From rock bottom to sky high

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From rock bottom to sky high The Financial Times By Caroline McGhie Published: November 19 2005 Tour the key cities of the UK today and you might think you had slipped continents. Gleaming new towers fronted by billboards advertising luxury flats fit naturally in New York or Chicago, Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur, not London and Manchester, Swansea and Chatham. However, extraordinary as it may seem, the British are finally breaking away from their low-rise past, peeling off the old industrial cobwebs and erecting - and embracing - modern residential skyscrapers. Most of the world's great cities have been in love with vertical living for decades, their glamorous high-rise apartment houses standing as expressions of wealth, power and success. Now, with more than 100 new cathedrals of glass and steel in the works, London is coming round to the idea too. Swimming pools at 400 ft? No problem. Bathtubs with views of the London Eye? Even better. This isn't just a minor craze; it is a serious switch in the national cultural outlook. New, unpublished, research from estate agent Savills shows that 30,466 flats, in 127 towers with more than 20 storeys, are being constructed or are at the planning stage. Pile them up and that makes 3,444 storeys altogether. About 46 per cent of them are climbing out of schemes forged since 2004 and many of the newest are in the north-west, north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside. They are getting taller all the time. Since 2004, according to Savills, the average height of a new residential tower has increased from 24 to 27 storeys. Next month the wrapping comes off a soaring 50-floor block called Pan Peninsula in London's Docklands, presented as a glittering spear of "world-class architecture" with "signature restaurants" and 700 flats. From the 50th-floor cocktail bar, the lights of the capital sprinkled at its feet will look like diamonds at night. It was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Illustrations show it lit at dusk in purples and pinks against the darkening aubergine sky, exuding sex appeal. In Manchester, work on the 47-storey Beetham Tower began earlier this year. All 219 apartments have been sold, even though buyers can't move in for another two years. And there are more soaring buildings in the pipeline. The Inacity tower, also in Manchester, would be taller still, at 60 storeys and 400 apartments. Even Edinburgh, that dour Scottish beauty, has hired architects Colin & Moggridge to see how skyscrapers could fit into its skyline, the first time it has looked at the issue seriously since 1968. Everyone is thinking big. Developers are rubbing their hands in anticipation. They love the bling side of the property market and the age of conspicuous consumption. They thrive on superlatives and wow-factors. For them, the huge new penthouse spaces appearing like glass bubbles in the air represent the highest risk and greatest profit. Recently I was whisked up 33 floors in Number One West India Quay to see penthouses developed by Marylebone Warwick Balfour and Manhattan Loft - six whopping cloud-huggers selling at £1.7m to £2.96m each. They seem chiseled from glass, dizzyingly lovely, with the rest of the population reduced to insect-size below. The lower floors in towers are traditionally reserved for low-income residents (today's quotas can range from 25 to 50 per cent) or sold to buy-to-let investors because prices are lower and the rental yields therefore higher per square foot. Above six floors, according to agents King Sturge, prices rise by as much as £7,500 to £10,000 per floor as the views get grander. But penthouses are a world all on their own. There have been fistfuls of them for sale across London this year, ranging from £1m to £16m, but they are notoriously slow to sell - some take up to five years - as the number of potential buyers is self-selectingly small. Investors won't touch them as they come at premium prices and owner-occupiers can always choose a house in Mayfair instead. But the market for skyline flats has definitely arrived. "Our cities are still very short of high-rise [homes] compared to other world-class cities," says Dominic Grace, head of new developments at Savills. "For decades the very mention of a high rise [home] sent shudders through every one. Now there have been a number of pressure points. The shortage of land, the need to put higher densities into developments and the desire for more glamour have all brought changes. Actually, glamour is one of the main drivers. On a big site you can create an iconic identity that can add to the image of the whole site - and indeed the whole city." There has certainly been a dramatic change of heart since the middle of the past century. People have forgotten the stigma that once attached to the thousands of dull concrete council housing blocks for low-income residents that sprang up around the country at the time. They have forgotten the awful pictures of Ronan Point, where a gas explosion in 1968 caused part of a 22-storey residential block in London's East End to collapse, killing five people and raising fears about the safety of towers. Council blocks have gone private. The late-1960s Trellick Tower in Notting Hill, London, designed by Erno Goldfinger, is no longer a ghetto of violence and crime but a Grade II-star- listed haven where property prices have leapt. So do skyscrapers present a possible solution to the housing crisis? "Well, no," says Grace, "because towers still need a lot of space around them and the initial costs are very high. They aren't ideal for affordable housing because they need glamour, snazzy lifts and huge amounts of glazing to create the right atmosphere." In fact they represent a huge risk to property developers. "You need to pre-sell and that is a challenge because a tower cannot be phased like an ordinary development," he says. "A huge amount of money goes into the ground, the underground parking