Vertically challenged

St Paul’s Cathedral is quite rightly something of a national obsession. No other building has protected ‘view corridors’ as a result of legislation in 1935, when new building regulations allowed the surrounding buildings — notoriously a telephone exchange to the south — to overtop the cathedral’s cornice line. These corridors, extending like an unseen net as far afield as Richmond Hill, make architects unaccountably cross, as if they were an unfair curb on the alliance of art and Mammon. Thank God they are there, and that the tallest buildings, springing up once again like genetically modified beanstalks, are at least corralled east of Bank.

St Paul’s Cathedral is quite rightly something of a national obsession. No other building has protected ‘view corridors’ as a result of legislation in 1935, when new building regulations allowed the surrounding buildings — notoriously a telephone exchange to the south — to overtop the cathedral’s cornice line. These corridors, extending like an unseen net as far afield as Richmond Hill, make architects unaccountably cross, as if they were an unfair curb on the alliance of art and Mammon. Thank God they are there, and that the tallest buildings, springing up once again like genetically modified beanstalks, are at least corralled east of Bank.

What, then, does an architect do when asked to build in the afternoon shadow of St Paul’s east end? In 1953, Victor Heal, a decent but dull conservative, designed Bank of England Chambers on a large bombsite, completed in 1960. Not long afterwards, Modern architecture claimed a victory when similarly ‘respectful’ designs for a new Choir School were rejected and a competition held, resulting in the present design by Architects Co-Partnership. The author of the scheme was Leo de Syllas, who was killed in a car accident soon after, so it fell to another partner, my father Michael Powers, to carry out the scheme.