March 2010 Archives

This next blog features photos taken from the 28dayslater forum. I recently came across this 'craze' of climbing partially built and under construction buildings when one of the most prolific persons on the scene (Downfallen) actually died base jumping in Switzerland, only a couple of months ago.

I must say however, I have been particularly surprised to read about the vast number of people actually participating in this all over the UK, and especially in London. A quick read of the 28dayslater forum demonstrates just how wide spread and frequent this type of activity is.

Now I'm not condoning this, far from it. The trespassing on to private land and risking all by climbing up scaffolding and large cranes just for the hell of it, shows more for the lack of security on some of London's biggest construction sites than it does to anything else.

But as you can see below, you have to take your hat off to these people who have taken some wonderful pictures of the capital's skyline in all of its glory.

Here are some of my personal favourites. For more, see the forum...

To view more photos like these, click on the link below:

 This is Bath House just off Holborn Viaduct a few months ago...and this is the blog.

Now look at it....or rather the lack of it. Construction is yet to start but it doesn't look that far off. This one's a good barromiter of the current climate, stalled because of financial issues, bought recently by Favermead Holdings, who, by the looks of it, is in no mood to hang about. 260,000 sq ft of B1 space on the way.

The story of new proposals from Heron for Stone house, the site next to their Heron Tower scheme currently under construction has been circulating for a couple of weeks now. The application though has still not been validated due to insufficent funds being recieved from the applicant and so not easy to find on the City of London's planning pages. However, I've managed to track it down and below are some of the photos included in the design and access statement giving a clearer picture of its design and scale. The full application can be found here.

The proposals include a 43 storey, 150m tall building to provide 120 residential units and 190 hotel rooms which will be run by Four Seasons Hotels. It will also refurbish a series of Victorian buildings to accomodate retail units and create a new public plaza. When built it will become first purpose built luxury hotel constructed in central London for 30 years.
 

Heron have also very recently as of last month started construction work on their Guildhall Music School site in between Moorgate and the Barbican which is also being billed as the first major residential development in the Square Mile for 30 years. According to figures 350,000 people work in the City but only 8,000 are residents.

It seems Gerald Ronson looks set to continue his recent trend of pushing on with development through the recession whilst others around him have paused for thought. With regards to his Heron Tower it looks like he will have the last laugh too with low availabilty and increasing rents as his stock comes on to the market. The shrewd businessman now also looks set to fill the gap in the City of London for top end, high quality hotel and residential stock.  

You can usually tell quite a bit about a development from the marketing suite. This is the one for NEO Bankside, on the site of the old Dave Musset building, slap bang opposite the Tate Modern and 5 minutes walk to the Globe.

Quite a few stories circulatting at the moment regarding the Elephant and Castle, all positive too, which is something that hasn't been said too often in the past.

Firstly an article in todays Times titled 'The High Life in Elephant & Castle'. In it it asks whether the newly built Strata will be a symbol of hope and says it could be the making of one of the capital's most deprived areas.

The Strata building which some apparently now are calling 'The Razor', really? do we have to? is now very nearly complete. The Guardian has an interesting story (link) on the buildings green credentials, which states that the wind turbines blades are due on site next week and will be winched into place in early April. When that does happen it will become the world's first building with wind turbines built into it's fabric, the fact that they will provide just 8% of the buildings electricty needs, is a little bit less fantastic. They also have some really good photos of the scheme here, some of them shown below. 

In other news, the redevelopment of the tatty and outdated (still a huge understatement) shopping centre could take place earlier than planned. Southwark, St Modwen and Lend Lease are currently discussing how to bring it forward after it got pushed back to phase 6 in last years revised regeneration programme. The operative word here though is 'could', these three have been talking for years... (the story in full)

I've saved the best till last however, with the news that the Heygate Estate is finally going under the wrecking ball, with demolition works recently getting underway. According to 24dash.com the Rodney Road and Wingrave blocks are now vacant and will form phase one of the demolition. They say the removal and salvage of flat contents, vermin baiting and a hygiene sweep is already in progress. Banners have also been erected on empty blocks to advise the very last staggling residents that demolition is now underway.

