Read the annual Athenaeum Lecture by Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, former Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, as delivered on Monday 14th July.

I’m very grateful to Chris Dyson, architect and member of the Athenaeum, for suggesting that I might give a talk about some aspect of the architecture of the City.  I should say immediately that I have decided to concentrate not on London as a whole, but on the City itself — the Square Mile, the area of London under the jurisdiction of the City of London Corporation with the Bank of England and St. Paul’s Cathedral at its heart; and that I am not showing illustrations, but hope that most of the buildings are sufficiently familiar to you for you to be able to see them in your mind’s eye.  

 

I should also say that I have almost no formal qualifications for doing this, other than the fact that I am a resident of East London and when you step out of the front door of our house in Stepney, you look westwards towards the skyline of the City.  One used to see the Gherkin prominently framed at the west end of Whitechapel High Street; but, during COVID-19, this was replaced by the rising tower of 22, Bishopsgate — a huge and, at the time, I thought very sinister tower block which was originally designed before the financial crash in 2005 by the American firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox, was redesigned in 2013, and then, interestingly, reduced in height in 2017 because of anxieties about low-flying aircraft crashing into it on the flightpath to London City Airport.  I discovered, which I should probably have known, that the City authorities had long ago embarked on a fairly aggressive policy of building upwards as a result of a changed policy towards high-rise building, not just in the City itself, but all over London, under John Prescott and Ken Livingstone, both of whom were, perhaps unexpectedly, great enthusiasts for skyscrapers as an expression of London’s economic dynamism. 

 

Since during lockdown, I had a great deal of extra time to investigate the politics of city planning and since I was asked to write a monthly column about architecture for The Critic, what follows is my attempt to understand what has been happening, which, as I have discovered, is far from straightforward, owing to the opacity of the City’s planning procedures, the length of time it takes for buildings to emerge from planning, and the lack of detailed public discussion of the City’s policies.  I want to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the City’s current architectural policy in terms of long-term urban planning and development and its impact on those of us who, even if we don’t live in the City, experience it both from a distance and at street level.

 

Let me start with the arguments in favour of what has happened.

It’s obvious that London, and the City in particular, is involved in a global competition to attract, and more especially, retain international businesses in a highly competitive international environment where companies will locate wherever it is best for trading and for their employees.  There is always the threat that multinational banks and insurance companies, which have long been at the heart of Britain’s prosperity, now joined by some of the tech companies and some so-called SMEs (small and medium-sized business enterprises), might migrate to Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva and perhaps also now Milan, particularly since Brexit when it has become more difficult to move across frontiers outside the EU.  The need to attract international businesses to London is a clearly a pretty cut-throat business and the City in recent years has felt under pressure owing to the growth, not least, in rival London areas of office development — above all, Canary Wharf, but also, more recently, newer neighbourhoods like King’s Cross where the headquarters of Google is located. 

 
The big multinational companies all require what is called Class A office space: a prominent location; the highest specification of building fit-out; a grand entrance and lobby; on-site places to eat and a gymnasium and, increasingly, therapeutic outdoor spaces as well.  Essentially, these facilities are much harder to provide in old office buildings where the ceilings are too low, the scale of the internal rooms often too small, and they are not sufficiently flexible to allow the layout which office managers now like with big open floor plans, big windows and enough open plan space to enable an appropriate balance between desk space, meeting rooms, and so-called break-out space.  

 

As a result, there is a relentless drive in the square mile of the City to create new office buildings in an area close to the main railway stations — Cannon Street, Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street.  Since there is little available ground space, old buildings need to be taken down after roughly thirty years and new buildings constructed to maximise the available space, which means building high.  Many of the policies of the City’s planning committee under the chairmanship of Tom Sleigh and of its planning department under its Director, Gwyn Richards, are devoted, for extremely good reasons, to figuring out how to allow developers to construct as much new high-quality office space in the very limited confines which are available, essentially in an area between Liverpool Street in the north, Broadgate in the west, Aldgate to the east, and the Thames marking the boundary to the south.  They have given permission to an immense number of new buildings over the last two decades, beginning with relatively low-rise buildings like the Gherkin, designed by Norman Foster in the late 1990s and given planning permission by John Prescott in July 2000, and the so-called Walkie-Talkie, a wilfully eccentric building which maximises its airspace, designed by the late Rafael Viñoly; but they are getting ever bigger and taller with 22, Bishopsgate now complete, work begun on 1, Undershaft, designed by Eric Parry, which will be the tallest building in Europe, and permission given to other equivalently large projects all in the same neighbourhood, essentially in order to be able to fill in the gaps in what is intended to be a coherent cluster occupying the eastern part of the City, a new business district equivalent in scale and character to Wall Street in Manhattan, the business districts of Boston and Toronto, and the cities in the far east which are viewed as models of free enterprise and either as a threat to London or, alternatively, as a model for its future development.

