Shaping the city

​The Royal College of Music is building new student accommodation on the Goldhawk Road, named Prince Consort Village in reference to the school’s main location in Albertopolis in Kensington. Goldhawk Road is on my route home and when the existing buildings on the site were demolished I was delighted to see that the works revealed a view of St Andrew’s Polish Church. Nothing particularly amazing, a tower and nave in standard Victorian gothic. No spire. But it was nice to see.
 

As construction continued and prefabricated student rooms were stacked one on top of the other, the view disappeared to be replaced by a rather bland, slightly traditional, brick facade. The Royal College of Music and their architects might argue that the completion of the street frontage was the appropriate solution to the site, but I felt a trick had been missed to enrich this pretty dull, well trafficked route.
 
I recalled discussing with Sir William Whitfield the significance of Queens Head Passage on his plan for the Paternoster Square development. This narrow street provides a dramatic view of the North Transept of St Paul’s Cathedral with Wren’s dome towering over the modern offices. It was one of the immoveable elements of Whitfield’s plan. When I was on the Design Review panel for Chelsea Barracks, master planners Dixon Jones and Michael Squire made great efforts to ensure that views of St Barnabas Pimlico were not obscured by the new development.
 
The importance of vedute in the iconography and planning of London is significant whether they are Canaletto’s 18th century views of the Thames, St Paul’s Heights regulations or the View Management Framework, and are of increasing importance in the debate over towers.
 
The cliff of tall buildings proposed for the north end of Bishopsgate is there because the sites lie outside the constraints of the view corridor to St Paul’s; yet this mechanism for protecting the historic view of the dome forces a change in scale from the 17th century terraces of Spitalfields that is cumbersome and less than ideal in terms of townscape.
 
In the gridded plan of New York towers are rarely seen on the axis - only the Pan Am (now MetLife)  Building on Park Avenue and parts of Lower Manhattan where the grid starts to break up come to mind; it is the views of the agglomeration of towers from New Jersey or the East River that form the recognisable skyline.
 
As Chief Planner in the City of London Peter Rees attempted to shape the form of the City cluster to respond to key viewpoints, creating a pinnacle in the centre from which the rest drop away. It was a form used earlier by SOM when they planned Canary Wharf where the geometry of the group hangs from the pyramid atop Cesar Pelli’s One Canada Square. Planners in Wandsworth and Lambeth have attempted to create similar forms in the cluster at Vauxhall Nine Elms which create a point of focus to the view from Westminster Bridge.
 
It not an easy job to do within a responsive planning system where applications are judged on their merits without an overall concept of the shape of city that we need. I recently visited Bordeaux which has redeveloped its waterfront creating great new parks and public spaces with a crescent of classical buildings, all of the same height.  It is beautiful, but it’s not London which has always delighted in its variety of styles and heights.
 
How we maintain the right balance between views and built form in this period of major growth and densification is one of the key issues that will have to be addressed in the new version of the London Plan and a question that must be put to the candidates for the upcoming Mayoral election.  ​