in mind on this occassion is some lonely teenager having a wank over pictures of the Brioadgate Tower shooting up in the sky. Or using that most famous of phallic symbols, the Erotic Gherkin.

Will Willis be ready in time

2007-04-30T19:19:00.000Z

By the looks of things, yes.

Exhibit A: As you can see, the facade is now fully glazed. Until recently there has been a single column of unglazed windows up which the tracks for the builders' lift ran. There is now only a need for one lift, which is attached discreetly at the rear. If your eyes are as keen as your following of this blog (or you've learned that clicking on a picture here almost always brings up a bigger version) you'll also see to the right that the glazing extends all the way to the top of the top tier.

Exhibit B: All the wires dangling at the bottom of the Tower are tidied away inside some fetching zebra striped encasement. The annoying thing is that I have taken photos of the pre-cladding clutter, but I think I've deleted them all, so you'll have to take my word for it that the transformation was both rapid and thorough.

Exhibit C: Judging from this photo, the building is saying 'Hello world!' like a glazed Alan Whicker. On a less anthropomorphic bent, why someone has chosen to put a picture of the Willis Building in the Willis Building's window is a mystery to me. Maybe the actual aim is to create a Willis Building fractal. When I was at Uni I had to sit through a week long proof of a continuous function on the open interval (0,1) having dimension greater than 1 but less than 2. The annoying thing was that I understood it until right near the end. After the lecturer finished the demonstration, with sweat pouring from his brow and a nervous tick developing deep in his belly, he told us it wouldn't appear in the exam. Sod.

To finish, here's a series of photos, from October to the present.

Wrexham police station

2007-04-29T22:15:00.000Z

I am, at heart, a boring sod. I set up Google Analytics for the blog, and like nothing better than to see how people have got here. I intend to have a weekly 'keyword of the week' for my favourite combination of words which have inadvertently lead someone here (You may recall that 1800's Erotica has been a popular one).

Imagine my delight today when I see that someone has come to the blog by typing in 'Wrexham police station architect.'

Wrexham is my home town, and the police station is the only building taller than about 5 storeys in the whole place. It's the first tall building I ever came across (I used to walk past it every time I went swimming, at Wrexham swimming baths, which is also a very distinctive building - one of only 2 hyperbolic paraboloid roofs in Europe, so I'm told). It quite likely inspired my lifelong casual interest in skyscrapers and the like.

I don't think I've ever specifically mentioned the police station on the blog, so it's really quite serendipitous that somebody, looking for information I don't have, inadvertently prompted me to talk about the first 'skyscraper' of my life.

Turkey = Holiday Holiday Holiday

2007-04-29T21:38:00.000Z

London Skyline is on holiday.

That's what I should've said last week before actually going on holiday. Because that's how you say it, isn't it, in website world. You don't refer to yourself in the first or third person, even if it's patently obvious that the website is the rambling product of one human being's keyboard. That's the rule. I think the way it happens in order for me to go on holiday is that first London Skyline has to go on holiday, and once that's happened I go on holiday from London Skyline. That's how it felt to me anyway. And, now I come to examine it, the blogger interface has acquired a suspicious tan. I think it lived it large in Benidorm.

But I didn't. I went to here

A little place called Olympos, 2 hours south of Antalya in Turkey. Probably most beautiful and sedate place I have ever been. Well done Laura for recommending it. Here's the view from the beach:

One day I shall return to scale this peak.

I'm just writing this post to explain the absence of any new posts for the past week and a bit, but may as well throw in a couple of holiday anecdotes.

Just before the plane took off a guy behind me pulled over an air steward and asked
'Excuse me - is the co-pilot male?'
'I'm sorry sir?'
'It's just that... that woman doing the announcement just now; that was the pilot, right?'
'Yes'
'I just need to be sure there's a man up there too... just in case.'
It ended up being (and I'm not just saying this for effect) the smoothest landing I've ever had the pleasure of participating in. Egg on face for him.
One day I was taking photos of the beach. As I was doing so a fat man was climbing out of the water. His wife was not very pleased with that and yelled what I can only assume to be the Turkish equivalent of 'What the Fuck, Larry?!', Susie from Curb Your Enthusiasm style.

Oh, and one final thing: I am the King of Backgammon!

2007-04-17T19:26:00.000Z

A treat tonight - 2 posts for the price of 2.

I mentioned once before that I inspired ( I think) somebody to take photos of the Willis Building. on Saturday a similar thing happened at the Broadgate Tower.

I was stood on Bishopsgate taking photos and a mother/aunt with two youngish children walked by. As i lowered my camera I saw the boy's eyes look at me, the camera, and then where the camera had been pointing. When he saw the subject of the photo he just said 'Wow!' It's a bit worrying that he had just walked straight past the building without noticing a thing until he saw me. But then again, I am quite eye-catching, even to the untrained eye I suppose.

And well might he wow. It's an awe-inspiring sight, it is. Going back to talking about cranes for a second, there are still 3 working on the actual Tower, but it's now so tall that, up close, all but the one on your side of the building can be completely hidden from view.

Up, up and away

2007-04-17T19:02:00.000Z

Cranes: Where would tall buildings be without them?

Completed, that's where.

A sign that 201 Bishopsgate is progressing nicely is that one of the cranes has been dismantled, leaving but a stump behind.

Another feature of the cranes I noticed at the weekend (but which isn't new - I've checked the old photos) is that the tower cranes for the Broadgate Tower are anchored to the tower itself. Tower cranes always do seem flimsy things. On reflection, the ones at Broadgate do look a bit slimmer than your average stand-alone ones, and tying them to the building under construction does probably mean they can make economies when it comes to crane girth.

Intermission
Today's song is brought to you by Squarepusher, and it's from the Lost in Translation Soundtrack. It's a good skyscraper song.

Back to the cranes. You might remember the yellow platforms on the Broadgate Tower, which I researched their purpose, and came up with the conclusion that they're for micro cranes to deposit their loads on. I've since changed my mind. I reckon they're just for the normal tower cranes to deposit their loads on as I can't see any sign of the mini cranes.

I really like the photo to the right. It's very cluttered, but really vibrant colours and striking shapes. One of the best ones I've taken of Broadgate in my opinion.

