Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

Will no one halt the vandalising of London's skyline?

This article is more than 12 years old
Catherine Bennett
Buildings such as the Shard are proof positive that the capital has become a greedy developer's playground

The creator of London's Gherkin, Ken Shuttleworth, likes to think of his work as "outrageous". "I'd rather have controversy," the architect once said, "than produce a dull, boring building that nobody comments on."

Unesco duly commented, when it was finished, on the unfortunate way Shuttleworth's huge, flashy edifice eclipsed a humble, if quite sweet little relic called the Tower of London, a world heritage site. Conservationists were disappointed that it replaced the listed Baltic Exchange, damaged by the IRA in 1992. But the new building, commissioned by a reinsurance company, won the Stirling prize in 2004, for the greatest contribution to British architecture. Unanimously approving judges said it was "already a popular icon".

When wrangles occur over dramatic changes to the capital's skyline, the Gherkin is invariably invoked as proof that, when in doubt, shiny architectural outrageousness should trump the case for heritage and the popular aversion for more tall buildings. Only someone as idiotic as Prince Charles, you gather, would dispute that the Gherkin and its far taller successors are spectacularly appropriate emblems for a dynamic, forward-looking nation in no more need of planning regulations than it is of Viagra.

It appears, however, that Prince Charles may have found a new ally. Ken Shuttleworth has just declared that "the age of bling is over". Si monumentum requiris, don't look at Ken's Gherkin. He wants architects to abandon "crazy shapes, silly profiles and double curves". If he were designing it again, he says, the Gherkin would look "different", with less glass. Interviewed by Emily Wright for Building magazine, Shuttleworth said the market should focus instead on "beautiful, simple, rectangular forms", eg not forms like gonads – the current mayor of London's term for Shuttleworth's sloping, all-glass City Hall. The architect has discovered the modest, the plain, the energy-saving corrective to showy, all-glass buildings. "Companies no longer want to be seen spending that type of money on their HQ building as it doesn't look good," he said. "Buildings need to reflect the time they are in."

This is the world of architecture, of course; a layperson cannot be sure Shuttleworth was not just saying it to cause one of his trademark controversies or, indeed, to prepare the way for his new, lower-rise, solid-walled development at Broadgate, an HQ for the investment bank UBS that is attractively described as "an engine of finance".

But still, for Shuttleworth, that acknowledged master of architectural bling, to cancel the legacy of his own past is surely, when you try to conceive of an equivalent style reversal, up there with Katie Price denouncing pink. Except that a multitude of disappointed little girls leaves less impression on the landscape than the capital's still-advancing army of giant dicks, the emissaries, as Shuttleworth reminds us, of a time they are no longer in. Just last week work resumed on the ludicrous Pinnacle (or "Helter-Skelter"), approved in 2005 and still a "unique product", according to its rescuers, a consortium of investors intent on bringing us the tallest skyscraper in the city.

Meanwhile, in another case of retro, early 21st-century exhibitionism, the growing Shard, designed to be the highest building in Europe, persists in its incredible deformation of the London skyline. Asked for his opinion of Renzo Piano's spiked tower/obelisk, his fellow icon-maker, Shuttleworth said: "I just don't get it. I don't understand it." A principal objection appears to be its costly glassiness. "I was there the other day," Shuttleworth said, "and I can't see how they are going to make it work environmentally."

But that is missing the point. The point of the Shard is showing off, not sustainability. Timed, inevitably, for Olympics readiness, this tall object is due to light up, and have rings or something coming off it, to show the world how mighty we are once we've called in an Italian architect and Middle Eastern finance. Once construction had begun, thanks to John Prescott, in his then role of taste-arbiter for the nation, Boris Johnson hailed the building as follows: "If you want a symbol of how London is powering its way out of the global recession, the Shard is it, rising confidently up to the heavens."

Does anyone, with the possible exception of bankers, want a symbol of how London is "powering its way out of the global recession"? As is now customary, with the mayor in charge of London's aesthetics, I don't believe we were ever asked. But if, as Londoners, we'd said oh yes please, would we have chosen this import from the Dubai school of economic symbolism, erected in a place where it overturned, at a stroke of Prescott's pen, planning principles that protected the inner London skyline from speculators for half a century?

Already, viewed from what was supposed to be, even when Prescott destroyed it, a protected – even iconic – view from Hampstead Heath in north London, the Shard, "rising confidently up to the heavens", has, as predicted by all its opponents, reduced Christopher Wren's elderly competitor to an earthbound, fussy-looking nuisance. The Shard, for God's sake. Like professional entertainers – give it up for the Gherkin! The Cheesegrater! The Helter-Skelter! The latest piece of speculative crap funded by the well-loved Qatari royal family! – new towers now arrive with ready-made nicknames, possibly to preclude the invention of ruder ones, probably to advertise, in advance, their guaranteed iconic status. Anyway. In the happy time when the fate of this particular building was still uncertain, with English Heritage describing it as a "spike through the heart of historic London", and most of the public saying they were against very tall buildings, its supporters deftly aligned critics with the Prince Charles school of Toytown philistinism. Concerns about views were dismissed as ignorant nimbyism. "Only if you live in Hampstead Garden Suburb, darling," mocked one passionate Shardist, as if the thing were a shrine to low-cost housing, not greed.

Whatever architects may say about Charles's interference, his fondness for pastiche has surely been a boon for skyline trashers everywhere, allowing their critics to be stigmatised, instantly, as thick Poundburyites whose very objections to new architecture only confirmed the geriatric worthlessness of their opinions. Conversely, the transformation of the capital into a developers' playground could be portrayed by someone such as Ken Livingstone as clever and modern. That he pledged, in the absence of any skyscraping mandate, "to promote the development of tall buildings" is worth remembering, now he's up for re-election.

Even now, critics of Piano's spike are apt to dilute their heresy with some judiciously expressed devotion, to the effect that his wonderful Shard would be simply marvellous if only it were somewhere else. Unless, that is, the heretic happens also to be an architect, such as Ken Shuttleworth. You can't say carbuncle: you can say silly, crazy and bling. As moments go, this feels positively iconic.

Most viewed

Most viewed