 

It’s extremely hard to argue against this logic and I’m not convinced that I want to.  Maybe it is sensible to accept what has happened: that the City has encouraged the creation of a Central Business District in order to maintain its global competitiveness.  I would only add three elements of mild caution to maintaining this level of relentless new development in the future.  

 

The first is an obvious one, and the City, at least in terms of its public policies, is certainly very alert to it: that is, that the policy is very wasteful in environmental terms.  It requires ripping up and redeveloping areas of the City constantly, such that Broadgate, a high prestige development by Stanhope in the 1980s, is already in the process of being radically redeveloped with much larger new office developments designed, for example, by architectural firms such as Make and Hopkins.  There is currently a plan to redevelop Minster Court, a gigantic development near the Tower of London which was designed in the 1980s in a faux gothic style.  Driving or walking through the City often makes one feels that it is a permanent building site.  The reason it feels that way is that in many ways it is.  The shift to the refurbishment of existing office blocks is slow and one does not currently see many signs of a change in the policy of constant renewal and radical redevelopment, however much the City may pay superficial lip service to policies of regeneration and renewal.

 

The second reservation is that I’m not convinced it’s clear that the world of work will continue to require such monolithic office developments in the ways that big financial and legal institutions have in the past.  As I understand it, some of the changes to the patterns of work which happened during COVID may, to some extent, have remained more permanent, although this is open to dispute: that is, that the nature of office work has shifted from desk-based work to using offices more for meetings and socialization.  For example, I was interested to see that Julius Baer, a prominent German private bank has taken on the new building in 8, Bleeding Heart Yard, designed by Groupwork and recently given a national award by the RIBA.  The bank presumably preferred to be in a building close to Faringdon Station with more character than the great anonymous corporate headquarters which companies looked for in the 1980s.  The quality and character of workspace and the ways in which staff move about and interact socially may be at least as important in the future as huge floorplates with serried rows of anonymous work stations, given that technology is now so lightweight.

 

The third reservation is that it is obvious that putting all activities within these immense office blocks is inclined to drain the surrounding neighbourhoods of street life, so that the wider quality of the urban environment suffers.  Increasingly, new office blocks have gyms, shopping malls, small roof-top and terrace gardens, basement bicycle parks and exercise facilities within the building itself so that there is no incentive to go outside during the day-time.  The streets and alleyways of the City thereby lose their character over time, and the old-established restaurants, like Simpson’s Tavern off Cornhill, which has existed since 1757, close.

 

But, as I said, I am not convinced that it is sensible to waste a lot of time in mourning what has happened in terms of the creation of a high-rise area of the City.  It is what it is and if this way of working suits the huge number of office workers migrating daily into the City, then I can see the logic of allowing the continuation of the current policy of building ever higher in a contained neighbourhood between Broadgate and Aldgate.  Maybe over time the cluster of office blocks will cohere better than they do now, as is planned.  Nor would I dispute that some of the new office developments are designed to a very high standard.

 

Instead of focusing this evening on the eastern half of the City, I want instead to get you to think about the future development of its northern half — the area north of St. Paul’s, encompassing St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield Market, the great and wonderful Norman church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Cloth Fair, immediately to the north of St. Bartholomew’s church, and, although it is technically just outside the boundaries of the City in Islington, the historic Charterhouse which is remarkably well preserved and occupies a big area of land as well as a range of historic buildings north of Charterhouse Square.  This is an area which has maintained its historic character much better than other parts of the City, partly because of the presence of the meat market itself which, if you look at the model of London held in the London Centre next to Guildhall, occupies a big area, unexpectedly nearly equivalent in the area that it occupies to the adjacent Barbican.  The meat market and the hospital have between them discouraged new development, and the historic character of the area is helped by the proximity of Hatton Garden to the east, traditionally an area of small-scale warehouses and workshops for the jewellery trade, and Clerkenwell to the north, which has likewise been an area of craft and light industry, including, more recently, a large number of major architectural practices, including the offices of Grimshaw, Wilkinson Eyre and the late Zaha Hadid.  

 

But, it may not have escaped your attention that the meat traders are now due to move out some time in 2028 or 2029 — the exact terms of their departure have, I think, still to be finally negotiated — and this means that there is quite a big area of the City immediately west of the Barbican which awaits plans as to what will — and should — happen to it.  This provides an immense opportunity as well as, I suspect, a considerable risk and it is on the development opportunities faced in this area that I want to focus tonight.

 

There was talk before the pandemic of the City creating what was called Culture Mile, which was the idea of attracting other cultural institutions in the area alongside the new Museum of London which is in the process of being relocated in the group of buildings at the west end of Smithfield Market formerly occupied by the General Market, which will be home to the museum’s permanent galleries, still apparently due to open next year, and the adjacent 1960s Poultry Market which will house the museum’s learning centre.  At that time, there was the plan to relocate the London Symphony Orchestra to a vast new London Centre for Music, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfrew, but this has now been dropped, replaced by a monster new development consisting mainly of offices which has been given planning permission and will tower over the adjacent Barbican, an indication that if ever there is an argument between development and conservation in the City, the opportunities of new development seem invariably to have the upper hand.  