The Broadgate Tower is glazing over

2007-04-15T21:53:00.000Z

The Broadgate Tower is glazing over. It wasn't so long ago that I measured the rate of completion of the Tower in Diamonds. Now I can do likewise for the vertical reach of the glass. As you can see from the photo, it's nearly 1 diamond high. As this photo from mid March shows, the extent of the glazing has grown by half a diamond in 1 month. Assuming a linear growth rate, this means the tower will be fully glazed in about another 4-5months. Scenes such as that to the right will soon be a thing of the past.

One thing that concerns me is that the outer casing overlayed onto the main supporting struts (eg the outline of the diamonds) are concave, and will surely just collect grime. They're also ideal nesting sites for pigeons. Now, i like pigeons, but I'm pretty sure the developers would rather keep the tower pigeon poo free.

It's difficult to tell from external appearance how close to completion a skyscraper is. I'll write tomorrow about the Willis Building, where I think it's most likely on the last lap (it's due for 'practical completion' (whatever that means) soon anyway). But, as I've just said, the Broadgate Tower, proceeding at the same rate as today, should be fully glazed by sometime in early Autumn... though it's not scheduled for completion until May 2008. Maybe progress gets significantly slower the higher up you go.

Here is a demonstration that 201 Bishopsgate is glazing over too. And that Bishopsgate is a far less busy street at the weekend.

Broadgate Tower signage

2007-04-14T21:31:00.000Z

Yesterday's surfeit of signs has spurred me on to add this photo. I think the 'DANGER pedestrians crossing' may be a little overkill on the building site safety front. I doubt traffic goes very fast on this particular thoroughfare, being as you have to go round a sharp bend and get some gates opened for you to get this far.

Here's another sign. The wording at the bottom says 'Two imposing new office buildings.' Given the level of dialogue surrounding all the other new skyscrapers - 'it's impact on the view will be minimal... it'll fit in just fine... damging to the skyline's character? Pshaw!' - it's quite refreshing to see that one of them is unabashedly proud to be a colossus.

On the other hand, maybe this is how it pans out after planning is granted. All meek proclamations (eg 'It may be 35 stories, but they are very small storeys... honest') when you need approval, but as soon as the licence is signed, out come the heavy metal music and the tattoos and dirty high-rise machismo. If the Walkie Talkie gets approved maybe the posters round the construction site will say somethingalong the lines of '20 Fenchurch Street - an eyesore, and proud of it.' The Leadenhall Building will have similar fare - 'The Leadenhall Building - I'm the daddy now.' Bishopsgate Tower - 'Mwahahahahaha'.

Broadgate Tower may be imposing, but it has had some difficulty attracting tennants (maybe it's the mixed messages of the imposing image combined with the namby pamby corporate responsibility of the billboards around it). In 2002 (from the Telegraph):

British Land is in discussions with Ashurst Morris Crisp, the firm of lawyers, over pre-letting around 400,000 square feet of its 700,000 sq ft ... BL has simply been waiting to pre-let part of it before starting. John Ritblat, the executive chairman of British Land, has been saying for some time that he would start the scheme speculatively if no occupier would take a pre-let. Several occupiers have looked at the scheme including Lehman Brothers, Accenture, Barclays Bank.

But that's all in the past now Law firm Reed Smith have agreed to let most of the tower. It's a good job there are billions of anonymous finance, law and consultancy companies out there that no-one's ever heard of. Ridiculous number of them. They all hang out in a city bar called 'The Underwriter.' Smoking cigars made out of gold bars. And eating truffles wrapped in rare manuscripts such as the dead sea scrolls. Philistines!

Build it up, tear it down

2007-04-14T19:48:00.000Z

Despite it being a glorious sunny day today, this post is going to be full of gloomy pictures like the one above (which is a burnt out warehouse/factory/Dixons I passed last week in Westferry, to the south of Docklands). What I suggest you do to counter this visual misery is to listen to another summery song (this time by Acid House Kings) as you read the rest.

The reason this post is so full of misery is because it's about 122 Leadenhall, which is being demolished to make way for the Leadenhall Building. It's wreathed in scaffold and sheeting (I know what you're thinking, but don't worry; it is licensed scaffolding) so from the square you can't see the extent of the demolition.

The latest newsletter states that during March the 'soft strip' has reached 75% completion, and a 'system for removing demolished material has been established'. During April, amongst other things, 'munchers and breakers' will get involved in the action. Judging by the photo to the right, the munching may already have begun. One consequence of this is that theses days it pays to look where you're going when using the city's handful of concrete walkways.
Having said that, this particular walkway does emanate from the rear of 22-24 Bishopsgate, which will be knocked down shortly to make way for the Bishopsgate Tower. in the photo you can just make out the pre/during demolition cladding on it in the bottom right.

The demolition site is surrounded by boarding, and on this boarding are no fewer than 14 different types of sign, variously informative, advisory and apologetic (photos of all of them on my flickr). Here's my two favourite. It warns you about a lot of things. So many things, in fact, that it's very difficult to remember the first few things you were warned about by the time you get to the end.

There was also a sign on a gate saying 'Gates constantly in use.' I waited for ages and they didn't get used once. Lying bastards.

But not bastards, in fact. As I was taking photos of the signs a car pulled up alongside me, and the driver asked me why I was taking photos, which instantly made me wary of my getting embroiled in another MI6 incident. But then I noticed he had 'Sitting on the dock of the bay' on the car stereo all along, and felt quite silly, and how can anyone who listens to Otis Redding possibly be a machine of the police state?

Anyway, it turns out his name's Lee, and he's the construction manager, working for Bovis, the contractors for British Land, the developers. I explained that I put the photos etc. online, and he was very familiar with the practice. He and the rest of the Bovis lot regularly read (with enjoyment) what the skyscrapercity community posts about the tower. I said I'd mention him in a post. Wish I'd been a bit more like Paxman though, and asked him some awkward questions. 'Can you guarantee the tower will be constructed on schedule? ... What if there's an international glass shortage? ... Is there any truth in the rumour that large sections of the building will be made out of cheese?' ... and so on. Or I could have written down his numberplate. Or done somethinga bit more investigative. A golden opportunity wasted.

Not too miserable a post after all as it turns out. Hope you enjoyed the song though.

Sitting and watching and thinking

2007-04-14T14:17:00.000Z

As so many people the length and breadth of the country will no doubt be doing due to the clement weather, I have turned my energies away from doing things to observing things. Here are today's observations so far.

