A Japanese developer has announced it will demolish a new tower of luxury flats in Tokyo it was weeks from completing. The reason? The 10-storey development was blocking beautiful views of Mount Fuji. The idea a developer would reach such a decision in Britain is inconceivable. In London, flats are usually built to make a profit. If they have a beautiful view, good luck to those buying them. To hell with anyone else’s beauty.
One of what we assume was the Sunak government’s last decisions was Michael Gove’s greenlighting of a huge 20-storey concrete slab that is about to rise on the banks of the Thames next to the National Theatre. It is hideous, and will dominate the once-glorious view of St Paul’s cathedral from Waterloo Bridge. Paradoxically, its developer is the Mitsubishi Corporation.
Beauty is a word you never hear in British election campaigns. They are a festival of philistinism, about money and little else. In Tokyo, the dignified regulation of the public sector matters. Maintaining the beauty of the environment is not a fey, nimby fad, but a duty expected of government in the public’s interest and pleasure.
Cut to the Thames, a few miles west from Gove’s slab. The current collapse of planning control in the capital has seen two Nine Elms towers rise almost 60 storeys, reducing Big Ben to the size of a toothpick in comparison. Last week, another “luxury” monster was announced up-river, next to Battersea Park. The company behind the scheme is a subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management, run by an American billionaire, Stephen Feinberg, reportedly a friend of Donald Trump. The tower will have as much to do with relieving London’s “housing crisis” as might his friend’s tenancy of the White House.
These towers now litter the Thames, mostly foreign-owned and empty. A Guardian survey of one Vauxhall tower revealed just 10% of occupants on the electoral register. The new Battersea tower could hardly be more out of place. It will soar as a ghostly presence over the visually delicate neighbourhood of Chelsea, much as Nine Elms soars over Pimlico. It will also tower over the secluded acres of the park and continue the conversion of the Thames into an urban canyon.
I cannot imagine another world city that would permit such visual outrages. Parisians laugh with derision at what has been done to London’s skyline. Romans are astonished. Americans ask, but who is in charge? No one consults London’s citizens in any meaningful way on these planning decisions. They merely illustrate the arrogance of modern developers and their architects and the impotence of politicians. They are visible assertions of the power of greed.
The reason for London’s peculiar chaos is that all planning permissions go to local boroughs which need council tax revenue, paltry though this now is. Each borough’s philistine planning committee craves the glamour of its own Canary Wharf. High-buildings policy in the capital is supposedly overseen by the mayor, at present Sadiq Khan. Like his predecessors, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, he has no sense of beauty. Government ministers also refuse to interfere, either from a similar philistinism or because their party coffers are stuffed by the building lobby.
In Tokyo, we see democracy working. The Fuji affair is that of a community demanding that the beauty of its surroundings be respected by elected authority. Yes, it is an intervention in the free market – but one made to a higher purpose, that of a compromise between development and aesthetics.
The debate on planning has timidly raised its head in the election campaign, but it assumes that housing supply depends on developers’ profits. In London, the Thames shore is lined with towers – 20, 30, 40 of them – because they all appear as “homes” in the statistics, even when kept empty. Many, if not most, are marketed abroad, and lie as title deeds in bank vaults. There is no attempt to regulate these vacant buildings, such as forcing their subletting or banning foreign ownership, as happens in cities abroad. The towers are totems of planning anarchy, of greed is good. All Labour’s Keir Starmer can say is that he wants to “bulldoze” planners and make them even more impotent.
Towers can be beautiful, especially when clustered and designed as a group, but they are for the rich, and have nothing to do with housing need. London’s Shard is handsome, but it has sucked the life out of its surrounding streets. Towers do not generate communities. They are not “green”. They require costly servicing and are unsuitable for families. Above all, they are incompatible with street life, which, as Jane Jacobs famously said, holds the essence of urban vitality.
Realising more homes is about regulating the current housing market – especially in concentrating on its rented sector. It is not about fighting over green belts and “my back yards”. No one can drive through England’s millions of derelict “brownfield” acres and demand they be left idle, while the Chilterns become housing estates and the Thames a tunnel of towers.
The sadness is that no British politician has the guts to tell Mitsubishi to show London the deference to beauty demanded in Japan.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
