A series of fortunate events brought me to a floor somewhere in the mid-twenties of London’s most acuminate skyscraper, the 72-storey, 306-metre Shard. I’d been up to the 56th floor of the Shard when it was still under construction, and marvelled at the astonishing views over the great greyish mass of London, to where the city fades out into the raggedly green vistas of the world beyond the M25.
But the vista from nearer to the top is a deceptive one: you’re so high above the city that it becomes an unreadable and amorphous mass. Down on the 20-somethingth floor, I had an angle that allowed me to grasp the great gearing of the built environment into the engine of growth in our economy. And if I’d had any doubts about what that engine was, Irvine Sellar, the developer responsible for the Shard, was right at hand to tell me. “We need,” he said, “to maintain the aspects of London that make it such an attractive destination for flight capital.” This Alan-Sugar-alike spoke without the least scintilla of irony. I’d heard the expression “flight capital” before, but never spoken with such implicit valorisation; for Sellar, flight capital was definitely a Good Thing.
Whereas Victorian London was built on the trading profits from a world-girdling empire, its 21st-century successor is being airily spun from the aerated finance frothing atop money flowing from other less stable economies. For flight capital, the important thing about the city is that it’s not St Petersburg, or Kiev, or Beijing for that matter.
It’s become a shibboleth of contemporary architectural discourse to lisp this play upon Adolf Loos: “form follows finance”. But the idea that the design of buildings is predicated upon a coefficient of investment and revenue stream is really nothing new. It certainly was applied to the great herringbone of dormitory streets lain down in London by the spec’ builders of the 19th century – and I daresay also to the construction of the Roman city walls as well.
No, what’s distinctive about the new metropolis taking shape under the spindly legs of myriad cranes is its incorporation – as a design trope – of the precise nature of its investment capital and anticipated revenue streams. Which is not to say all the money pouring into London is flight capital – far from it; a great deal of the available finance is the same sort of bullishness that was rampaging around the system before the 2007-8 crash. Seeking high returns, investors are inevitably attracted to a local economy that has seen property prices – and attendant land values – exponentially increase once more.
Looking down from the Shard along the lazy s-bend of the Thames, I was privileged by a vision of the future. The London of a quarter century hence would, without doubt, be a high-rise city; moreover, it wouldn’t be a high-rise city of the stark 20th-century form taken by so many North American downtowns (not so much row-after-row of Mies van der Rohe as thickets of rectilinear towers) but a distinctively Cockney agglutination of parametrically wave-formed glass, faux-granolithic rendering, suddenly-silvering timber cladding and good old London stock brick.
The London of the 2040s will be high, certainly – yet it will also be wide: a great sweep of mega-structures spreading from Canary Wharf in the east to Wandsworth Bridge in the west. These behemoths are already thronging on and immediately behind the embankments, with significant clusters of new high rises behind the South Bank, along the riverside between Vauxhall and Battersea, while there’s a general but insidious densification radiating from the City to the West End.
Londoners are easily transfixed by the new office blocks being built in the City itself: the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie are joining the Gherkin and the Heron Tower to form a cluster of structures that have a distinctively 21st-century appearance; these are icon-cum-logos, whose forms don’t simply embody financial constraints, but also articulate the symbolic unity of fungible objects and their branding. If Victorian goods were typically exchanged for their utility – the London docks circa 1900 being full of ships unloading such industrial precursors as phosphates, timber and cotton – then our own neo-Elizabethan products accrue value mostly because of the labels attached to them.
As it is to the Hermes scarf or the Gucci handbag so it is to the Pinnacle, the skyscraper putatively shaped like a rolled-up sheet of paper that’s currently on hold, but which will – I’ve no doubt – soon enough furl upwards. These buildings are childlike in their aspiration to impose their crude shapes on the city as a form of advertising. Their investors wish us to be drawn to their giant handbags not because they’re particularly well-designed or capacious, but simply because they’re identifiable. The rhetoric that surrounds property letting – both commercial and residential – in contemporary London is full of buzzwords such as “experience”, “excitement” and “cosmopolitan” that mask the crude facts: you’re buying a little box of ticky-tacky for millions simply because of its location within a rapidly expanding property price bubble. Moreover, you’re probably a south-east Asian or Middle Eastern investor who’s buying the little box not as a domicile, but as a magical hope chest in the confines of which your money will grow.
