Lurking down a side street, in the tangled maze of lanes and railway viaducts south of the River Thames, stands one of the strangest new sights in the capital. Look up on the corner of Union Street and O’Meara Street, and you will see a white brick building with a great furrow gouged out of its facade, as if it’s been attacked with a gigantic ice cream scoop. It is a true architectural WTF moment that has been stopping passersby in their tracks since the scaffolding came down a few weeks ago.
Follow the direction of the two-storey gouge, and observant onlookers will find that it precisely frames the shape of the rose window of the church next door, making it look a bit like the building might have been melted by holy rays emanating from the stained glass: a facade sculpted by the power of the Lord?
“We wanted to respect our neighbour,” says Jonny Plant, architect of this curious new concave office building. “The church had always been overlooked, tucked down the side street next to the railway viaduct, so we wanted to celebrate it and draw people’s attention to it.”
His firm, Lipton Plant (since merged with Corstorphine & Wright), had been commissioned to expand the four-storey redbrick building on the corner with an infill extension to the side, and an extra storey on the roof. The building’s ground floor had always filled the entire footprint of the site, but the upper floors had been recessed back from the street, to politely align with the facade of the Roman Catholic church – a grade-II listed romanesque structure, built in 1892 by prolific church architect Frederick Walters.
“The developer originally wanted to fill the whole site and bring the building right up to the street edge,” says Father Christopher Pearson, priest of the Church of Most Precious Blood. “But we had just spent a lot of money restoring the church, and we didn’t want to be hidden. They were very accommodating and listened to our concerns – and we are tickled pink with the result. It’s as if the building is saying saying: ‘Ta-daa! Here we are!’”
There is a reason that the church had always been somewhat secluded. For over 200 years after the Act of Uniformity in 1559, outward observance of the Roman Catholic faith was illegal in England. Even after the Catholic emancipation in 1829, and further relaxation of the laws in 1850, Catholic churches were often squirrelled away down side streets and set back from the road. Over 130 years after its completion, Most Precious Blood is now more visible than ever, theatrically framed by a most precious viewing cone.
History is awash with “spite buildings”, architectural monuments to neighbourly grudges, designed to block views and obstruct daylight. But this is the opposite: a surreal love-thy-neighbour tribute wrought in glazed bricks. Using 3D modelling software, the architects extruded the shape of the rose window in an imaginary cone back to an exact a point on the street corner, from where it is designed to be viewed – which happens to be right outside an espresso bar, so you can have a good gawp while queueing for your coffee. “The council was so supportive,” says project director, David Crosthwait. “We even talked about having a special paving slab in the street, directing people to look up.”
It is a simple (some might say crude) concept. But it was fiendishly complex to execute. A hefty steel frame makes the architectural acrobatics possible, with a series of big arched ribs holding shelves that support the 10 different kinds of specially shaped glazed bricks. “It’s like a big steel wine rack,” says Crosthwait. It looks eye-wateringly expensive, not to mention the extra embodied carbon of all the steel, but Plant says the additional floorspace that the gymnastic feat allows “makes a good return on the investment”.
The project is perhaps the most literal example of building around a sight line in London, but it stands as a microcosm of the city’s long tradition of picturesque planning, where buildings have been sculpted by a matrix of invisible ley lines, designed to preserve a range of cherished vistas.
For generations, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral has been the hallowed point to which all else must bow, extending a radial web of protected views across the capital. The system was first developed in the 1930s by Godfrey Allen, then surveyor of St Paul’s, who drew up a grid of height limits around the cathedral, primarily to preserve views from the south bank – many of them from outside his favourite pubs.
The rules have since been expanded and codified in the London View Management Framework, which details the precise coordinates of the 27 protected views and 13 protected vistas – even taking into account the curvature of the Earth, so distant are some of the precious prospects. They are classified into four categories, including London Panoramas, such as the view from Parliament Hill; Linear Views, such as the Mall to Buckingham Palace; River Prospects, including the Victoria Embankment; and Townscape Views, including Parliament Square to the Palace of Westminster. But St Paul’s still reigns supreme, enjoying protection not only from buildings obscuring its foreground, but also from things popping up in the background – in theory, at least.
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Conservationists’ eyebrows were raised in 2016 when it was belatedly discovered that the expensive shaft of Manhattan Loft Gardens, a 42-storey tower of luxury flats in Stratford, was poking up behind the dome of St Paul’s like a chubby middle finger. The fact that this was only visible through a telescope from a mound in Richmond Park, 20km away, where a hole is especially cut in a hedge to preserve the vista, mattered little to outraged critics with telephoto lenses. (The LVMF protected view stipulates the background should be protected up to 3km behind St Paul’s, whereas the tower is 7km away.)
More visibly, the odd shapes of many of the City of London’s skyscrapers are guided by their need to dodge the views of St Paul’s. The angular wedge of the Cheesegrater, by Richard Rogers’ firm RSH+P, is so shaped in order to lean out of the view from Fleet Street – fittingly, from just outside Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub. It was an engineering feat that took twice as much steel as the Eiffel Tower to achieve. Similarly the Scalpel, by KPF, leans in the opposite direction, sloping back to the south in a mirror-image incline, the duo lurching away from the dome as if caught in an awkward dance of social distancing.
Perhaps the clumsiest manifestation of all the St Paul’s restrictions comes from French architect Jean Nouvel. His galumphing One New Change shopping centre staggers to the east of the cathedral, twisting and turning its brown glass walls as if drunkenly trying to limbo beneath the height limits.
The story goes that the architect turned up to the first meeting with the planners holding an Airfix model of a Stealth bomber. Just as the form of the plane was modelled to avoid detection, so too would his building be deftly faceted to duck below the radar of the viewing matrix. It’s not hard to see why he was tempted to indulge in a bit of sculptural slicing. The City’s supplementary planning guidance positively encourages it, talking of how the height grid around St Paul’s actually represents “a complex three-dimensional surface of inclined planes and occasional ‘cliffs’ where significantly different sightlines coincide” – catnip to an architect struggling for ideas.
As Peter Rees, then chief planner of the City of London, said at the time: “There’s only one tool of development control that really works – and which I possess – and that is a low threshold for boredom.”
