I love towers and hate towers. I love those of Siena and San Gimignano and the skyscraper clusters of Manhattan and Dubai. I admire the design of London’s Canary Wharf, and of the Shard, if only it had not been dumped on Bermondsey. I do not love the ugliness now being scattered at random along the banks of the Thames or the squalor of London’s skyline. As art historian Vince Scully said of New York, he once “entered the city like a god; now one scuttles in like a rat”.
We have seen nothing yet. The latest survey from New London Architecture, the only body monitoring the city’s towerscape, is nothing short of sensational. At the turn of the century, the metropolis had some 30 towers over 20 storeys. Two years ago 115 were planned or under construction. Now, according to NLA, a staggering 510 are proposed. No plan for this proliferation has ever been published. No mayor has ever put it to the voters. Unlike any other European country, skyscrapers can go up wherever developers want, provided only that they do not spoil a view of St Paul’s Cathedral. It is “wild west” planning.
The capital is not alone in England. Manchester is facing a 40-storey slab, which will loom over the Victorian streets like something from outer space, while acres of inner suburb lie derelict. In Bristol a single 26-storey tower is being allowed next to Castle Park, in a city where nine storeys is supposedly the limit. Most astonishing of all, a 25-storey tower is proposed for the heart of ancient Norwich. These cities should be struck off the tourist itinerary.
Ever since the turn of the millennium, skyscrapers have acquired “iconic” status as harbingers of wealth, even if much of that wealth is funk money from foreign dictatorships. They are loved by virility-obsessed mayors. Ken Livingstone wanted to ape Manhattan. Boris Johnson went to Malaysia in 2014 to promote his Battersea towers as “inward investment”, as if an empty tower was a machine tool factory. In the same cause, Liverpool 10 years ago wanted 50 towers, some covered in wind turbines. Leeds proposed two 54-storey towers to signify “civic spirit and economic zest”. Birmingham wanted 10; Croydon five. A pillar of luxury flats seemed glitzy, glamorous, macho.
These towers have nothing to do with housing need or land shortage. Almost all are “luxury residential” and, at least in London, investments with few permanent residents. Figures are obscure, but most estimates put 60% of prime London sales going to foreign buyers, most as “buy to leave”. A tower is a developer’s “signature”, easy to sell at the property auctions that crowd hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong. The gargantuan Battersea power station site even has a Malaysia Square to attract investors.
In 2016 a Guardian investigation revealed that at the 50-storey tower in Vauxhall – which even the planners rejected until mysteriously overruled by John Prescott – just 10% of occupants were on the electoral register. No one can tell what will happen to these investments when the current property dip in London bites. The assumption must be that many of the blocks will experience the usual cyclical slump, moving into multi-occupancy and possibly social housing. The industry says service charges will stop this, and a downturn will make little difference as many flats are just nest eggs for laundered cash. So dumb is British planning that these are still classed as “meeting housing need”.
The virtue of skyscrapers to investors is precisely why they are so damaging to city vitality. They are locked, gated, anonymous and family-hostile. No one cares if they are empty or blight the surrounding communities. And they have little to do with the much-vaunted “densification” of British cities. London may boast the lowest housing densities in Europe – the LSE’s density chart puts central London at just a quarter of central Paris. But even if they were full, the towers rarely offer higher densities than traditional Victorian terraces in their neighbourhoods. The aborted “Paddington pole” had fewer units than a rival street-based plan.
Britain’s urban housing market is conditioned by its profligacy in its use of buildings. High stamp duty and a failure to tax living space have produced its biggest housing failure: underoccupancy. They are a growing disincentive to downsizing. Britons occupy 2.5 rooms each, as against 1.5 in the 1980s. The way to galvanise the housing market is not to build towers; it is to tax property and end stamp duty.
As for alternative forms of urban renewal, there is no mystery. Anyone seeking thoughtful “high-density, low-rise” need only go to London’s King’s Cross. Here is development where smart planning has delivered a fusion of old and new, work and play, nature and community, at some of the highest densities in the capital. Towers are an irrelevance.
An American friend gazing at the horizon from Waterloo Bridge asked me if it was all down to corruption. I had to explain that in London, planning was so bad it had no need of corruption. Some developers are asked for sweeteners in the form of a dribble of cash for a local primary school or a few “affordable” flats. But the reality is that planners and councillors lack the guts to stand up to developers, and if they do, some mayor or minister overrules them. There cannot be another city in Europe that would have permitted London’s Walkie Talkie and One Blackfriars, and their obscenely bulging upper storeys there purely to maximise rentals.
Tall buildings are always prominent, and therefore matter to good design. Such a statement would seem second nature in France or Italy or Germany. Rome is the most corrupt place I know, but Romans would never do to the Tiber what London has done to the Thames. London gave its governors a postwar skyline still by Canaletto. They have returned one by Jackson Pollock.
I know some people like towers as urban sculpture, but that is no reason for their likes to be imposed on everyone else in perpetuity. And do they really want 500 of them? Towers are the enemies of social vitality. They are silent stakes driven through a city’s sense of community. They are mere memorials to Britain’s greed for foreign cash in the 21st century, and to a newly philistine public realm.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
