Landscape Matters Issue 4 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 8
2.
London: Let's take care
Robert Holden and Tom Turner
WE SHOULD CARE for the appearance of our capital city,
its public spaces, its parks, its streets and the RiverThames.
The central section of the Thames is in particular need of
comprehensive landscape strategies.The Greater London’s
Authority’s Blue Ribbon policy gives the river some protection.
But we do not have sufficiently effective policies for views,
skylines or green roofs from and along the river. Each of the
32 London Boroughs can develop high rise policies and long
stretches of the river are dominated by skyscrapers.The only
effective planning policies for high buildings are Conservation
Area status (70% of the City of Westminster), World Heritage
Site status (which applies to Parliament and Westminster
Abbey and theTower of London) and St Paul’s Height’s for the
area SW of St Paul’s Cathedral. These policies are patchy and
exclude much of London south of theThames.The GLA’s Views
Management Policies are largely ineffective.
Matchboxes and look-at-me architecture
At borough level, apart from an occasional ‘no’, planners seem
happy to say ‘yes’ to every proposal. Many developments, like
Southbank Place, PLATE 1 are conventionally dreary ‘matchbox
architecture’. Others are towers of crazed idiosyncrasy:
attention-seeking designs for never-seen-before shapes, like
St George Wharf Tower by Vauxhall Bridge. Made of glass, steel
and concrete, these are hugely expensive structures, costly
in embodied carbon, with large ecological footprints and few
living walls or roofs.The residential skyscrapers of Southwark,
Lambeth and Wandsworth overshadow each other and create
hostile microclimates. PLATE 2 Many are owned for speculative
reasons by non-residents.They are often unoccupied, as are
the open spaces between them. PLATE 3 The offices of the City of
London skyline is more ‘larkitecture’ than architecture with the
central reach of the river becoming a dark canyon with its few
historic buildings appearing as gaps on the mouth of a tired old
horse. PLATE 4.
