OBITUARY: The City’s “Agent Provocateur” Simon Harris has died following a 20-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Harris, the innovative and influential development consultant born in 1948, passed away over the weekend.
Harris, who founded Baker Harris Saunders in 1976 and then BH2 in 1994, is credited with helping to shape the modern City of London. As an agent working in the Square Mile in the 1970’s Harris was one of the first to realise the need to reinvent the office building and the City’s potential to become a very different kind of place.
His first major project was Cutlers Gardens, EC2, where Baker Harris Saunders worked with Standard Life, Greycoat Estates and Stuart Lipton to retain more than half of the original facades on site and create new additional buildings with a similar vernacular of courtyards and spaces.
His expertise was also recognised through his contribution to 1 Finsbury Avenue – the first of the City’s US-style, large floor plate buildings – which is now Grade II-listed. Designed by Peter Foggo at Arup Associates and completed in 1984, 1 Finsbury Avenue led the City’s charge to deliver the office space needed to accommodate the banks and institutions flocking to London as a result of Big Bang – the regulation the financial markets effected by Margaret Thatcher in 1986.
Broadgate then followed. Harris understood the aims of Peter Rees, the City’s planning director, and helped shape the corporation’s goals of high-quality architecture using imaginative architects.
Harris also assisted Lord Palumbo on the development of One Poultry, first with Mies van der Rohe’s Mansion House Square designs and latterly with James Stirling and the Post-Modern scheme that was finally built on the site following the intervention of the Prince of Wales and a public inquiry.
He set up BH2 in 1994 with his previous partner Michael Baker, with Tony Gibbon looking after the investment side of the business and Sandra Jones heading up research. The practice was instrumental in delivering 30 St Mary Axe (the Gherkin) – the first tall building in the City of London for two decades and which generated the eastern cluster of towers that dominates the area today. Harris was also key to other Norman Foster schemes including 1 London Wall, 100 Wood Street and 10-12 Gresham Street.
Former partner Baker said: “He was unique in the City property market and was perhaps the first surveyor to understand the fact that good architecture and design was welcomed by the tenants and also made sound financial sense. In many ways he was a frustrated architect but he had the unusual flair to fully understand the planning and development process and was the first development consultant in private surveying practice.
“Simon was a one-off; interesting, enthusiastic, artistic, caring and thoughtful with a wicked sense of humour. He, despite his illness, carried on working for many years without a murmur, played the guitar and was an avid oarsman-a good friend and will be missed by many.”
Mike Hussey, chief executive of Almacantar and former Landsec director, added: “Simon advised me on the transformation of New Street Square, selecting Rab Bennetts, and on the appointment of Jean Nouvel at One New Change.
“New Street Square was probably our most successful scheme at Landsec and when it completed, Simon wrote to me and said: “Mike, you have no idea how talented you are… very few people would have taken my advice and then actually made it work!” He was humble and a quiet, experienced, genius who admired risk-takers and whilst not one himself, he was the most effective risk adviser I ever met.”
Former City planner Peter Wynne Rees remembers Harris as a quiet voice in his ear: “From the first hint of the City’s Big Bang in the mid-1980s, Simon was in the thick of the development revolution which resulted,” he said.
“He attended so many planning negotiation meetings at the Guildhall that it seemed as if he had moved into my office. Simon had his regular seat, in a corner and awkwardly out of my line of sight. Unobtrusively armed with a sketchbook and fountain pen he would take careful notes, interspersed with doodled solutions to the design issues under discussion.
“At critical moments of tension – within sometimes passionate debates between planner, client and architect – I would hear what sounded like a calm quiet voice within my head. It was Simon, from his corner near my elbow, proposing a clever compromise with well-practised apparent diffidence. Not only would he have sketched out a solution to the intractable problem but he would be able to “remind” us of what we had said, from his careful notes of the negotiation. That was Simon Harris, as the City’s ‘Agent Provocateur’.”
A memorial event will be held in the City in the autumn.
