Reaching for the Sky
By LOUIS WULFF
Ur and up go the gleaming buildings of the post-war City of London, carving a new skyline of concrete and glass rectangles high above the irregular, haphazard rooftops that Hitler's bomber pilots knew. Week by week, the vast office blocks grow.
How long will this process go on? Are the designers right in trying to give the staid City a look of imitation' New York?, Will the eventual result be a City of grace and dignity, or a heterogeneous collection of nondescript, utili- tarian buildings without character or wsthetic merit? These are questions debated as hotly in the City's clubs and bars, boardrooms and coffee- shops as they are in architects' offices and among the planning authorities themselves.
The City Corporation plan for the new Lon- don has been in existence with various modifica- tions for thirteen years, and a fascinating scale model exhibited at the City Information Centre in St. Paul's Churchyard—where it attracted disappointingly little attention—can be seen at Guildhall. But it does not give all the answers. There is much of the new City still unplanned. There are still far too many empty bomb sites, gaping like missing teeth, among the new build- ings and old.* Conservatism—in the non-political sense—is innate in the City where men tend to dislike anything new simply because of its newness. It is to this that a great deal of the criticism of the new London, built and to be built, can be traced. It is easy to sneer at 'matchbox buildings' and to condemn the property developers as smen who merely want to make large amounts of money in a short space of time. Similar remarks were made, similar accusations levelled, when ancient Rome was being rebuilt after Nero's little experi- ment in site-clearing by fire. The best way to judge is to go and look for yourself, and I chal- lenge any unprejudiced observer to spend a couple of hours walking round the square mile without being driven to the conclusion that the new, emerging City is. a vast improvement on the old.
Turn off Fleet Street up Fetter Lane and look at the wide, almost noble vista of New Fetter Lane, with its tall, well-proportioned office blocks and wide roadway, and compare it to the higgledy-piggledy maze of little narrow streets and culs-de-sac, with mean and ugly little con- verted houses which used to disgrace the area.
Walk past St. Paul's where civic lawns and gar dens invite you to pause and watch the hurrying tide of traffic and bustling pedestrians from an oasis of calm, where one great modern building is set far back from the roadway to make way for further (and this time privately owned) lawns- Go into any of the new buildings in London Wall, persuade someone to take you on to the roof and look at the gradually developing line of Route Eleven, an exciting view of the City-to- come.
Before you complete your tour and form your view, walk now round some of the old City, in the areas which many people think it a pitY escaped Hitler's bombs. Go along Copthall Avenue and explore the tiny passages threading on either side of it, like deep canyons in a moun- tain range. The office blocks, built perhaps 3 hundred years ago when land values were a tiny fraction of what they are today, are set almost back to back, leaving just enough room between for a man, but not two abreast, to walk. No room here for lawns or flower beds. 'No profit in that sort of thing, out of place among the counting houses,' you can almost hear the Dickensian owners agreeing with their builders. Along the walls are ranged tall reflectors of polished metal, set at an angle to catch what little sunlight maY penetrate between the walls, and to give a pale shadow of daylight to the unfortunates who work within.
The sooner all such horrors—and there are plenty more elsewhere in the square mile—are swept away and replaced with buildings in the modern style which give light and space for those who work inside them, the better.
One of the most interesting plans still in the preliminary discussion and sketches stage is for, the rebuilding of the Stock Exchange. Lore Ritchie of Dundee, the Chairman, and his col- leagues on tne Council have allowed no hint of their intentions to leak out, but it is certain that the new 'Change will be a very much taller build- ing than the old, designed to house many more workers in more efficient and more comfortable surroundings. It could well be a show place of the new City. What of the other buildings of the future, the offices, flats and garages that as yet exist 001); on paper, or as dreams in an architect's mind I have found complete agreement, at any rate on one point, among all the big men of property development with whom I have discussed this' Because land values must continue to go LIP' they say, the height of new buildings must go uP, too. Some of the more visionary developers an° architects have talked of forty-, fifty-, or even sixty-storey blocks springing up in the next de- cade or two. In the near future it may be possible for an architect, once he has heard what his client wants, to go to the chemists and ask them to produce a material with whatever special charac- teristics will best suit the design he has in mind' Perhaps the whole art of building and Olv struction will undergo another change as far; reaching as when concrete came to supplement and, too often, to replace, bricks.
* Of the City's 667 acres of property, 104 Warew destroyed, 121 acres damaged by bombs. Up to n°.,e just over 100 separate redevelopment schemes ha' been completed.
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