“Wellness” is all the rage at the fancier end of modern office development. Anxious to entice valuable employees away from the comforts of working from home, or from defecting to rivals, companies offer them spas, gyms and views of greenery. Proposals for gigantic office blocks in the City of London now come garnished with shrubs and trees and other forms of urban parsley dozens of storeys up in the air. There’s a related mania for running green stuff up the outside of all kinds of buildings. All too often these plans exist more in the realm of gesture than reality, and come without full consideration as to what it actually takes for plants to flourish some distance from the ground.
The idea of achieving wellbeing through multistorey vegetation is not new. It was put into practice a half-century ago with a building known officially as Gateway House, then Mountbatten House and now Plant, more popularly known as the “Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke”. Designed by Arup Associates and the plantsman James Russell (1920-96), it provides six levels of gardens stepping up a sloping site, arranged so that its interiors would never be far from views of greenery, transporting office workers from the mess of roads and office blocks in which it stands up to a world of lush terraces that seem to flow into the surrounding hills. Created during a time when Basingstoke was a “London overspill” area – a government designation that brought with it a smidgin of the forward-looking ideals of new towns, of providing new lives for escapers from the crowded metropolis – Gateway House was to be a model enlightened workplace for the then-200-year-old paper-making company that commissioned it, Wiggins Teape.
