Sharps and Flats
The London skyline has altered more drastic- ally in the last five years than it did through- out the five decades of Bone's rule in Fleet Street, and the rate of change is accelerating. For myself, I find this exhilarating, and I wel- come the appearance of tall towers rising over the low lines of London's vast sprawl. The Park Lane Hilton may in itself be no master- piece, but from the bridge over the Serpentine it soars distantly to dramatic effect. Even the Shell building on the South Bank, a jumped-UP version of the squat monolith on the other side of the river, has, from certain angles and In certain lights, its moments. Upstream and loom- ing more elegantly over Millbank, the Vickers tower reflects the sky like a shaft of blue ice. To my indulgent eye it no more shoulders the Houses of Parliament out of attention than their antiquarian sharps and flats rebuke Its cool modernity. How snugly, seen from lower St. Martin's Lane, the homely Victorian lines of the Cranbourn fit in at the foot of Sir Basil Spence's bleak slab of Thorn House. For ine it is a dreary attitude which holds that old and new cannot live comfortably together, and which maintains that a building of quality 15 somehow diminished in regard by the spring' ing up of a taller neighbour. Certainly I sym- pathise with those who fear the total trans' formation of that view from Westminster Bridge which can still bring back Wordsworth's lines to anyone with the leisure to look, but we shall just have to let our eyes learn to make the most of the compensations. I also have some sym- pathy for those visiting New Yorkers who ex- press their horror at the changes in London s skyline far more vehemently than our own most ferocious critics, but I don't see why we should live in a museum just to please them.
Previous page
