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Writer's pictureLee Mallett

CAF Annual Dinner 2024: Delivering Destination City

The City Corporation will work “collaboratively and transparently” with developers, architects and their teams alongside businesses to deliver “Destination City”, the object of City Plan 2040, the new Director of Environment, Katie Stewart (below, middle right), told a packed City Architecture Forum annual dinner.


88 CAF members and guests filled the Mercer restaurant with a senior cohort of City politicians and officers including Planning and Transportation chair Shravan Joshi (above left), his deputy Graham Packham, and Planning and Development director Gwyn Richards.

 

“It is about delivering a world leading business and leisure destination and a seven-day-a-week Square Mile. The tricky bit is how you deliver that on the ground,” she said, speaking alongside architecture critic and 20th Century Society chair, Hugh Pearman (above right).

 

“We cannot be prescriptive about how we get there and it’s critical for this next era of the City’s development it is done in the same way as previous moments in its history – by the private and public sectors coming together.”

 

She thought current issues were perhaps more challenging than previous crises. The City has to get a grasp on its emissions, on bio-diversity, on the impact of new AI technology, and not least the changes imposed by post-Covid working. We are still “frankly, working out what life and work post-Covid actually is”.

 

“Destination City – although it [the City Plan 2040] doesn’t say it explicitly – is all about making the City fit for the future, resilient and sustainable – and not just environmentally. Activating the public realm at ground floor and at height, making all those spaces more inclusive, more exciting.”

 

It was not a task the Corporation could deliver on its own, or without controversy given the historic built environment. “This is tough stuff” but the City will welcome “creative tensions” and is prepared to take “collective risks” because “without taking risks, we will not succeed”.

 

The City’s team, politicians and officers, will work “collaboratively and transparently” with developers, she promised. With flexibility around policies such as change of use and locating tall buildings and how these impact the City’s built environment.

 

The City would also seek a more “open and frank relationships” with its eight Business Improvement Districts (raised at a recent Policy and Resources Committee). And “we are working to understand what businesses really want out of the City,” she said. The Corporation wanted to build Team City of London – a working partnership between the Corporation, developers and businesses to help achieve Destination City.

 

She concluded with a tribute to CAF’s co-founder  Michael Cassidy CBE, who will not seek re-election in the City’s elections in March and who helped establish and champion the Forum with incredible energy and enthusiasm, providing a place for discussion. The Forum she said was “a lasting legacy of his vision” which had “helped shape this fantastic city”. “I’m sure everyone here tonight is grateful for the contribution he’s made to the City.”

 

“Temporary” solution for City offices

Architecture critic, trustee and chair of the 20th Century Society, Hugh Pearman, provided a more “oblique” take on the City’s built environment, past and future including a list of buildings that, he said, were in the society’s sights for future listing.

 

 “The City is not that old a place really is it?” he teased. “St Albans, Colchester and Canterbury have longer histories, despite impudent makeovers by the Romans. And like ancient Rome itself, this new town we’re in, is in a perpetual state of demolition and new building.”

 

The best fun to be had when starting out as an “architectural hack” he said, was scouring planning applications to see what “hopeful monsters” were evolving. He found London Wall was often where developers and architect “let rip” and Terry Farrell’s Alban Gate development, he discovered, was only one of several proposals to bridge “that canyon” – “and I think luckily the only one. It should be listed but isn’t.”

 

If London is a “city state” then the Square Mile can be regarded as “state within a state” – but what are its rules? Steeped in tradition, the paradox is it is “so unsentimental” about its buildings. And it is the toughest place to get a recent building listed, he said, or even a not-so-recent building.

 

Visit Broadgate for example he suggested, described by Simon Bradley editor of Pevsner, as “far and away the best office precinct in London”, where there are now “only architectural fragments” of the original Arup and Peter Foggo-designed elements. “Turns out it just wasn’t good enough!” joked Pearman.

 

One Finsbury Avenue, the remnant, he suggested should be upgraded from its Grade II listing to Grade II*. It was built in a time when it didn’t seem especially necessary to build tall, but today even James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry seems “positively modest” while Richard Rogers’ Lloyds of London even though it is quite tall, merely comes across as “big”. And the Gherkin is reduced to “a tiddler” he said.

 

The City has always reinvented itself. And today “you don’t even need the excuse of a fire”. There are some “real peaches” of buildings now under threat he said: “There’s Farrell’s Alban Gate. There’s Denys Lasdun’s only surviving unlisted building – the extraordinary faceted emerald Milton Gate. And..the ultimate B-movie building, GMW’s Minster Court, of which architect Piers Gough was moved to remark “they do Gothic better than vampires”. “No one does quality kitsch like that anymore, and yes the 20th Century Society is being pressed to ask for it to be listed.”

 

Perhaps the City had a special dispensation under planning law, considering its amazing churn in buildings. Like parts of a petro-chemical refinery that can change their structures within a curtilage without needing planning permission. But this isn’t the case, so Pearman had a proposal for the City.

 

“Why don’t we stop pretending and declare all speculative office buildings in the City to be temporary structures? After all that’s what they seem to be. Instead make them lightweight, smaller, more sustainable, with recycled materials, like Expo buildings. Then we can all understand they are not permanent and much less expensive.”

 

“Just don’t ask me about land values…I leave the details to others. Anway, the City Plan 2040 could include my proposal, and be immensely superior…”


You can view a full gallery of images from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/201782641@N06/albums/72177720321766337

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