Tony Robinson is filling the post-John Peel advert voice-over gap
It's quite possible that terrapins charge themselves with solar power once a year. I say this because I saw 3 of them sunning themselves by the canal at the same time last year.. and I've just seen them again, holding their heads up on outstretched necks like haughty camels.
Pigeons get confused when you follow them on a bike. If the pigeon is on the ground initially it will take off and, thinking you're a normal on-foot speed human, try and land a few flaps of the wing ahead. About to land, it will realise the human has surprisingly caught it up again, and will give a few more flaps to get ahead again. It will do this repeatedly. The overall effect is that it looks like a kite being jerked on a string (no pigeons were harmed during the description of this experiment).
A lot of women joggers jog in a freaky way. They flick their lower legs out sideways like Charleston dancers during each step. I saw one jogger do this, and wondered if it was a disability of some sort, but it turns out at least 66 percent (of a sample of 3) do the same.
Finding your keys after searching for hours for them the previous night is a great start to a day.
Now it's sunny, it's all about the reggae. Such as this summery song by Zap Pow.

Now I'm off to see my friends Broadgate Tower and Willis Building to see how they're getting on.

Capital FM, the Killers, Y-fronts and enlarged shops

2007-04-12T19:25:00.000Z

There is a blog I subscribe to called Unphotographable. It's a professional photographers blog of 'Occasions when I wished I'd taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter.' I like it a lot. A particularly good entry lies here.

The reason I mention it is because I am now going to do a miniature Unphotographable post:

This is the picture I cannot post because both Capital FM and The Killers haven't thought to put a copy of the billboards advertising that The Killers are this month's artist of the month anywhere on the web. You will therefore have to take my word for it that it is an altered view of the London skyline - replete with Gherkin - in which the buildings conspire to spell out 'Killers'.
(*edit* - Dave Gorman, no less, has obliged in putting a photo up on Flickr.)

I'll do another, more artistically valid one:

This is the photo I did not take on a hot May afternoon last year in Green Park. One of the war memorials there features a sheet of water trickling slowly down a slightly inclined plane. A number of tourist parents allowed their small children to splash and frolic in the water, disregarding a sign that clearly said that doing so was prohibited. A child dressed in nothing but sodden Y-fronts stood atop the metre-or-so-tall monument, a few inches above said sign. I didn't capture the very funny scene as I didn't fancy being chased through the streets being called a paedophile in a number of European languages.

A bit of local news to finish: It's not just the city that's being redeveloped. No fewer than 3 of my local grocers have had a refit in the past two weeks. The general approach is to knock through the back wall, enlarge the wine section, and give toilet rolls a shelf for themselves rather than stacking them on top of other goods. Tonight I was so confused I ended up buying jaffa cakes when I only went in for tomato sauce!

I've just realised - I have completely lost the ability to use semicolons appropriately. I used to have the knack. Damn!

Battersea power stationary

2007-04-10T20:46:00.000Z

How current do blogs have to be?

It depends what they're about I suppose.

In a world as slow moving as that of the London Skyline (barring the Broadgate Tower, which is glazing over at a rate of knotts) I could be forgiven for not following things up immediately. Today's post will be about possibly the slowest advancing development saga in London. If you recognise the Towers to the left, you'll know I mean Battersea Power Station.

The photo to the left dates from sometime in the autumn. I visited the power station with Tom and Karen as they had an exhibition of Chinese art there (including piles of rotting apples, a video of thousands of laughing chinese men, and a pormographic slideshow which an upper middle class family let their 5-ish year old child watch).

Part of the exhibition was a model of the planned Battersea developments. Karen Tom and myself all agree that they looked hideous. There's a real conflict around the power station and it's surroundings' redevelopment. No one wants to surround it with forgettable apartment blocks, as this is hardly befitting an iconic building. And yet, surrounding it with eyecatching developments is just garish. Like putting Bono in the same room as Fred Dibnah (You can buy a DVD of Fred's funeral here. You can't buy a DVD of Bono's though. He's not dead yet. But members of U2 are dying every day - please give kindly).

The Power station is a rare example of an old building on a monumental scale. I am generally in favour of putting big modern buildings around smaller old ones; they don't clash as they're not competing on the same level. A small building doesn't demand that you look at it awestruck, and a skyscraper doesn't demand that you look at the intricate stonework. At Battersea it's difficult to get the balance right. The power station is awe-inspiring, but also has the quaint atmosphere of older buildings - what do you put next to that.

I have an idea - how about a skyscraper?

I've been thinking about it, the length of this post, and the more I consider it the more it seems like a good idea. Smallish modern buildings will just look silly next to it. Something like the Shard of Glass wouldn't though. Putting a huge modern edifice there will perhaps concentrate visitors' eyes on the ancientness of the power station. And after all, the power station was once a n icon of modernity. Putting something similarly striking there would be wholly in keeping with the heritage of the site. Or maybe something a bit like the new Tate Modern extension. God knows what you'd put in it though. Some sort of people I suppose. Maybe freemasons.

Possibly not argued very convincingly, but picture the scene and I think you'll agree it's a good one. There will be puppies lolloping. Puppies!

Anyway, the reason for raking all this up now is that the This is Hertfordshire website of all places announced that Rafael Vinoly, of Walkie Talkie fame, will from now on be in charge of the redevelopment as the old plans have fallen through.

'His brief will include designing a completely new master plan for the site, effectively taking development there back to square one. The previous master plan took three years to create and was followed by a decade of inaction.'

So perhaps a huge modern tower isn't out of the question. Although, it has to be said, even here the Walkie Talkie would look like an over-sized shopping trolley wrapped in cling film.

The official website says 'This site is currently under construction', which is more than can be said for the real world site. Fingers crosse dsomething will happen soon though, or the power station itself may fall into such a bad state that it will be demolished entirely.

Low flying planes

2007-04-09T20:19:00.000Z

Would you believe that the Civil Aviation Authority has a policy on tall buildings. On the surface of it, it seems sensible. Planes fly in the sky... tall buildings reach up into the sky... MY GOD!!! WE MUST HAVE A POLICY ON THIS. The national height limit is 242m, but a special one for the City is 1,000ft (those crazy CAA people just won't standardise their measurements!). 'Any proposal approved for buildings above that height will be refered to the Secretary of State at the DETR as dangerous.'