and the piling to take the weight of the structure, which means a lot of cash is going out before any comes in. Until completion, all you have is 10 per cent deposits from buyers, which is why there is huge pressure, huge investor hype around city-centre residential high-rise. It is shit or bust when you press the button." Nor is the market wide open. In Britain, "you [still] can't include people with families. So buyers have to be young, aspirational and affluent enough to afford the prices; or second home buyers; or empty nesters who want to live it up." But the new love of skyscraper living has grown on the back of huge leaps in technology - as whole vertical communities they can be green, solar-powered and recycle their waste, can be made to respond to different weather conditions, can appear in extraordinary shapes, taper and billow. They have become a powerful regenerative tool and have created a whole galaxy of "starchitects". And nowhere is the push towards vertical living more apparent than in the UK captial. Pay a visit to the New London Architecture (NLA) exhibition space in London's Store Street and the sheer elasticity of the capital is on show. Stay away from the city too long and it will mutate into something long-time residents wouldn't recognise. Blink and it will have gone vertical. Commercial towers have led the way, with "the gherkin", Sir Norman Foster's Swiss Re building, in the vanguard. And there are more to come in London: Minerva, by Nicholas Grimshaw at Aldgate, an "iconic tower" of 43 storeys, 217 metres above the pavement with eight elevations arranged like four open books sitting upright on their spines; Heron Tower at Bishopsgate, 183 metres high and billed as "a powerful magnet for attracting foreign tenants"; the "cheese grater" by Richard Rogers at 122 Leadenhall, going up 310 metres and 66 floors; and More London, between London and Tower bridges, the 3m sq ft headquarters of accountants Ernst & Young. Then there is the exquisite shard of glass" by Renzo Piano, designed to pierce the sky south of London Bridge. At 310 metres, rising from a lobby to offices, to a mid-level piazza, to a hotel, to apartments, to an art gallery, it would be the tallest building in Europe. On a clear day upper-storey residents are expected to be able to see the south coast of England. It quite takes your breath away - the scope of these projects and the speed with which they're being approved. But there are detractors with powerful voices and good arguments. In August John Prescott, the UK's Deputy Prime Minister, granted planning permission for the Vauxhall Tower, next to the city's Vauxhall Bridge - at 180 metres and 49 storeys, hailed as the tallest block of flats in Europe. He overruled the planning inspector who had refused permission when the developer St George took the application to appeal. With one stroke he enraged members of Parliament, local residents and heritage groups. The architecture correspondent of London's Evening Standard newspaper described the decision as "epic in its dumbness". Even supporters of high-rise buildings were appalled. Peter Murray, NLA's founding curator, keen to celebrate the £100bn worth of new development taking place in the city, could find nothing good to say for what the headlines called "Prescott's monster". "I don't like Vauxhall," he says. "After the war the general policy was to spread out the tall buildings around the skyline, like dragon's teeth. But now clusters are the way forward. We are looking at creating higher density urban centres." Vauxhall Tower is out on a limb and looms too close to the Houses of Parliament. Prescott's controversial decision rips holes through the conservatism of decades. But the grounds for high-rise working and living are in place, prepared by a searing report from the London School Economics called Tall Buildings: Vision of the Future or Victims of the Past. To remain a "world city", it said, London needed to "accommodate or die". It had to get over its neurosis about mistakes in the 1960s and "grow up". The LSE gave powerful economic reasons for looking skywards. By 2016, it said, the capital would accumulate a number of new residents equal to the population of Liverpool and would need five to seven times the amount of extra office space provided by Canary Wharf, the new business district built in the 1990s, over the next 25 years. It scorned London's negative and erratic approach to planning, which had led to a "messy skyline". While New York, Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin had proactive planning policies, London, in a very British way, remained purely reactive. Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, standing at the window of his 8th-floor office in County Hall - another block of intriguing shape known as "the testicle" - could see it all, looking across Tower Bridge to the capital's financial centre, the City. By February 2004 he had drawn up and published The London Plan, the first proactive planning strategy in more than 30 years, which actively encouraged both residential and commercial skyscrapers in the face of a rapidly rising population and shortage of land. Canary Wharf, Stratford and Croydon were mentioned as areas that might swallow the new architectural Viagra. And Livingstone was clearly taken with notions of grandeur. "I find the vision of a city filled with mediocre, depressing, medium-rise slabs - far too many of which have been approved by local councils without a second thought - much less inspiring than a city with a skyline of innovative, graceful towers and spires." Like an adolescent with a sudden growth spurt, the whole of the UK is getting taller. London leads the way but the trend is spreading across the country. The British, for so long huddled in terraces, wedded to front doors and lawns to mow, have belatedly discovered that vertiginous views are a good swap. Living close to the clouds is now considered thrilling and the mile-high club is the one to join.

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