I'll leave you with this photo taken from the 19th floor of Strata, looking out onto the Heygate Estate. The average price for residential units is £500,000 with just a few out of the 310 private units still left to go. One of those though is the the top floor penthouse still on the market for £2,500,000. I think the price tag merits a better view than this, although hopefully the view won't hang around for too long now.

Last month I blogged about LandSec's Park House development on Oxford Street. Works are yet to start, but that does not mean that there's nothing happening on site, far from it.

Go there today and you'll see this:

It's all part of the Dinosaurs Unleashed Exhibition, a temporary attraction with about a month still left to run. The key word here is temporary.

Back in the heady pre-Lehman days, it was all so easy; buy land - build on land - sell the stuff that you built - make profit - repeat process. Things are a bit more complicated now.

When do you build? Will the market have improved by the time your development's finished? Will there be anyone out there with the money to buy? It's all a question of timing, and in this game of musical chairs, you stand to loose a lot more than your seat if you get it wrong. But just because you haven't started building on a site doesn't mean you can't still make a profit from it, on the contrary.

If you've got a large, cleared open space in a decent location you could do a lot worse than appliying for the temporary use of the site for "large entertainment uses" as Land Sec did. And they're not the only ones. This summer Chelsea Barraks will become an antiques fair, although how successfull the new water feature at Potters Field (below) will be is anyone's guess.

The concept of empowerment of pedestrians over the use of the car is an idea which planners and urban designers have pursued for quite a while now but has recently come to the fore (especially in central London) and is highlighted in these 3 stories below. Firstly, the new Oxford Circus Crossing. Recent research by consultants Atkins over the Christmas shopping period showed that the new crossing had improved safety 20% and made pedestrians feel less stressed. They also claimed it has generated £6.5m in benefits from pedestrian and vehicle journey time savings, recouping its costs inside a year.

Piccadilly Circus is also set for a transformation as part of a £14m revamp, which will rid the busy central London junction of guard railings. Westminster Council recently approved plans that will remove more than 1km of railings, build a central island along Piccadilly and Pall Mall and reintroduce two-way traffic. Work is expected to begin in November and take 12 months to complete.

Work has also recently begun (yesterday) on removing the southern roundabout of Elephant and Castle, 4 years after it was first promised. In its place will be a three-way junction with surface-level pedestrain crossings, with the horrible underground subways filled in. Work is expected to be finished early next year and will form the heart of the Elephant and Castle regeneration area, fronting the nearing completion Strata.

Medway Council have criticised Boris Johnson's ideas for an airport to be situated in the Thames Estuary, calling them 'pie in the sky'!

Johnson has set up a Thames Estuary steering group to look into the £40 billion scheme, but it has been dismissed as unworkable by environmentalists not least that by situating an airport in the Thames would mean that aircraft would be 12 times more likely to suffer a birdstrike than other airports that are situated inland. Medway Council joined with Kent County Council and the RSPB last year to launch a campaign against the Thames Estuary airport plan.

Further environmental concerns have risen in the report from the fact that the proposed airport would be situated to close to the major liquid natural gas port at Thamesport and the probababilty of the need of a new railway station has been over-looked.

Numerous buildings across London have come to light for being former locations where both foreign and domestic spies have hung out. The information has been published in a new book, 'The Insider's Guide to 150 Spy Sites in London' written by Mark Birdsall and Deborah Plisko.

Although Londoner's are familiar with the home of MI5 on Millbank and MI6 at Vauxhall Cross, other more inconspicuos buildings have been uncovered. Some of which can be linked to the Sixties Cambridge spy ring as well as those involved in the more recent death by polonium poisioning of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko who is believed to have been killed by disgruntled ex-KGB members.

Other buildings include the Cafe Daquise in South Kensington which held secret meetings between Christine Keeler the call girl at the centre of the Profumo scandal and Eugene Ivanor, a Soviet embassy civil servant.

The book also uncovers details of locations of supposed dead letter drops, front companies, safe houses, garages and underground sites all which have been associated with the work of the intelligence services.