City of London Airport is a safeguarded airport, which means that:

'it must be consulted on proposals that may lead to an increased chance of aircraft flying into a flock of birds (bird hazard) or involve tall structures that could affect aircraft movements.'

The CAA have been consulted on the construction of a few London buildings (can't remember which - Bishopsgate Tower I think is the one I read about, but I think we can assume they've been consulted on others of a similar height too). Now, I'm no expert on the height aircraft fly at as they approach an airport (and Google and Yahoo haven't helped either, although Wikipedia does have an entire article on landing, which touches on aircraft and swans), but I've seen airplanes fly over the city, and they fly significantly higher than the existing buildings. As I see it nothing but a complete catastrophe i.e. plane plummeting unexpectedly to earth would cause it to crash into one of the towers, even if they were a fair bit taller. I really don't know how buildings in the City could 'affect aircraft movements' without being at least double or treble their current height.

I'm trying to think of things which could cause an 'increased chance of aircraft flying into a flock of birds.'

Building an airport in Trafalgar Square
Hanging bird feeders from the wings
Building a skyscraper in the shape of a huge bird feeder, and giving all employees an unlimited supply of peanut snacks
Carrying the subject of the Carpenters' 'Close to you' on board

A closer look at Docklands

2007-04-09T20:08:00.000Z

I cooked using red wine tonight. It didn't need too much red wine, so there was rather a lot left to consume, so I apologise for any bad typing.

The photo to the right has very little to do with this post. I meant to put it in last time but couldn't remember why. I do remember now: it was to point out that people on the lower floors of some of the Canary Wharf skyscrapers will have their views of Greenwich blocked by the Pan Peninsula Tower. To rectify this they could either:

establish the view as a strategic viewing corridor post-haste
buy a flat in the tower
build wings out of all the money they make and fly, fly, fly...

The connection with this post is the zooming in of the camera. To the left you will see the blindingly shiny Canary Wharf Tower, which I imagine could blind a pilot, so maybe the CAA have a point. The entire tower is covered in sheet metal, which accounts for the glare. ot only that, but also, as illustrated here, even the blinds have a metallic finish. If - God forbid - every blind were to be pulled at the same time I think we could have an aviation disaster on our hands.

A curiosity atop one of the towers is this scaffolding. The scaffolding looks temporary, but the things they're supporting - glass honeycomb structures - don't look at all like a transient part of constructing something else. My best guess is that they're building a penthouse greenhouse. I shall take another look in a few weeks to see if there's any change.

Now here's a peculiar feature. These striking formations, reminiscent of the posters of penrose triangles that every secondary school maths class is legally compelled to have on their walls, are right at the top of an otherwise bland building. Why put them all the way up there, where nobody can appreciate them? May as well not have them at all.

Last close-up now. Docklands is reviled as a cluster of 80's grandiose glass block buildings with no imagination. I think this photo demonstrates that, although the style of the time was perhaps to build rather conservatively shaped structures, this doesn't mean that the architects didn't put at least some thought into providing variety; the differences in texture between the buildings certainly add interest.

Strategic view #5 - Greenwich Park London Panorama

2007-04-09T09:44:00.000Z

I said a few weeks a go that I would systematically visit the 'viewing place' for each of London's strategic viewing corridors to give a 'qualitative visual assessment' of the view towards the 'strategically important landmark.' The landmark in Greenwich's case is St Paul's Cathedral. It is also worth noting that the view is also 'the only designated London Panorama that is part
of a formal, axial arrangement.' For this gumph and more I recommend reading chaper six of this.

One slightly less gumphy bit is this:

The background of the view is currently unimpeded, offering a clear silhouette of St Paul’s Cathedral with Tower Bridge in its immediate foreground. The ability to see light between the upper parts of the various elements makes it easy to recognise and appreciate the landmarks within the context of the City.

It's very true. A lot of the other protected views are, I think, slightly silly as they protect the view of St Paul's specifically, even though you can hardly make it out (going by the photos in the official papers). Anyway, below is the proof that you can indeed see the outline f St Paul's:

Shame about the tower in the foreground though - how did that get past the planners? I smell the stench of corruption.

But what's my opinion of this protected view? Well, I think it'll take some beating. As the panoramic photo at the top shows, I'm not alone in thinking it's worth sitting and enjoying. I myself cycled 25 odd miles (in a round trip, which I grossly underestimated) to get there. It's 4 views in 1:

I don't think the Millenium Dome's anything to write homw about; in fact, I think it looks like an ugly industrial facility - it's far too flat and undecorated to look like anything elses - but I imagine some people like to see it.

Question: will views of the Gherkin ever be protected? I noticed in one of the Waterloo panorama shots that English Heritage have been parading about that the Gherkin will be virtually obscured from the West by the Leadenhall building. With all the furore about St Paul's and the Tower of London I think people seeking to protect the London skyline's integrity forget that they are not the only buildings worth looking at.

Oh - and to whoever commented, you'll be glad to know that from Tuesday, cycling to work will take me through Southwark, so taking a look at some of the buildings you suggested is a definite possibility. Vive la diversification.

Lebensraum

2007-04-04T19:27:00.000Z

Through accident more than by design I found myself taking lots of photos of accomodation over the weekend. I've already voiced my doubts about Pan's ~~Labyrinth~~ Peninsula being able to attract adequate punters due to the dire nature of the surrounding hubbub. Leaving the nightlife etc. aside, the design is also not hugely distinctive. They're tall buildings, and a bit bit glittery, so don't get me wrong - I give a lot of points out for tallness and glitteriness. But they're hardly going to win international awards.

So what of the other residential buildings I've looked at?

Worst of the bunch are these, to the south of the main docklands complex. The houses around where I used to go to school were yellow brick, probably built in the 60's, and about as entertaining to look at as a turd (apart from that one day when we watched through the chemistry lab windows a dare-devil ladder acrobat with a HUGE drill install cavity wall insulation in one of them). These blocks of flats seem to be aiming for the same look, but figured 15 storeys is better than 2. How ridiculous do those roofs look??

Second from bottom is this riverside warehouse conversion. I took the photo to show Broadgate Tower looking not unlike the radiator of a Rolls Royce (not so long ago I saw a latest model Rolls outside the Tate Britain - an uglier concoction of car and... car I have never seen.) Took ages to find that link to the Rolls photo - why is it that bluechip companies known for excellence in design insist on having such bloated flash websites?