 

The talk now is of what is described as ‘Destination City’, which is the idea of encouraging the City to think of itself as a tourist destination, as well as a business district, with more of a mixed economy, including cultural amenities.  This was viewed, perfectly sensibly, as a way of attracting businesses back into the City post-COVID.

 

Although the City is clearly investing hugely in the development of the west end of Smithfield Market, it is not yet clear, so far as I am aware, exactly what will happen to the old market buildings themselves, although outline plans are being developed by Studio Egret West who were appointed in 2019, as their website describes it, ‘to explore potential future uses for the Grade II* listed East and West Smithfield Market buildings, the associated basement areas, and the separately-listed Grade II Rotunda ramp’.

 

Let me outline what I understand are currently regarded as the key possibilities in terms of the future use of Smithfield Market after the market traders have moved out, which will obviously be absolutely key to the future development of this area and the maintenance of its existing historic character, including the nineteenth-century market buildings themselves, designed by Sir Horace Jones, the architect of Tower Bridge.

 

One possibility, obviously, would be to keep its historic association with food and trading and convert it into a massive food hall, an equivalent to Borough Market, but north of the river.  Borough Market has been extraordinarily successful in terms of attracting visitors, currently said to be over 20 million a year, more than three times the number of visitors to the British Museum.  There seems to be an apparently limitless appetite for what one might regard as gastronomic destinations, not only in this country, but internationally, as is evident in Eataly, the vast food emporium which has opened next door to Liverpool Street Station, the Time Out Market in Lisbon, and the enormous growth in farmers’ markets throughout London.  This is the option which is favoured by Studio Egret West in their current proposals and it could obviously provide an appropriate solution, retaining the historic association of the buildings with food.

 

A second possibility, I know, since I was involved in preliminary discussions about it, would be to create a new exhibition centre.  It would be possible.  It will be interesting to see how V&A East manages, when it opens its new exhibition building in Stratford next year, after opening its wonderful and very successful new open storage centre on the east side of the Olympic Park at the end of May.  But I am also aware of the increasing costs of shipping works of art which is making big exhibitions, for example at the Royal Academy, harder to mount and the environment for mounting big, popular exhibitions in London has become profoundly competitive with Tate, the British Museum, and the National Gallery all competing to stage blockbuster exhibitions; and there would need to be a staff and a system of organization to mount big exhibitions, which would require a big investment which the City is unlikely to want to make.  

 

A third possibility is to establish the market halls as what Studio Egret West describes as ‘a creative-industry hub which could host calendar events such as fashion week and design festivals under one roof’.  But who would run it and how would it be financed in order to ensure that there was a coherent sense of  public programme, rather than it just being just another version of Kensington Olympia or Excel or, indeed, Somerset House ?  

 

I favour the idea that it might be used for exhibitions of new architecture and design, including the possibility that it could also house an Architecture Museum, something which London currently conspicuously lacks in contrast to much smaller cities like Rotterdam and Basel.  Of course, I am aware that the RIBA is developing its 1930s headquarters in Portland Place as what they are calling ‘A House of Architecture’.  It will indeed have exhibition space on its ground floor.  But they are currently looking for somewhere to show and display their wonderful historic collection of architectural drawings and models, having terminated their agreement to share storage with the V&A.  The new V&A East Storehouse, designed, like the London Music Centre by Diller Scofidio + Renfrew, has demonstrated how museum stores can be re-invented in a way which is brilliantly exciting and adventurous.  It feels to me as if there is a tremendous opportunity for the imaginative development of Smithfield Market, which could be a way of diversifying the economy of the City and giving the north-east part of it a very different urban character — more historical, more attractive to tourists, an opportunity to attract tourists and encourage them to explore the neighbourhood after visiting St. Paul’s.  After all, tourists come to London from North America and the Far East not to see a city which looks like the cities they have back home, but a city which still has buildings a thousand years old.

 

Now, all of this may already be obvious and well known to the City’s planning department and civic leaders, including Chris Hayward, the City’s current policy chairman and his successor.  But, in the development of the City over the last thirty years, there have invariably been tensions between conservation and new development.  For perfectly understandable reasons, new development has won out in the battle of ideas, as one sees in the current plans for the development (or, as I would see it, the over-development) of Liverpool Street Station which involve introducing a vast amount of high-rise new office development as a way of simply modernising the station.  

 

In looking at Smithfield and its surrounding neighbourhood, I think that the pendulum needs to swing back to the protection and preservation of its historic character and to developing the back streets round Cloth Fair and Charterhouse Square in order to maintain their character and to resist the temptations of new office development.  This means adjusting the current model of the City’s development which is developer-led.  There needs to be a more holistic and forward-looking narrative as to how to maintain and develop the City’s historic character, so that it is more like Paris, Zurich and Milan, which are our competitors in terms of providing an attractive historical environment for offices, instead of following the far eastern model of urban development of Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong.  

 

We need to maintain more of the historic fabric of the City, which is what in the past has given it its special character.