Cloud-capped towers
THE Irish Republican Army cleared the ground for the City's new tower by mistake. When it blew up the Baltic Exchange, the chairman of the Stock Exchange was asked whether the bomb had been meant for his own address. His reply was less than tactful: `Have you ever met an Irishman who could read a map?' His tower would not have been mourned, but the Baltic was a marble temple of Edwardian commerce. Now it is to make way for Lord Foster's latest erec- tion, already nicknamed the Erotic Gherkin, or Crystal Phallus. Strings were pulled to get this design through the planning proce- dure, after Swiss Re, the insurer, said that it would move into the City in a big way if it could have a suitably grand tower to live in. I hope the Swiss enjoy the view from the top. Look, that's the NatWest Tower, or was until NatWest abandoned it — and Britan- nic House, which was British Petroleum's tower until BP moved back to the town house by Lutyens — and that bulbous tower is Barclays' idea of a head office, and that building site across the way was Barclays' other tower — and that monument to past glories must be Lloyd's of London. And that's the Stock Exchange.
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