But the warehouse conversion... the top floors really are extremely ugly. There are some great warehouse conversions out there - Butlers Wharf, Catherine Docks, the ones across the canal from me - but the ones in this photo are certainly not among them.

Won't bother posting a photo but these are also pretty naff. An original and geometrically interesting design in search of function, balance, character and memorability. Slightly better is this block, but only by virtue of the circular balconies. Not sure of the utilility of these - you can't have a conversation with the corner of the building in the way - but they look nice from below. What might have been better would be to alternate, floor by floor, butting the balcomies at the corners and in the middle of the walls. Did I mention I wanted to be an architect when I was bout 12?

OK - enough filler. Now we move on to the stars of the city living show.

Surprisingly for a skyscraper themed blog, they are all low-rise.

The triangular buildings in the bottom left are great! in the shadow of all these monoliths (and one building that looks like a giant microchip) are some chalet style buildings. Anachronistic given the setting, but this just adds to their charm. The photo doesn't do it justice, but they're brightly coloured too.

In third place are these flats, again down by the river. I'm no architectural expert, but it's quite obvious they're inspired by the Habitat '67 building in Montreal - the hive of flats that was meant to revolutionise the built environment... but didn't. With this being one exception. I would guess it's in wapping, and I'll add it to my 'to visit' list. It doesn't stand out, but it's probably one of London's more adventurous buildings.

Now on to the joint winners.

About 3 years ago, a few months after moving to Bow, I too a walk along the canal to meet Karen and Muzo in Victoria Park. Whilst walking along I was slightly perplexed by the buildings across the canal, which seemed to be packed with hundreds of nubile young women (not that I'm complaining). Since then I've discovered that these are the accommodation village for Queen Mary University.

I went to Uni in Warwick, where most of the accommodation lives and breathes sensible in bucketloads. Queen Mary's halls are refreshingly original, bright and welcoming and, I would guess, manage to avoid the Peckham trap: creating a futuristic architectural utopia at the expense of incubating crime and ill-feeling.

I can't be complementary enough about the buildings - interesting self-consistent, harmonious materials, colours and shapes. Little quirky features (such as the bar joining both halves of the turquoize one) which seem to serve no practical purpose, but add interest all the same.

They're wonderful. I'll try and find out who the architect is. On the off chance that someone would want to visit them, they are here.

Pan's people*

2007-04-03T21:23:00.000Z

*May in fact be a 'tower', not a 'people'

As I was saying, I now have a bike-lock, so leaving the bike unattended holds no fear for me! (well, a lot less than before. I thought I'd got a good bike-lock; a Factor 8 no less. But I've since discovered the factors go up to 15. Slightly more comforting is that I am a medium when it comes to bike helmet sizes. I think head size is one area in life where being average is distinctly better than being at the big or the small end.)

Previous to today my entrance to Canary Wharf has either been via the DLR station or the cavernous tube station. Some of these occasions have been fairly recently (I sometimes meet Keith to go to the cinema at East India Quay as it's roughly halfway between us. Exactlty halfway would probably be Poplar, which it's probably best to avoid, what with being pushed in front of trains). But not once during these visits have I seen the messiness that lies just behind the wall of tall buildings.

One of the main culprits as far as unitidiness goes is the new Pan Peninsula Tower, high-rise luxury living with - the placards drum this into you - it's own cinema, holistic health spa, cocktail lounge and signature restaurant (Could that be a world first - I've heard of a signature tune, and even a signature dish, but not a signature restaurant. does this mean they will also have many other restaurants which will be forced to be mediocre and forgettable in order to guarantee the signature status of the waterside restaurant?).

It's actually a pair of towers (as evidenced by the following photo), so god knows why they call it a Tower. Interestingly, there was some work going on at the weekend, unlike the new city-scrapers. I took a short video of the lift going up and down to prove it, but can't be bothered uploading it... but you'll believe me, won't you.

I'm not sure how much living is done in docklands. I've known one or two people who've lived there or there abouts over the past few years, and the complaint is always the same - that there's never anything to do, particularly at the weekend. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how luxurious the flat is if getting there after a night out means a long taxi ride. Maybe there will start to be a culture change in the area, with it becoming a rich man's playground, rather than just a rich man's office. The closest to a club they have in docklands at present is a hotel 'club and restaurant,' and I can't help thinking the area will need to become a lot more vibrant before it can attract clientele who could probably easily afford a comparable flat closer to the west end.

See what I did there - undermined years of market research.

2 signs to finish off. The first is a spelling mistake (see if you can spot it) which is funny simply because of the general rule: the bigger the font a spelling mistake is printed in, the funnier it is. That's the rule!!

(At work today a job description and advert for a new job was sent round all the staff and contained more hilarity than its font-size alone merited:

Duties will include liaising with internal staff, dairy management and producing error free documentation.

Talk about falling on your own sword.)

The second sign is below, from a different building project, but worthy of mention. It makes me think of the swimming pool docu-soap in The Day Today, with Stephen Coogan saying "In 1976 no-one died, ...". Can't help wondering what the last reportable accident was. Decapitated scaffolder?

Also , I notice they stopped counting last August. This could mean one of 2 things:

Construction workers have been dying every month since then, and they don't want to blight their record by taking them into account.
Nobody's done any work since August.

My money's on 2.

From Portobello to docklands

2007-04-01T14:46:00.000Z

Some people will have been reading this blog feeling distinctly miffed. I do of course refer to those who live outside the City of London, by which I mean 'the square mile' which constitutes the old city, now the financial district. Only around 9,200 people live in the City, represented on the council by the 'Chief Commoner'. The population was 208,000 in 1700, but dropped steadily until reaching a minimum of 4,234 in 1971. The population roughly halved in the second world war! Anyway, this means most people in Lonon don't live in the City, and therefore qualify for a good miffery due to my ignoring where they live.

It's true that I have focused almost exclusively on the City, being that I live pretty close to it (25mins walk) but, for a couple of completely distinct reasons, I have branched out this week.

Since last March, when I took part in Shoot Shoreditch, organised by bunch-of-wankers-with-a-really-good-idea Shoot Experience (so good they're now doing overseas franchises), I have been on their mailing list, which lets me know of upcoming photographic treasurehunts. There was a free one in Portobello this weekend, and as Laura lives near there I thought we could do it... and we did. The photo at the top of this post (Island Records graffiti) is my favourite out of the entries we submitted, but the one relevant to the london skyline theme of this blog is Trellick Tower (right).

