Medellin is a fascinating city. It sits in a valley with a river running, north south, down the middle. Large areas of the surrounding mountains are covered with precarious slum housing similar to the favelas of Brazil or barriadas of Peru. The traffic is terrible and there are plans to restrict cars by permitting access to odd number plates one day and even the next. It has an excellent metro system that largely runs parallel to the river and stations are linked to the four lines of spectacular Metrocable cars that span the city.  The cable cars allow a transport system to be threaded into the dense slum areas with minimal disruption and efficiently traverse the steep inclines. Bus stops and cycle share are located at metro stations, providing a satisfyingly integrated system. E​​very Sunday and public holidays there is a cyclovia around Avenida Poblado between 7am and 1pm. I was told there are some 100km of cycleways in the city (a link to them can be found here) and so I decided to investigate.
I started at the Botanical Gardens and followed a route going south. Crossings are linked to pedestrian movement rather than vehicular and marked in red - so you cross when the peds do.

 The cycleway turned onto a wide street with a well marked route next to a tree-lined pavement. But then came a bit of a surprise and cyclists turning right were directed onto a lightly segregated cycleway which ran down the middle of the road which did little to prevent encroachment by vehicles or was great for peds.

Then, as so often happens, it ran out of steam and cyclists were forced onto a rather narrow and at times crowded pavement. But then as quickly as it had disappeared, it started again as a shared foot/bike path:

Further on I was impressed by the new connection into the University, which was very busy and included a bikeshare station.

The route then went into the middle of the road again. The raised section between four lanes of traffic is safe enough for cyclists, but again, poses problems for peds. It's also pretty polluted.
​Then came a more successful bit of light segregation followed by a nice, wide street where cyclists are segregated from traffic by trees and from peds by bollards and planting.

I then got to a Metro station where Bikeshare links up to the rest of the public transport network. The cycle route continued on through a lovely park, following the route of the Metro.

I finish with a shot of a junction protected by rather interesting bollards. I presume the holes are in there to take a chain or a rope; they provide a high degree of protection to cyclists, are easy for peds and look OK to boot.

I was only in Medellin for three days and am in no way an expert, but I was very impressed by the ambition of the city to face up to some pretty amazing challenges, not least repairing the city after decades of drug trade induced violence. The charismatic Mayor of Medellin in the early noughties, who then became Governor of Antioquia state is Sergio Fajardo, a mathematician rather than a politican whose father was an architect. He saw the benefits of providing the poor with a strong social infrastructure and built an amazing array social and sports centres, libraries and hospitals in the most needy areas. There is even a spanish disctionary definition of 'fajardismo'. 

One cannot leave the home of Quintana, Chaves and Uran without commenting on more adventurous cycling. In spite of the competitive reputation of Colombian cyclists I saw none of the aggressive cycling one sees so often in London - although where there were no cycleways, riders were fearless as they mixed it with the busy traffic. Most impressive were the massive climbs in the surrounding mountains - on every car journey out of the centre one encounters dozens of cyclists, amateur and professional, training in the thin air.

 On Saturday 24 April 1993 at 9.17am, the City of London Police received a coded warning from the South Armagh Brigade of the IRA. Just over an hour later a bomb in a tipper truck parked in Bishopsgate and loaded with almost a ton of fertiliser was detonated, destroying adjacent buildings and severely damaging many others within a 500m radius. The cost of building repairs was estimated at £1billion.
The IRA bombing campaign set in train a series of events that led to an equally dramatic but more benign change in the architecture of the Square Mile - the rise of the Eastern Cluster. The close-kissing towers, still growing on the City skyline - once dominated by Wren’s 51 church spires - have multiplied ever since Foster and Partners received planning permission for 30 St Mary Axe in 2000 on a site made vacant by the 1992 Baltic Exchange bomb. 
One of the victims of the IRA was the Leatherseller’s Livery Company Hall in St Helen’s Place, set behind a neoclassical facade built in the early 1900s. As the ancient Company, which dates back to 1444, contemplated restoration, it became clear that surrounding sites of which it held the freehold were ripe for development. The Square Mile was booming and the City Corporation was keen to densify office space. As then Planning Chief Peter Rees said, “if we can’t build out we must build up.” 
The outcome was that the Leathersellers did a very advantageous deal with Brookfield Properties whereby the developer would build the 40 storey 100 Bishopsgate Tower next to the site of the old hall and the proceeds would fund a new one - no expense spared.
Instead of building up, Eric Parry designed a building that goes down. Behind the refurbished facades of Helen’s Place, the above-ground floors have been allocated to income-generating office space while a grand ground floor reception space, with views out to the medieval walls of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, leads to a sweeping, processional stair down to the Company’s dining hall. The curved walls are lined with shrunken bull shoulder with a two-tone effect developed by leather designer Bill Amberg, to match the vitreous enamel on the building’s exterior. Elsewhere, Amberg has responded to Parry’s obsession with craft to fill the Hall with a range of leather pieces including a corridor lined with pale green and maroon, gold-foiled, leather-clad panels and an inglenook in the ground floor lobby area entirely stitched by hand using historic saddlery techniques.
​Craft, not just in leather, is a key focus of Parry’s interior: the Court Room has double height panels of American walnut with a central court table of European walnut; the reception room sports a central blue-and-white glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly suspended above a circular bronze table, while the carpet was designed by Parry to complement the Chihuly above. At the top of the main staircase is a stained-glass window by Leonard Walker showing Henry VI, the monarch who conferred the first Charter on the Company made in 1937 for a previous hall.
Scagliola pilasters, transferred from the old Hall, have been scattered randomly across the walls and ceilings - perhaps as a reminder of the destruction of previous halls by the Great Fire, the Blitz and the IRA bombings. The walls of the Dining Hall are again covered in American walnut panels which sit below a forty metre long tapestry with images and allusions relating to the Leathersellers’ Company and its history. 
The Hall was opened in 2017 by the Earl of Wessex and is a worthy new member of the cluster of City Livery halls that is such an important and little-known component of London’s heritage. 
The importance of this collection of architectural gems can be discovered in a remarkable new book by Dr Anya Lucas and Henry Russell with photos by Andreas von Einsiedel. I use the word remarkable advisedly. Astonishingly, this is the first time in their long history that the 40 historic buildings have been properly photographed and compared. Thanks to the initiative of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects it is now possible to properly appreciate the legacies of the ancient City trades like the Mercers, the Grocers, the Goldsmiths and the Skinners. It is to be hoped that the publication will prompt the generally secretive Companies to make their homes more accessible to the wider public and in that way to highlight the rich culture of the Square Mile.

