September 2008 Archives

This is 18 Blackfriars Road which had consent for a 30 bed hotel. The consent has lapsed as has the building...

...Land Sec is the freeholder.

What connects these 3 buildings?

1 - Beetham Organisation's Trinity Scheme at Aldgate Bus Station: 1.2 million sq ft of office space proposed.

3 - Saxon Land's (Generali and Babcock & Brown) Fenchurch Avenue development: 488,900 sq ft office space proposed.  

It's not the fact that they're all big office schemes or that all of them are in the City of London...what connects them is that they will all have rooftop gardens, all of which will be open to the public. But if you can't wait a couple of years for a bit of public access remember that it's Open House London this weekend. Notable "open" buildings include The Blue Fin Building and The Hop Exchange in Southwark and The Willis Building, Bank of England, Vintners Hall, 47 Churches etc in the City.

... it's Frobisher Crescent which I blogged about in July. United House are going to refurb the top 3 floors to 69 flats. In fact preliminary works have already started on the site; this is what it looked like last week:

Not sure what part it plays in the film, I suspect it's the HQ of some bad people.

Looking more like a wildlife centre at the moment, this is English Partnerships and First Base's 360 London just to the south west of the Elephant.

It's been in the news recently for amendments (which were granted) to a previous planning permission to reduce the amount of affordable housing from 40% to 31.5%. The table below has the numbers: 

One more City boundary dragon. Farringdon Road (right in the middle of it)...

...and just over the dragon's left shoulder this time it's the plastic clad, recently soft stripped, jv between private investor David Khalili and Welbeck Land's Bath House. This scene is likely to be with us for a while as the development is, shall we say, experiencing slight funding problems at the moment.

Following on from the Last City Completion blog about City of London boundary markers, here's another one, this time on the eastern edge on Aldgate High Street.

And just over the dragon's left shoulder the London Underground owned Rennie House, still with an unimplemented office to training centre consent.

According to a recent Office of Fair Trading report around 10% of buyers say their new homes are of "poor" or "very poor" quality...

...thankfully the above is not one of those. This is the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion by Frank Gehry who also did the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao not New York, that was the other Frank). According to Gehry 'The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery".