Paint Your Wagon
Photo 13. London
I never saw a sight that didn’t look better looking back…
It’s a line from the musical Paint Your Wagon and here we were, over the Thames, looking back at the gulch we’d threadneedled our way through, just a few days before. We’d let the horses run free in Hyde Park1, and were on our way to the Tate Modern.
Paint Your Wagon was set in a gold-mining camp and our view from here was of a modern day goldmine: The City of London. According to itself:
London has retained its crown as the top global financial centre as New York City slips to second position, new figures published by the City of London Corporation reveal2.
The City of London Corporation? It’s a city within a city: that part of London that’s loosely defined by the walls of the ancient Roman city Londinium; the capital (£) of the British Empire. The ‘Square Mile’, as it is known. Prime real estate.
St Paul’s Cathedral is also here, and—for three hundred years—its dome dominated the skyline. But—come the 1920s and 30s—when, in New York and Chicago, skyscrapers were the new kids on the block, a couple of buildings went up in London: not tall by today’s standard, but big enough to obstruct some views of the cathedral from the river.
There was outrage. Apoplexy. A spluttering of sherry. A ‘Surveyor to the Fabric of St Paul’s’ was appointed. Who came up with what are known as the The St Paul’s Heights: view shafts that preserve St Paul’s visibility from other parts of London. These ‘protected views’ remain, and strongly influence why the City’s skyscrapers are where they are, and where they are not3. That distinctive slope, for example, of the building known as the Cheesegrater (officially, The Leadenhall Building): it was designed that way specifically to comply with the St. Paul’s Heights; to protect a view shaft.
Not for London what those uncouth colonials had inflicted on their precious church:
And so—even after WW2, when most of the City was bombed to bits (see postscript below)—London took its time growing up.
Come the Millennium, however, and a new Mayor (Ken Livingstone), of a new city-wide authority; a mayor with an enthusiasm for architecture…and the Gherkin pickled off a whole new era. At 180 metres tall, it was London’s first real skyscraper. Ridiculed at first, it won London over and opened the drawer to the whole butler’s pantry that’s been erected since. There are more on the way…
Demand for Grade A office properties in the City of London continues to drive the capital skyward4 and The City has a target to build more than 1.2 million square metres of office space by 20405.
In Paint Your Wagon, Lee Marvin’s character says There's two kinds of people, them goin' somewhere and them goin' nowhere. And we were goin’ somewhere, so on we went.
We did think it a shame, though, that we couldn’t see the Gherkin from here. Given the contribution it has made to the city—prefiguring a whole carnival of modern architectural marvels—you’d think (wouldn't you?) that that was a view worth protecting.
Postscript
Came across this during my research and couldn’t not share it…
A question someone asked on the internet:
Why was the historic centre of London destroyed and replaced with high rise buildings? Couldn't they simply build their skyscrapers somewhere else instead of having to demolish entire parts of the historic centre to build them there?
And here is the answer History Geek provided:
Well, we outsourced the demolition of central London to the Luftwaffe in the early 40s. We couldn’t complain - they basically did the entire job for free - all we had to do was clear the site afterwards. It was an offer we couldn’t really refuse.
Next week: Minnesota
A reference back to Photo 9, Fire Fire!: We were in the finance district—the City of London—wending the narrow streets and laneways, dwarfed by gherkins and graters. Cowboys, on horseback, threading through the gulch…
Stephen Liddell’s blog, The protected views of London.
Great story! Thanks for that
https://www.frp.org.uk/james-batten-st-pauls-view/