It's 98m tall, so is just below the arbitrary threshold I set for inclusion in the blog, but what the hell - it's distinctive enough to make the grade I think. Skyscrapernews, ever a source of interesting facts, reveals that 'the walkways between the service shaft and main tower every two floors are based on the dimensions of train carriages to make the users of them feel more comfortable and familiar with their surroundings.' Brilliant rationale, and thoroughly needed as I doubt many people in the seventies would have had much experience of walking down corridors by themselves, what with schools, hospitals and office buildings of any type not having being invented yet. And being in a train hundreds of feet up in the air would have been a completely normal, everyday sort of experience.

As illustrated by the strategic placement of a 'woof!' in the photo, a possible further inspiration could be a dog. In particular, Odie from Garfield. The resemblance, I think you'll agree, is really quite striking.

Also, I was about to suggest that the tower's architect Erno Goldfinger (a friend of Ian Fleming's, and the inspiration for the Bond villain) may have stood in the Docklands area all those years ago, peering out to the South West, and seen the buildings to the left, and thought they'd look good rolled into one. But, as it turns out, Guy's hospital (the one on the right) at least, was built after Trellick Tower.

It wasn't a good theory anyway.

The second reason for the diversification of the geographical areas covered by the blog is that I have now bought a bike-lock, so when cycling down to Docklands I can leave the bike and wander around on foot to examine how construction is progressing.

More on that later.

Elsewhere in the tall-buildings-averse

2007-03-29T21:33:00.000Z

I redesigned the blog a few months ago, partly to give it a london skyline theme, and partly to make it wide enough for standard size 500px Flickr photos (it does annoy me that you can't select a different default size to suit your blog, or wherever else you post them). I may have to widen the content area again though, and ignore the plight of people using small screens, as below is a video which comes in at a whopping 700px wide!

It's the latest Channel 4 ident, featuring an adulterated view of the rapidly growing Dubai skyline. If you're into idents then, idents being your thing, you would probably like to visit the blog/podcast I got it from: http://idents.tv/blog/. Why you would be into idents, beyond just going "hmm - that's clever" when they come up on your TV screen, is a mystery to me, but the blog claims to have 218 subscribers so there's evidently quite a large niche.

Apart from more buildings than there actually are being made up in Dubai in order for a '4' to spontaneously form, other interesting bits and bobs in the skyscraper world are (just one bit and one bob as it turns out) the imminent construction of a 146m tall tower in Birmingham called the V Building (pictured) and a new tower planned in China.

Birmingham is much-maligned for its architecture, but... actually - I don't really have anything to say about the new tower, other than that it looks pretty good. And that the architect says:

'However, if The V Building was in Chicago or New York, it would be just another tower to be appreciated up close, crowded by the many other skyscrapers when viewed as part of the skyline.'

I bet he'd love it if his tower was going up in New York or Chicago instead.

The left over 'bob' is a tower I just recently read about on skyscrapernews being built in Tianjin in China, which is a pretty special design. Distinctive, futuristic and elegant. I'm not sure if it'd fit in on the london skyline - whilst very modern buildings among classic style ones can be very striking, not every modern building will look good in such a setting. But anyway, it looks like the Chinese might be coming on a bit since the folly of the Shanghai bubble-boy masts. Here's a picture (click for article).

And one final trivial thing is an online jigsaw of St Pauls, Tower 42 and Waterloo Bridge.

Rocked and rolled

2007-03-26T20:43:00.000Z

I wrote a few days ago how the Lewis Media Centre at Millbank Tower were to play host to this year's battle of the bands. I included in the post this picture , ironically mocking the Centre's severely un-rocking image (unless you count a 3m tall portrait of Jeremy Paxman as rocking... which I suppose some people might. If I'm honest I'm one of those people. I call him Jeremy "The Axeman" Paxman. That's probably also what his wife calls him in bed, and I'm not sure I want to follow this train of thought any further... or do I?...)

Turns out I underestimated the event. Not only was godfather of filth Gareth Gates present, but he also made the aforementioned hand gesture.

"Some people [me?] doubted the event would succeed – from the complexities of the itinerary to ensuring all those rockers (and journalists) could be in one room at the same time without all hell breaking loose."

The battle was a journalists only contest, which brings to mind Father Ted's all priests look-alike competition (youtube video). If I was in a band of journalists we would be called 'on the record'. One of the entries went by the moniker 'the spin band', so I'm glad to see somebody followed the journalistic theme. They didn't win though. There was tough competition... from Soulscream, no less.

Foreigners and Fenchurch street

2007-03-26T19:15:00.000Z

I walked part the way home along the South Bank this evening being that it was such a nice day out.

Came across one of those human statues who had put his normal clothes back on, but still had the tell-tale silver face.

He spoke French. This surprised me. I suppose, now I think about it, it's a natural job for somebody who's moved to this country and maybe doesn't have great English. Beats digging up potatoes in Norfolk I suppose.

Apart from the fact that these human statues also seem to be popping up all over London there's not much to link that with skyscrapers, so I'll just jump...

... like this, and pretend I've been talking about buildings all along.

So, as I was saying, here are the two most pertinent points from English Heritage's case in the Walkie Talkie inquiry.

"This would become London’s ugliest and most oppressive building. Londoners have not even been asked whether they want this building in their city. "

"...larger, more monolithic and more prominent than St Paul’s Cathedral"

Not much to say about them, other than that they're spot on. Forget the foolish diagrams and appeals to world heritage status - this is the real crux of the argument.

For comedy value, here's a few choice bloopers from English Heritage's arguments (distilled from skyscrapernews' very useful news page).

[On English Heritage's proposed planning restrictions diagram] Conveniently for English Heritage this takes 20 Fenchurch Street out if it were to be adopted by the planning authorities. ... won't just take in 20 Fenchurch Street but also tall buildings on the South Bank ... counting up the gross development value ... opposing over £5 billion pounds worth of new development in London and thousands of new and much needed homes.

... the electricity requirement of keeping it cool which would be ... 57,534 [kWh] per day ... Whilst this might sound like a lot, it compares favourably to other commercial premises ... What makes the attack particularly unusual is that English Heritage have latched on to this figure, scarily huge but totally meaningless without a comparison presented.