Influential architectural review panel CABE have savaged Tesco's plan for their major regeneration development in Bromley-by-Bow. They raised concerns that the project lacks a clear masterplan and is "incoherent" in its layout, is disjointed and divides the scheme into distinct quarters that conflict with one another. They also pointed out that most future residents will have a view either over grid-locked traffic or the roof of a huge new Tesco store. There wasn't a lot CABE did like on the scheme which was masterplanned by Callado Collins. In summing up the scheme they also stated that they were disappointed that CABE were not consulted at an earlier stage when they could have contributed more constructively to the design development process.

The government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space published their review of this scheme on the 3rd of March, less than a week later Tesco's have sent their architects back to the drawing board. The supermarket giant said it had taken the criticism on board and, following this and further community consultation, was revising the scheme. A spokesman said: "We want the scheme to deliver the best result for the area and are grateful for the feedback we have received."

The scheme proposes a new district centre including a replacement Tesco store of nearly 12,000sqm, other retail and community uses, a hotel, a primary school and 403 residential units as well as a new public riverside park. CABE's review of the scheme can be found here.

With this recent CABE review and subsequent quick response from Tesco's its good to see that the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment is doing exactly what it set out to achieve when it started back in 1999; improve design. You just wonder why if Tesco's give CABE's view in such high remark, why didn't they consult with them first? They may well do next time. 

This next blog isn't strictly a residential one but it's interesting none the less, well I think so anyway. As a regular visitor to the Brick Lane area for site visit purposes, what I call 'the proper East End' and Jack the Ripper's old stomping ground, I came across this; the new Minaret outside the Brick Lane Mosque. The controversial structure actually gained consent back in January 2006 but has only now just been built. The idea gained prominence in the media around the mayoral election time last year as Ken Livingstone promised to help raise funds for it to gain the Muslim vote.

Other locals are not so fond of it however. Here are the reasons: The Brick Lane mosque is grade 2 listed and in a conservation area, the new Minaret as seen in the picture is quite large and obtrusive. Also intriguingly the mosque today as it stands lies comparable to when it was first built as a French Protestant Church in 1743. After this it was turned into a Methodist Chapel in 1819 and then again to a Jewish Synagogue in 1898. Now obviously it serves its purpose as a Mosque.

This building then has often been remarked as representing the history of successive communities of immigrants into London; from this point of view it may be called one of the most remarkable and evocative buildings in the area and one of London's architectural and historic treasures. As new influxes of people have come in to the area and taken over the building for their own religious purpose, they have given the building very slight changes. Now the argument persists that "what happens when another religion moves in to and dominates the local landscape?" It would be a lot harder to knock down a minaret instead of applying a lick of paint which is what has happened in the past.

Continuing the theme, Tower Hamlets also look set to approve two structures which represent veil head scarves worn by Muslim women at the entrances to Brick Lane, at the north and to the south. This has again proved hugely unpopular and is being paid for by S106 money from the Spitalfields refurbishment and the Broadgate Tower. Local protesters including artist Tracey Emin called the design "bulky, ungainly and unnecessary" and risked inflaming racial tension. The 'hijab gates' as they will be called will cost nearly £2m and has received 158 objections, but planners recommended granting permission at committee (tonight 04/03/2010). Below is the Brick Lane entrance on Bethnal Green Road with the proposed structure.

Going back to the Mosque, can you think of a building that better shows the influx of different social and religious groups through time to a particular place like the Brick Lane Mosque does? I can't.

After the long awaited submission of a planning application for Battersea Power Station in October 2009, as well as the support of the designs by the government, it looked as though progress was being made in rejuvenating the landmark site. However, it has emerged today that a little-known Victorian pumping station, pictured below, could further delay the development of the site.

The Victorian Society is opposing the plans for the power station as it would mean the demolition of the "historically important and rare" water pumping station. Treasury Holdings do not feel that they can make use of the pumping station, and believe that if it is not removed then it will damage the potential for recouping the cost of restoring the larger and more famous power station. However, previous planning permission to demolish the Grade II listed building expired in 2007 and nothing has been submitted since, so Treasury Holdings may have a long battle on their hands.