From some angles, it looks like a giant toilet seat in the sky. From others, it looks like a big tongue, sticking out to lick crumbs off the neighbouring Cheesegrater. Or, in the words of William Upton KC, member of the City of London Corporation’s planning committee: “It looks like one of those plastic spoons we used to get in cheap station cafes that you sort of swirl your coffee with.”
Whatever allusion you prefer, this swollen white protrusion – set to hold a “podium garden” aloft, 40 metres above the street – is one of the more contentious features of the proposals for the tallest new tower planned for the City. The designs were expected to be rubber-stamped, after being recommended for approval by planning officers. But earlier this month, after a marathon three-and-a-half hour meeting, the planning committee voted to defer its decision, requesting “minor adjustments” be made to the 310-metre tall skyscraper’s ground floor public realm.
Making tweaks to this behemoth is like fiddling with a toilet seat while the bathroom burns. The design doesn’t need minor adjustments, but a wholesale rethink. It is the latest, and biggest, of an ever-expanding crop of towers that are inflated to the very limits of what timid restraints the City tries to impose, together bidding to swallow up the last gulps of street space and sky remaining in the Square Mile.
The project, for Singaporean developer Aroland Holdings, is the work of Eric Parry, architect of a previous scheme for the same site. That version was more sober, a slender square shaft, rising to almost the same height, its facades cross-gartered with steel braces, lending it the nickname the Trellis. The new design looks as if the building has returned after an intensive few years on a weight-gain diet. If the former iteration respected the public space of St Helen’s Square beneath it, this one has gobbled it up: its footprint would cover 29% of the square, while the lolling tongue looms over the rest. Now too fat for its stylish braces, the building’s lumpen flanks are expressed as crude stacks of office floors, punctuated by the occasional garnish of greenery. It has yet to receive a nickname, like the Gherkin, the Can of Ham and the Scalpel before it. How about the Paunch?
The chair of Lloyd’s of London, based in Richard Rogers’s famous cathedral of steel pipes across the way, has said the project “would rob the City of a really important convening space”. Historic England said it would “seriously degrade” the public space around it, encroach on the two Grade-I listed churches either side, and cast the streets into near-permanent shadow.
At the planning meeting, Parry defended his toilet-spoon-shaped floating garden as “a perambulation” that would allow people to see the surrounding buildings “at this privileged level”. Less poetic words were said about the fact that the new design has expanded the floor area by about 30%, bloating the Paunch to its limits.
It is a greedy strategy that has been deployed before. A little to the west stands the City’s biggest beast to date, the colossal tombstone of 22 Bishopsgate, designed by PLP Architecture. It contains a whopping 19 hectares (48 acres) of floor space over 62 storeys, forming an 80-metre-wide cliff face that dominates all views of the London skyline. Its design is too banal to receive a popular moniker, but one critic aptly called it the Wodge.
Its history might sound familiar. The same architects (before they split off from the US giant KPF) had previously won permission for a tower known as the Pinnacle, which began construction in 2008, but it was swiftly credit-crunched, leaving a partly built concrete lift shaft on the site for years. The site was bought by Lipton Rogers in 2015 for the staggering sum of £300m, funded by a consortium led by French company Axa Real Estate. They asked the architects to remove the costly swirling forms and add 30% more floor space, expanding the building outwards until it butted up against its neighbours, and upwards until it hit the flight path of passing jets.
The Wodge and the Paunch represent the ultimate, corpulent conclusion of the City’s free-for-all attitude to planning. A few precious views of St Paul’s dome must be preserved, but pretty much anything else goes – as long as there is a “public” space somewhere high up in the building, usually accessed via airport-style security. Places with a history of tall buildings, such as Manhattan, have strict regulations to ensure daylight will still reach the streets, but London has nothing of the sort. The result is a scrum of steroidal extrusions sprouting from the City’s medieval tangle of little lanes, each developer filling their plot and inflating their towers to the maximum.
The one thing that tries to shape the mess is the vaguely defined notion of the “City cluster”, guided by an imaginary “jelly mould” placed over the skyline. The plan was for a series of “foothill” buildings that would gradually rise to a mountainous peak, but this picturesque notion was long ago scuppered by the arrival of the Walkie Talkie, sprouting outside the zone earmarked for tall buildings. It was justified by the chief planner at the time, Peter Rees, as “the figurehead at the prow of our ship”, with a “sky garden” where you could stand to look back at the “engine room” of the Square Mile. But it unleashed the inevitable: the area between the Walkie Talkie and the cluster is rapidly being filled in, congealing the skyline into a single solid lump.
The streets of the City below now feel darker, windier and meaner, as public space, and the air and light above it, is relentlessly swallowed. Once it’s gone, it won’t come back.
Oliver Wainwright is the Guardian’s architecture and design critic