.. attack by English Heritage lawyer ... on the lack of affordable housing within the scheme. Given it's an office building centred in the most singularly office district of London ... it's hardly surprising this aspect was neglected by the developer

Well, they made me laugh. Not out loud though.

Finally:

The planned tower is in the unique position of being called in by the Secretary of State, Ruth Kelly, for a public inquiry despite no-one having referred it. Adding to this unusual situation, is the decision by Kelly herself to fast-track the inquiry, a move that some fear has been taken so she can decide the fate of the building herself before she loses her job in the expected cabinet reshuffle this coming July.

Kelly is no fan of tall buildings or joined up thinking having previously overridden the findings of a public inquiry on Brunswick Quay as well as having campaigned in her capacity as a local MP against policies she has introduced as a minister.

Which makes me more hopeful than I was that the tower wil be rejected.

Let's put the Broadgate Tower on the map

2007-03-25T17:46:00.000Z

I'm going to try a bit of observational comedy now:

Have you ever noticed how, y'know, when they have those pictures - artist's impressions, y'know - of the difference between today's London skyline and tomorrow's, they always leave out the Boadgate Tower. (pauses for audience to chuckle in recognition). And Turkish delight - what's that all about??

Poor comedy aside (I say poor, but stuff of that caliber was good enough to get The Cowards their own Radio 4 show. I'm not going to link to a page about them as it will only increase their ill deserved fame.), it's true:

I know the Broadgate Tower is set back somewhat from the river, but you can already see it (I was only there outside the Tate last week) and it's only 2/3 its final height.

It's not as easy as fixing the New London Architecture Willis Building omission debacle as these images are generated willy-nilly by artists the length and breadth of England. But where there's a will there's a way (that's not to say I have a will).

Now, back to the comedy:

I saw this guy the other day... just walking!

If still in doubt, draw another diagram

2007-03-25T15:58:00.000Z

Yesterday's foray into diagrams and their use in guiding London planning policy (Re Walkie Talkie in particular) has inspired some further research into the area.

If you've been following Adam Curtis' so-so new documentary series castigating the UK and American governments for turning everything into targets and management speak, you may not be surprised to hear that there are such entities as "Strategic Viewing Corridors" and the "London View Management Framework." With diagrams to accompany them.

These are the strategic viewing corridors. All roads lead to Rome, but all strategic viewing corridors lead to St Paul's cathedral (well, nearly all. A handful lead to westminster and Buckingham Palace). There are 26 in all listed in the framework document. I also found a consultation document. Interesting snippets in it include:

New views in river prospects and townscape views were welcomed by heritage bodies in particular. The creation of new views does however create extra work for some of the central London boroughs.

You'll be glad to know that the London Boroughs don't have to build the new views from scratch; they just have to regulate existing ones.

Geometric definition for some views was opposed by some developers who prefer a system of qualitative visual assessment.

I bet they do.

To give an example (detailed in full in this document, which is but one from a selection looking at all the viewing corridors in equal detail), the strategic viewing corridor from Alexandra palace impacts on planning in 4 London Boroughs - including 1 which lies on the other side of the river (As it forms the backdrop). The document contains this unlikely sentence:

The view of St Paul’s Cathedral from the car park will be managed through geometric definition.

The picture above illustrates exactly what is to be preserved. If you ask me, they should have left out the real photo as it looks naff. Pink and yellow planes streaking out across London however - I'm convinced! They also have a table with lots of angles noted down in it - very proper.

Anyway, I plan to visit every single one of the viewpoints to compare the managed views and maybe pick a winner.

On to the second map. In the blue area you're not allowed to build anything more than 57 metres tall as it will interfere with the view of St Paul's (a similar area is in place for the monument). You could get by these planning regulations by building a 57m tall wall in the middle of the Thames, but I doubt that will happen. Although, who knows - maybe I've just planted a seed in the mind of some Montgomery Burns tycoon developer. Hope not.

What started yesterday as a quick round up of the Walkie Talkie trial has become a farce. I now have 30 tabs open in firefox with no end in site.

If in doubt, draw a diagram

2007-03-24T15:49:00.000Z

Last post for the day now - I'm meeting Tom in a bit to watch the footie.

In mathematics it's generally considered to be useful practice to draw a diagram to guide you towards a formal proof (Matt is doing some research on whether this is all the diagram can be based on this book - quite interesting, or so I'm told).

I don't know if English Heritage is dominated by frustrated mathematicians, but they have also come up with an instructive diagrammatical representation of the London Skyline, which they hope will lend weight to their argument that building the Walkie Talkie tower at 20 Fenchurch Street just isn't on.

Look at these two photos:

View from Waterloo Bridge

View From Waterloo Bridge With Consented buildings and 20 Fenchurch St

First picture good, second picture bad. Convinced?

Not likely.

But now look at this:

English heritage believes that structures between the cluster of tall buildings proposed for the Aldgate area and the furthest visible point of the river should remain below a visual arc drawn between the two.

A masterstroke! See how the waterflow in the river interacts with the treeline and the top of the river wall to create harmony. It's enough to make you think about actually drawing in the arrows permanently on the river, and tying a cable from the top of Bishopsgate tower to the river, which would also, through incorporation of a deathslide, make leaving work quicker and easier for those working near the top of the tower.

But, much as I like diagrams as a way of cutting out the clutter and lending some precision to the argument... the Walkie Talkie actually fits in well in this shot. It only looks out of place when you see a natural colours photo. It's not ugly because it fails to fit a geometrical form that aesthetically pleasing cityscapes must satisfy (consider Toronto's jerky profile). The Walkie Talkie is just plain ugly and ill-fitting for a whole host of reasons.

And also, isn't jsut wonderful how, coincidentally, the Bishopsgate Tower lies exactly on the ark which sorts the good towers from the bad. Surely English Heritage can see that, with such an arbitrary starting point, it's possible to make the reverses argument starting with the Walkie Talkie being in the arc, and therefore giving free reign to build really tall buildings where the Bishopsgate Tower is. Was that well explained?

And, in case you're wondering - 3-0 to England's my prediction.

