Exposure in the park
Sir: In his article (7 June) 'Indecent ex- posure in the park' Stephen Gardiner is right to protest against the increasing visual en- croachment of Hyde Park by surrounding tall tower blocks but wrong, I submit, to cast the Hilton hotel as the villain of the piece. If indeed this were the only perpen- dicular accent in the vicinity there would be little to complain about. What is more, if any architectural journalist were capable of the stupendous feat of surveying a, building without preconception and prejudice the Hilton would have come in for as much praise as blame.
In shape and exterior cladding it is defin- itely elegant and its upper half seems to dance in the air before one as one drives along Constitutional Hill towards it. Like the Carlton Tower hotel in Sloane Street, a positively beautiful addition to the area as one walks northward from Sloane Square, it conforms to the sine qua non condition for tower blocks, namely that from material angles its lower half is obscured while its upper portion rises soaring out of a bed of greenery.
I could give other examples of the con- version of ugliness to beauty through this method yet it is an effect achieved by town planners only by fluke and accident. The Hilton is in any case not one of the major crimes against London. These—at least two of them perpetrated with the blessing of the artistic establishment—are of course: 1, the complex of office slabs at the back of St Paul's, 2, New Zealand House with its death sentence to the former magic spells of St James's Park, and 3, the shattering incon- gruity of the Millbank Vickers Tower aligned, as one crosses Westminster and Waterloo bridges, with the Houses of Par- liament.
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