Some time between now and the 20th of this month, Michael Gove is due to make one of the more momentous planning decisions of recent times. In his capacity as secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, he has to determine whether Marks & Spencer can or cannot demolish its flagship store in Oxford Street, London, and replace it with a new office and retail development, following a public inquiry into its proposal. What is at stake is the effect on climate of the demolition and replacement of old buildings.
Construction requires colossal amounts of energy and causes vast emissions, facts that have led to the belated realisation that it is better wherever possible to renovate rather than rebuild. The most sustainable building is the one that is already there, as the now-fashionable saying goes. In the case of M&S it would be perfectly viable to keep and renovate the current building – a revamped version could be up and running and earning the company income if it hadn’t chosen a different route. If Gove is the slightest bit serious about reducing the country’s climate emissions, he should refuse permission to the rebuild.
Sheffield City Council’s recently revealed plans to reuse the city’s former John Lewis store suggest that there are alternatives to demolishing out-of-date retail. Meanwhile, a mile or so to the north-east of the Oxford Street M&S, another high-profile stack of building materials – embodied carbon and embodied energy, to use the technical terms – faces possible removal to landfill and replacement. This is the 36-storey Euston Tower, once the home of Capital Radio, one of a triad of 1960s tall buildings stretched along Tottenham Court Road, the other two being the BT Tower and Centre Point. An elegant-enough rectangular composition wrapped in greenish glass, it is the least glamorous of the three.
Here, the developers British Land, one of largest property companies in the country, working with the Danish architects 3XN, the British practice DSDHA and engineers Arup, have reviewed the options for keeping the building and has come to the conclusion that it can retain 25% of the old structure, in the form of its foundations, basement and central core. The floors, columns and glass cladding of the building, it says, will have to go.
This is progress relative to M&S’s proposals, but it also shows how challenging it is to keep old buildings whenever possible. Simon Sturgis, an expert on sustainable building design, quotes the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney to the effect that the climate emergency requires a complete rewiring of the economy. The same, he says, is true of construction. The Euston Tower plans are more thoughtful than most, but they don’t constitute such rewiring.
British Land’s arguments go like this. The old tower is obsolete and awkward. It has low ceiling heights and current standards require more lifts than it now has. Inserting new shafts is tricky, as it is impossible to punch holes in the tower’s idiosyncratic structure without removing larger quantities of concrete than is needed for the openings alone. The outer skin, energy-inefficient and worn out, needs replacing in any event.
Given these constraints, it might make sense to convert the tower to flats, which don’t require such high ceilings as offices, but British Land says that the costs of doing so makes this option unviable, unless it compromises the London Borough of Camden’s requirements for affordable housing. Better, it argues, to rebuild the floors with more generous dimensions, increasing their area as well as their height, to provide top-quality office space, accommodation for startups and laboratories for the booming life sciences industries. It also promises to break down barriers between these industries and the sometimes underprivileged residents of local housing estates, with the help of a “civic space”, open to all, in the new building and programmes of engagement.
British Land says it will use sophisticated techniques to recycle the aluminium and glass from the old cladding so that it can be reused as high-quality building materials, and to remove the old concrete slabs and beams in such a way that they can be reinstalled. The development would be designed to last, such that it would not have to be wastefully redone in the near future. It would benefit from the company’s commitment to a “net zero carbon portfolio” by 2030, which includes a programme for offsetting, on its own property and elsewhere, the carbon costs it incurs.
So British Land is making some serious efforts on embodied energy and carbon, in ways that similar companies, a few years ago, would not. Many still don’t. But it’s nonetheless hard to be confident that the removal of 75% of the Euston Tower is, in terms if sustainability, the best available option. We have to take British Land’s word for it and accept all the assumptions that it and its consultants use. If there were a law that said it had to keep the fabric come what may – as is the case with some historic buildings protected by listing – would it not find a way to make it work?
There is no such law, nor much by the way of policy, beyond some rather general statements by some planning authorities, including the London Borough of Camden and the Greater London Authority. While building regulations have much to say on the energy efficiency of buildings once they’re built, they’re silent about the energy consumption and emissions that go with construction.
So there’s a void, on a subject of huge national and global importance, in which property companies, if they choose, take the lead. It’s much better that they do than that they don’t, but there’s a limit to what businesses, ultimately driven by their own interests, will achieve. It also requires leadership from national government – which Gove, who has expressed some environmental concerns, could conceivably initiate – to bring about the kind of transformation of which Sturgis speaks.