The Livery Halls of the City of London Anya Lucas and Henry Russell Photography by Andreas von Einsiedel is published by Merrell on behalf of the Worshipful Company of  Chartered Architects. 280 pp and 450 illustrations.

https://bit.ly/2P0Me2k​    Price £45



 
 
 

The exclusion of through traffic at Bank Junction in the City of London has received overwhelming support in a public consultation survey carried out by the Corporation, while a further study shows that the junction is now safer, less polluted and does not unreasonably impact on traffic flow.
The temporary experiment, which began in May last year, banned all vehicles apart from buses and cycles between the hours of 7am and 7pm. If the findings of the reports are accepted, the changes will be made permanent.
75 per cent of 3730 respondents ‘supported’ or ‘generally supported’ the changes. Of those 17 per cent wanted further positive improvements such as extending the scheme to 24hrs, wider pavements and better signposting, while 12 per cent wanted to allow black cabs and other vehicles back into the junction, 70 per cent of whom identified themselves as taxi or private hire drivers. The Ned Hotel, concerned about deliveries and taxi drop-offs called for black cabs to be permitted to use the junction at all times.
As might be expected 90 per cent of pedestrians and cyclists supported the scheme while every other mode gave over 50 per cent support - except  for taxi and commercial drivers. Businesses and groups who were supportive included the City Property Association (CPA) which represents 150 firms working in the City, British Land, Shanghai Commercial Bank, WBRC Insurance and Welltower Health Care.
In their response to the survey the CPA said that the scheme ‘should be retained as a new benchmark for the minimum standard of what should be acceptable for air quality and road safety for vulnerable road users in Central London’. Property giant British Land suggested that such initiatives have a ‘very positive’ impact on the City’s image as a contemporary business location. 
The London Cycling Campaign asked that over the longer term, all motor vehicles should be removed from the junction and the space turned into a public plaza. 
A second study on the performance of the changes found that there had been a 40 per cent reduction in casualties compared to average equivalent periods in the five previous years. The study also found that buses that used Bank were actually travelling faster than before the changes, saving between three and five minutes on a journey, and that there has been a marked improvement in NO2 levels, although further changes are needed if the area is to meet EU annual average limits. 
The reports, which will be presented to the Streets and Walkways Sub Committee on April 10, suggest that the improvements have met the Corporation’s performance criteria and that there is sufficient support for making the scheme permanent. A final decision will be made by the Corporation’s Policy and Resources Committee on July 5.

When I started the London Festival of Architecture is 2004 it was focused on Clerkenwell. We calculated that the up and coming area was home to more architects per square metre than anywhere in the world - an accolade boosted by the recent arrival of Grimshaw and BDP. In spite of this headline statistic we found it very difficult to convince Ken Livingstone and the GLA to be as generous to us as they were to other London festivals. Architecture did not seem to feature as we thought it should in the lexicon of creative businesses like fashion, design, games and advertising.

The reason for this it appeared was that the RIBA had decided that the future of architectural export lay with the construction rather than creative industry because they handed out the jobs, so in the eyes of the Department of Trade, architecture was classified as building rather than creative design. Things have changed quite a bit over the years, but the LFA always lagged behind in its ability to raise public sponsorship, lacking the figures to prove London's importance as an architectural design hub. No longer.

Through the sterling efforts of Tamsie Thompson, the indefatigable director of the LFA, the GLA Economics division has carried out detailed research into the commercial impact of architecture. They have found that there are some 4,240 offices in the capital’s architecture sector which produced £1.7 billion in gross value added (GVA). After accounting for inflation, the compound annual rate of growth in the GVA of London’s architecture sector since 2009 was 7.6 per cent. That was faster than the creative industries and the London economy as a whole. There were approximately 22,800 jobs in London’s architecture sector in 2015 with one-in-four architect occupations in the UK based in London. Encouragingly approximately 40 per cent of architectural staff were female - a considerably higher figure than the rest of the UK.

But it's not all about exports; the research found that between £382.5 million and £453.9 million of London’s GVA could be attributed to architecture-related tourism. So that's good for the heritage sector.

More worryingly around one-third of the jobs in London’s architecture sector were taken by non-UK nationals and of this, the majority (73.3 per cent) were EU citizens. So movement of labour is going to be very important post-Brexit, if London is to retain its status as a global hub for design and construction skills,

The research highlights the significance of architecture's role in London's economy and the need to protect it as the Government negotiates our exit form the European Union. It also reinforces the importance of events like the LFA in drawing attention to the sector. The creative industries are going to be crucial to Londons success as the financial sector reallocates to other centres. Congratulations to Tamsie and GLA Economics for reminding us that the mother of the arts can still hold her own in both her creative and her commercial contribution to the capitals wellbeing.

This article first appeared in On Office magazine
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