What’s missing from this view of the towers of London?

Would-be skyscraper developers would do well to examine past failures From the top of the Gherkin, the view is spectacular. You can look down on all the City’s other towers, and this seems to be the right attitude to them. The one with the cranes on top is the former NatWest tower. It was built as an iconic head office, but the managers preferred their old quarters in Lothbury and would not budge. Inside, it is made up of lift shafts, with offices tacked on. NatWest has sold it. The bulbous one, known to its friends as the Islamic Cultural Centre, was Barclays’ final attempt to build on its Lombard Street corner site. Barclays moved in, then moved off to Docklands. The one under wraps with the deep holes on either side of it used to be the Stock Exchange tower. I was there when the Queen came to open the building, but she never came back to close it. Hammerson has found a use for it and the Exchange has found a more practical home. The showy one with the lifts on the outside was commissioned from Richard Rogers as Lloyd’s of London’s gesture toward high technology. The business inside still depends on pencils and paper, but at least Lloyd’s is still there. New crop of towers is planted Experiences like these might have put the City off tower building, but memories fade, fashions change and a whole new crop of City towers is now in prospect. One will look like a helter-skelter and one like a portable telephone. Even the great house of Rothschild, having torn down its historic home in New Court to build a Newer Court, now plans an even newer version, 16 storeys high. Minerva may have decided that it has troubles enough without building hundreds of feet above Houndsditch or, at least, not on spec but others have fewer qualms. What has happened to fertilise this sudden crop of steel and concrete? First, of course, happy times in the financial markets.Their customers may or may not have made money, but the brokers certainly have and must surely be thinking of showier buildings and corner offices. By the time all these buildings are ready, the markets may have gone off the boil, but the City’s cycle has always been like that. City opens its arms This time, the City fathers and planners are determined not to miss their chance. They gaze down the Thames towards the towers of Canary Wharf, they kick themselves and their predecessors for letting that business escape, and they want to show the world how welcoming they are. You want the best towers, we have them, or are ready to see them put up; and if they spoil the view of St Sebastian’s, Arrow Street well, we all have to make adjustments. One adjustment appears to be heading for Broadgate, where not so long ago the North London Railway had its terminus and goods yard. No one preserved them and no one has yet proposed to preserve their successors. The idea is that they would be better if they were a whole lot higher. But they would also lose the human scale, which, for those who come to work there or to watch the skating, make them fit harmoniously into the scale of City life. This may help to explain why the City has, until now, been unlucky with its towers. They are not well adapted to what it does best. It is not a corporate structure, but a marketplace of more or less enterprising individuals, who trade in information their staple commodity and seek to add value. There is (so I once wrote) more to a house than a machine à habiter, and more to an office or City of offices than a machine à travailler.A City designed for battery hens will produce quantity, which any fool can arrange, rather than quality, by which it must live, if it can. One successful tower stands, for good reasons of history, just outside the City’s limits, where it was put by King William I. Now the conservators of Unesco’s world heritage committee have noted “with great concern” the new buildings planned to loom over it, and are threatening to put the Tower on their danger list. Can Unesco trump the City fathers, or indeed strike a deal? For every new tower that went up, one would have to come down. Four obvious candidates can be seen from the Gherkin, and more will assuredly follow. Christopher Filders is a financial journalist and a director of Barlows