Architects know best

2007-03-24T15:20:00.000Z

I was going to start this post with a jokey 'photo of the Elephant and CAstle shoping centre accompanied by a "See!"', but this is far funnier:

'It's always been a fun item, and references to the area name (taken from an olde pub) just adds to its cuteness. It even spent some years painted in a sickly pink, a huge homage to the in-joke.'

I think Charles is serious, judging by the rest of his website. Will have to return and read more some day as it looks to be thoroughly well put together. It has a piece on how Euston used to look before it looked, well, hideous.

Anyway, back to the theme - architects know best. I'm just going to compile a selection of opinions voiced by architects and architectural bodies regarding the Walkie Talkie. Then we can have some sort of head count by way of a face-off.

The property giant won support to go ahead with plans for the 39-storey tower from a range of modernist architects, reported to include Lord Norman Foster & Lord Richard Rogers.
Frank Gehry [responsible for the amazing looking building to the right] added his endorsement, telling the inquiry in a written letter that the building would represent a “great addition to the London skyline,” The Financial Times reported.
Former Riba president George Ferguson has criticised Rafael Vinoly’s designs for the ‘Walkie Talkie’ tower at 20 Fenchurch Street. Ferguson said “You can justify these buildings in London if they are exceptionally good, but this is a child’s concept,”
CABE, the government’s design watchdog, which said the tower could offer an “extraordinary public space” and “unrivalled views.”

So that's about 5-1 to the pro Walkie Talkie people... but I think man of the match must go to George Ferguson - scathing!

I do agree with him though. When I was little, me and my brother used to draw futuristic moon space stations which, come to think of it, looked just like today's Shanghai skyline. The Walkie Talkie would have fitted in perfectly, and that is not a good thing: We also drew huge man-eating monsters. Build the walkie talkie and we are but a childish step away from Godzilla style mayhem.

I've just remembered a dream I had last night. I was looking at a fort which I was sure was the Kremlin. In the middle of the fort was a big Germanic looking house stood atop a slender tower. It looked pretty cool, unlike some other top heavy buildings.

UNESCO don't like the Walkie Talkie Tower

2007-03-24T14:22:00.000Z

They have intervened by proxy - the International Council on Monuments and Sites - and in their own right into the 20 Fenchurch Street inquiry. They are also deciding 'whether to put Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and Liverpool’s docklands onto its World Heritage Danger List this summer.'

There are only 31 sites in the entire world on this list, only one of which is an architectural site in the western world. If we could get 4 then this would be quite a coup. I for one am willing to permanently ruin the view around the Tower of London in order to get one over on the Germans in the 'number of areas which are too precious (to the world) to ruin' stakes.

Seriously though, Westminster Abbey is hardly a cathedral of global note. Westminster Palace, though striking, is only a pastiche of gothic architecture. The Tower of London is far from being a unique architectural piece (plenty of other well preserved castles around) and it's heritage is surely mainly of value to Britain, not the world. Liverpool docks on the other hand are a place of great significance for global history, but the buildings and the docks are not the important thing - it's tracing the fates of all those people who left there for America and other places that matters.

Why are these places even being considered for the list? The criteria for putting a site on the danger list talk about there needing to be a risk of destruction, but the only thing in danger of destruction in London is the view, something which is not considered in the criteria for putting something on the world heritage list (or at least, not those criteria which the London buildings were put on the list for). And, lest we all forget, St Paul's - the building always at the centre of the hoo-ha - isn't even a world heritage site. There really isn't much coherence to the heritage argument against constructing tall buildings.

The trouble is that UNESCO has this worthy aim of preserving heritage, but in truth, in this age of tourism and photography, most of the rest of us only really care about the view. Some of the UNESCO's criteria for world heritage relate to outstanding architecture and 'superlative natural phenomena', but such is the clamour for protecting nice (though not globally significant) sights that they, I suppose, feel compelled to make the case for preserving the view for all heritage sites which people like looking at, even if it's not in their remit for a particular case.

To sum up - the view is worth preserving, but it's not UNESCO's place to say so.

What the hell is world heritage anyway? I do find the concept a strange one. UNESCO's criteria I imagine identify some pretty worthy things to protect (North Wales' castles, for instance), but are the North Wales castles of world heritage importance? Would world history be impoverished if they were gone? Would it be impoverished if any of the things on the list were gone? If all of them were gone? It's difficult to know what we can expect the world population to make of any of these sites other than their being beautiful and fascinating. I doubt those words are what the people at UNESCO would like heritage to be reduced to, but it's good enough for me.

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Endurance

A new home

Farewell

Signage

The fog

A Condor in the City

A waterfront is as good as a skyline

Sustainable cities

When is a skyscraper finished?

Newsflash: Prince Charles hates modern architecture!!!

Back to bike ranting

Parliament Square and Whitehall security zone

Don't fence me in

Spot the difference, Richard Rogers

Dialogue concerning construction of a cheese wedge

Snowboard - Eat fresh!

Where are YOU going?

Things move fast

Blue meanies

Doom and gloom

Keyword of the week: Does London have a nickname?

Who makes the iDents?

All work and no play

Think about it, think think about it

Broadgate Tower - an icon of our age

Why Y?

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Phew!

A novel idea

London - a global city (2)

Letters!

Better safe than sorry

London - a global city (1)

More considerate constructors

Zoning out

Citizen's band

Shapes

Why build a tower when you can build an arch

Size is everything to a mayor consumed by edifice complex - a riposte (part 1)

Size is everything to a mayor consumed by edifice complex

Erecting buildings

Beneath the skyline: Part 1

My beautiful galleria

The Devil is in the details

Baptism or How to make up names and influence people

Return of the prodigal son

Back in the saddle

My second youth

A castle under siege

How the Willis was

The internet is bad!

Hanging around at the demolition site

Property bulls and property bears

Sky high tower

Waiting for Willis

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Egos "a threat to skylines"

Cutty Sark: After the film crews left

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ULTRA BOOM

Run, run, run to the Centre Broadgate

A scaffold is for life, not just for construction

I don't see enough dead people

Two-things-only-safe

Keywords of the week

Cutty Sark/bike parallels

The white tower

Transport problems

Keyword of the week - london sky line egg

The miracle of the Olympics

28 synergies later

Church theft

Church theft

Hawksmoor's seven

Keyword of the week

Who will buy my sweet docklands building

Dribble to the sea

How wide is a piece of River Thames...

lonDon skyline
london skyLine
london skylIne
london skyliNe