When a building’s construction requires the closure of a nearby airport, you know that the building is tall. But that’s the thing about the Square Mile at the moment – it’s so successful that the only way is up.
The cranes on 22 Bishopsgate (rather than the building itself) reached such a height, as the skyscraper neared completion, that they exceeded the permitted limit for City Airport, meaning that for a few short periods the airport had to halt flights. As you stand in Horizon 22, the viewing gallery that has just opened (tickets are free but booking up fast), looking down at nearby streets is like reading the A to Z. But while 22 Bishopsgate might be head and shoulders above its neighbours (912 feet, 62 storeys), there are plenty more office towers on the way.
Trading on your history isn’t enough – success depends on constant reinvention
‘Over half a million people a day come into the Square Mile to work,’ says Shravan Joshi, the City of London’s Planning and Transport Committee chair. ‘We’re now back to 85 per cent of the weekday activity from before the pandemic. Even if people stick to the “hybrid” model [working partly from home], the projected growth means we’re going to need another 20 million square feet of office space by 2042.’ The plan is to develop in two main locations: at the eastern edge (that is, near the current Bishopsgate cluster) and in the area near Ludgate Circus.
The City is reaching for the skies because it has run out of space at ground level. It isn’t like Canary Wharf, which took a ‘build it and they will come’ approach. Yes, they came – but they never really liked it. Just about anyone who’s ever worked there tells you how soulless it feels. ‘It’s true that there’s more bustle – and better food – in Canary Wharf than back in the 1990s,’ the business journalist Harry Wallop tells me. ‘But it still feels terribly ersatz. Like it is playing at being a city.’ You can’t create history in three decades. The City’s buzz is the result of centuries of activity – indeed millennia, if you go all the way back to the Romans.
As if to symbolise the Square Mile’s superiority, HSBC are moving their London headquarters from Canary Wharf to the site near St Paul’s previously occupied by BT (and 22 Bishopsgate has attracted tenants from Canary Wharf too). Shravan Joshi is keen to point out that he doesn’t see the two areas as competitors: ‘We need Canary Wharf to thrive, like they need us to thrive, and we both need the West End to thrive.’ But the City just has that magic. Walking its streets gives you a thrill, partly because they’re so narrow – you can almost feel the energy pushing the buildings ever upwards.
However trading on your history isn’t enough – success depends on constant reinvention. Just as City workers look very different from the 1950s (when future Tory politician Peter Walker was told that a condition of his employment was to wear a bowler hat to and from the office), so do City buildings. There are 20 football pitches’ worth of floor space in 22 Bishopsgate (as well as 1,000 miles of cabling), but it caters for every sort of tenant, from firms with thousands of employees right down to individuals. Freelancers can rent desk space in one of the shared areas. There’s no need for a reception desk – each tenant emails a QR code direct to their visitors, which allows access through the security barriers. ‘These days it’s really about allowing people to interact,’ says Phillip Shalless of AXA IM Alts (who manage the building on behalf of its investors). The lifts in towers like this used to restrict you to the floors occupied by your firm, but that isn’t the way here. ‘We host regular events that any of our tenants can come along to – talks and so on. There are restaurants where people can meet up, there’s a gym… It’s very different from the City of old.’ Phillip shows me the gym’s climbing wall: it’s fixed to one of the external windows, so you can look out at London as you work up a sweat. The building is dog-friendly, it has space for 1700 bikes in the basement… Peter Walker would take off his bowler hat and scratch his head.
The City’s new skyscrapers might all be tall, but no two look the same. Each has its own character and quirks. The Cheesegrater’s sloping side is to prevent it impinging on the protected view of St Paul’s from Fleet Street. The Heron Tower was named in honour of the developer’s father, HEnry RONson. The Gherkin looks nicely rounded, but amazingly it only contains one curved piece of glass – the horizontal one at the top.
Another change is that the Square Mile no longer becomes a ghost town at the weekend. It’s actually 20 per cent busier on Saturdays and Sundays than it was before Covid, after a policy of opening up to retail and leisure. The former is a return to the City’s past – Cheapside got its name because ‘chepe’ means market, and the turnings off it (Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane and so on) reflected the products you could buy there. The proliferation of hotels, though, is genuinely new. Until the 1980s the Square Mile only had one (the station hotel at Liverpool Street). Now you’ve got a choice of dozens, from the Premier Inn Hub on St Swithin’s Lane right up to the Ned.
In fact, that building – home not only to the hotel but also to several bars and restaurants – is the perfect example of the City’s rebirth. Designed in 1924 by Edwin Lutyens (hence ‘Ned’), it was originally the headquarters of the Midland Bank. The counters on which you transacted your business are now where you eat, the bank vault downstairs is now a private members’ club, and one of the original pieces of furniture still in place is the set of wooden lockers where senior staff stored their top hats. No mere bowlers for them.
The nearby Bloomberg building, meanwhile, keeps a foot in both camps, business and leisure. Specially commissioned as the European HQ of the financial media company, its 10,000 tonnes of Derbyshire sandstone are the largest stone project in the City since St Paul’s. It occupies the site where the Romans built their Temple of Mithras. During construction Bloomberg unearthed 14,000 Roman artefacts – dice, sandals, combs, even the City’s first ever written record of a transaction – some of which are now displayed in an area on the ground floor. The Temple itself has been restored in the basement. Both are open (free of charge) to the public. Throw in the bars and restaurants that occupy the structure at street level, and Bloomberg pretty well encapsulates the City’s past, present and future.
When Michael Bloomberg opened the building in 2017, he drew attention to its open-plan design, in which he had ‘always been a big believer… Walls just get in the way of communicating and working together.’ This notion, while a recent introduction to offices themselves, has always been the guiding principle of the City as a whole. Lloyd’s of London was originally a coffee house where people swapped information, and the area’s winding alleyways meant you were often bumping into friends with whom you could trade gossip. Even the design of its pubs gave London the edge over continental competitors, according to Peter Rees, the City’s chief planning officer for three decades until 2014: ‘In a Paris café you sit at a table to get served, whereas in a London pub everybody stands up, which means you’re much closer together. This is great for overhearing conversations, if you’re careful and clever. And that’s very valuable, because you can take that back to the office, put two and two together and make some money.’
‘Maybe 1,800 years from now,’ said Michael Bloomberg in that 2017 speech, ‘Londoners will discover the remains of this building, just as the Temple of Mithras was discovered here. By then, they may consider the Bloomberg Terminal as primitive as the tools that we now display in the Roman temple.’ Perhaps. What’s certain is that the Square Mile is set to maintain its genius for adapting. When it comes to change, the sky’s the limit.
Comments