The most spirited – and eminent – critic of looming London has been Simon Jenkins. In a recent article for the London Standard, Jenkins pointed out that businesses are abandoning high-rise offices on the grounds that “high costs and shrunken floor plates” make them economically inefficient. The Gherkin, he observes, is bankrupt, while many of the new office towers stand empty, “their owners selling to Gulf funds and hoping one day for an upturn”.
As for the burgeoning residential towers, Jenkins concurs with me that they are “an eccentric economic microclimate or tax-evading savings parked in the sky over London”. But Jenkins is too much of a capitalist himself to accept the full and remorseless logic of the market. Good meliorist that he is, he sees the built environment as, in principle, susceptible to reason and planning – but in fact, most of London’s developmental characteristics are a function of caprice and serendipity rather than systematic thought.
The 1894 London Building Act confined structures in the centre of the city to 80 feet, and it was passed in response to the erection of Queen Anne’s Mansions, a Victorian proto-high-rise apartment block of 14 storeys, that the reigning Queen herself objected to on the grounds that it blocked her view of the Houses of Parliament. London’s low-rise aspect was a function of royal prerogative as much as defined policy; while the low-rise, low-density cottage estates that Jenkins champions came into being as the spatial correlate of a general move towards economic equality, based on the assumption that those on workers’ wages should be provided with decent and genuinely affordable homes.
The cottage estates have long since been hived off by London councils, either to their tenants (most of who sold on at a profit) or, more recently, to soi disante “housing associations” that have in fact acted as stalking horses for wholesale privatisation. No, the materialisation of capital is intrinsic to anarchic evolution of London, so much so that for anything to look significantly different, or function significantly better, an economic – and therefore political – transformation would be required of unparalleled radicalism.
Meanwhile, bubbles are shiny, translucent and easily popped – and London’s new built environment shares the same attributes. Its evanescence is as much a function of short building specifications – in many cases, 50 years or less – as it is of the febrile nature of global capital markets. Or rather, the two are once again aspects of the same phenomenon: rising land values mean developers can realise more money by demolishing existing buildings and erecting bigger ones on the same footprint. Indeed, the logic of capital accumulation means that they have to demolish the old and build the new, simply to make more money for investors.
On this problematic, the question is not if London will become a high-rise city – but how soon? Moreover, there is, so far as late capitalists are concerned, a virtuous circle in the relationship between the free flow of money and economic migrants. It would be heartening to imagine that Londoners stepped aside from the UKIP landslide in the European parliament elections because they objected to Nigel Farage’s dog-whistle politics (an ultrasonic alert to any racists listening). But the truth almost certainly is that at an unconscious level, we understand that the people fleeing here are following the money extracted – often illegally – from the faltering economies they’ve left behind, and that London’s prosperity, under the current dispensation, depends equally on high investment returns and low wages.
A friend who transplanted to Manhattan some 20 years ago once casually remarked to me apropos the skyline of her native city, “It’s as dull as ditchwater” – and one of the problems that has to be confronted squarely by critics of London’s latest form of capital instantiation is that it’s far from being ditchwater. Indeed, it’s as exhilarating as Niagara. I find the lit-up phallus of the Shard thrusting skywards such a beautiful sight that I’ve moved my bed so I can go to sleep looking at it.
Standing in the tower itself, listening to Irvine Sellar hymn the benefits of flight capital, I was even more exhilarated. Of course, when you allow your eye to zero in on the detailing – the useless postmodern furbelows, the noxiousness of ducts – the excitement rapidly subsides; however, the genius of this new form of architecture is that it defies you to regard the particular as distinct from goggling at the whole.
You might’ve thought the high modernism of the International Style tended towards “the city” becoming an undifferentiated, pre-stressed concrete whole, but in truth the very simplicity of those great mid- and late-20th-century skyscrapers meant that the eye sought to distinguish one rectilinear block from its neighbour.
