The curious thing about the development known as The Slab, which is to replace the unprepossessing ITV block on the South Bank, is that no one other than the developers has a good word to say for it. Yet Michael Gove approved it last week. The Mayor supported Lambeth council’s planners’ backing for it.
The Twentieth Century Society (which likes the rest of the South Bank) notes that it is “universally derided”. Green campaigners point out that, as with all high-rise buildings, the actual environmental cost of construction will be enormous.
If you imagine putting Lego bricks, not right on top of each other, but with one sitting halfway across the one below, with the other half jutting out, then you have the idea. Add to that a stripey horizontal effect and make a huge jumble of those bricks and you have it: 72 Upper Ground, courtesy of Make Architects.
The result is, as Rowan Moore, formerly architecture correspondent of this paper, observed, “a brute”. It is way bigger than the ITV tower block it replaces — 109 metres rather than 72 metres — but unlike that admittedly unlovely block, it’s a broad, assertive presence.
It provides what the developers call “two new public squares”, but to point out the obvious, the South Bank isn’t short of public space. They also say that it “includes new cultural venues that have rehearsal space, gallery and presentation spaces and studios, alongside new public spaces with river facing cafes and restaurants”. Again, say what you will about the South Bank, and I am not among the admirers of its modernist aesthetic, it doesn’t lack restaurants and galleries.
The Slab will rise up on a a bend in the Thames where something actually beautiful might have been built
Moreover, the Slab will rise up on a critical bit of the Thames, at a bend in the river where something actually beautiful might have been built. But we’ve given up on beautiful, haven’t we?
The Thames used to be the thoroughfare of London until early modern times; if a Tudor bargeman had somehow time-travelled to see The Slab, he’d have thought he’d died and gone to hell.
Michael Gove himself admits that it is unattractive, but justifies his decision on the basis of the “employment-generating opportunities” and “placemaking” including “creative affordable workspaces”. Actually, there’s not much of that as a proportion of the whole. What London needs is housing, not more office space which is what this offers. And — hello to the Housing Secretary — the problem in London isn’t creating more demand, but providing a greater supply of skilled workers, which this will suck up.
Actually, the most worrying thing about this terrible decision is that it is Michael Gove who made it.
Whether you agree with his politics or not, he is by some distance the most intelligent and thoughtful member of the Cabinet. He’s good company; a civilised man. He shares the instincts of the cultivated class, or what passes for it.
He would have approved of the Policy Exchange document called Building Beautiful. He would have supported everything the King tried to do when he was Prince of Wales and established an Institute of Architecture “to teach and demonstrate in practice principles of traditional urban design”. And yet he still went ahead and approved a development which will impinge on the lives of all of us — well, anyone whose eyeline includes the South Bank. This clever man has done his bit to make London that bit uglier, more dispiriting — and God knows, the ITV tower that The Slab replaces didn’t lift anyone’s spirits.
It was the same with Boris Johnson. I thought that as mayor he would bring the instincts of a classicist to bear upon the public spaces — the Emperor Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick and left it marble — and in the case of Boris, all he had to do was not make things worse. But he did. He approved some of the cacophony of male egotist buildings which a New York Times columnist critised this week.
The response of the late columnist Auberon Waugh to all this was to advise, possibly controversially, that if you meet a modern architect, punch him in the face. Being nicely brought up, we wouldn’t, but just give me the chance to shun a London planner.
The thing about the succession of terrible developments in London over the last 30 years, of which The Slab is the latest, is that it impinges on us all: you can’t get away from the skyline. It’s like that infant in Dickens’ Dombey and Son who kept making a “low-spirited noise”. Ugly developments are the visual equivalent.
If a mayoral candidate were to promise he or she wouldn’t approve anything as ugly as the Slab ever again, that would be my vote in the bag. Fat chance though.