The emergent London of the 21st century is the antithesis of this: the detailing is so profuse and so gimmicky that the viewer resists being ensnared by balustrades and caught up in arrases of pampas grass – her eye flees from one behemoth cartoon outline to the next, before giving up and simply goggling at the whole winking, steaming, lit-up panoply.
Lincoln Steffens notoriously said after a visit to immediately post-revolutionary Russia: “I’ve seen the future and it works.” But contemporary Londoners cannot help but feel that they’re witnessing a working future every day: the vast civil engineering projects underway in the city are facts on the ground and up in the sky, and to quote Steffen’s nemesis, Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
The visceral excitement we feel when we witness quite this much apparently purposive human activity carries the day – and the subsequent ones. How else can we possibly explain the excrescence that is the Arcelor Mittal Orbit? In any culture governed by a Platonic and aestheticised public ethic this would be pulled down by a baying mob, while Anish Kapoor would be burnt on the mangled and steely bones of his own hubris.
The curious thing is that in a city in which the construction of 250 new high rises within the next decade is being seriously mooted, there’s no real sense of progress. The high-rise boom that began in Chicago in the late 19th century was accompanied by vaulting propaganda, and a sense that these towers were implicit in a human eschatology, one that would inevitably culminate in the unification of heaven and earth.
Post 9/11 the skyscraper has been purged of its theological associations: Babel was indeed built, and Islamicist terrorists took God’s part and knocked it down. London’s new up-thrust is evanescent, translucent and, even to those who work and live in it, strangely insubstantial. Buildings designed by hand, using pens, pencils, paper and rulers retained an element of the haptic – touched in the making, they were grasped once built.
Contemporary structures, conjured up in virtual space by CAD programmes, also bear the paradoxically insensate impress of their origination: the mirrored windows of 1980s office blocks were the precursors of today’s screen-based city, wherein facades have the queasy permeability of VDUs, while windows and doorways resemble so many USB sockets which are entered and exited not by living, feeling people but by their avatars: time-impoverished workers wearing earphones, walking with their eyes locked on their mobile computing devices, and unaware of the context within which they operate, only of their GPS-plotted location.
Yes, New London is a city mediated by the technology of bi-directional digital media – it’s this that gives it its intangible atmosphere and disorienting air. But at least there’s one thing we have to be grateful for: the new technology has banished that estate agents’ fiction “village London”. No longer can neighbourhoods be spuriously created in order to support property prices, for the entire centre of the city has become an undifferentiated and colloidal mass of semi-solidified financial liquidity. I call it “jelly London”.
Writing in his magisterial work The Production of Space (which, although published in 1974, was eerily prescient), the French Marxist social historian Henri Lefebvre observed that cities were the concretisation of markets by means of enacted networks. “The corresponding buildings, in the towns, bear material testimony to this evolution. Thus social space, and especially urban space, evolved in all its diversity – and with a structure far more reminiscent of flaky mille-feuille pastry than of the homogeneous and isotropic space of classical (Euclidean/Cartesian) mathematics.”
However, if old London was just such a flaky pastry – which is what gave it its indefinable “charm” – then the paradox of its successor city is that it’s an image of the mille-feuille rather than the real biscuit. The privatisation of public space continues apace, with new developments sectioning off parts of the city and subjecting them to rule by security guards who patrol their precincts, checking out that everything is running smoothly in the chain coffee shops where mille-feuille pastry is sold.
You might imagine that such a state of affairs would depress me – yet it doesn’t. London has been known as the Great Wen for centuries: not so much a city as a giant purulent infection on the body of languishing England. The city’s capacity for unrestrained growth was expressed laterally for most of its history – now its being vertically (and virtually) articulated.
Yet it’s precisely London’s slack planning, and banjaxed Bojo governance, that give cause for hope rather than despair. If the city’s relentless burgeoning is currently the solidest possible example of the contradictions implicit in late capitalism, then it may well also be the case that – as Marx foresaw in The Communist Manifesto – “All that is solid melts into air.”
Will Self is speaking at Kings Place, London N1 tonight as part of the London Festival of Architecture. The event is sold out.
• London's skyline, before and after – an interactive guide
