Peacetime at Poultry
BROADWALK House is the City's newest office building, in a droopy arcaded style and bilious colour, near the down starting signal of Liverpool Street Station. It appears to be made of a new material: reconstituted herrings in tomato sauce. No one, not even the dottiest government inspector, would say that it might just be a masterpiece. That was the blessing which an inspector conferred on the design (by James Stirling) which Peter Palumbo favours for his central City site in Poultry, and it was that opinion which fortified Nicholas Ridley in letting Mr Palumbo pull down eight listed buildings to make way for it. Now the Court of Appeal finds that Mr Ridley failed to go through the right ritual motions, and orders his successor, Christ- opher Patten, to try again. Whoops of joy from the City Corporation, which opposed the scheme and does not like being walked over by ministers and from workaday City people who (as I do) like the Poultry site the way it is. The Court, though, has not ruled on the merits of the case. It has simply provided, as a by-product of its judgment, the time and the opportunity for peace to break out. Mr Palumbo truly wants to leave the City some fine buildings. The Corporation and the boroughs on its fringe have waved on the developers of dull or dismal buildings by the dozen, buildings which, as potential masterpieces, are just non-starters. Can the two sides not agree to look for sites where the designs of Stirling and van der Rohe would be un- arguably welcome? Some developers, with their overdrafts and balance-sheets under increasing strain, would now be glad to sell Mr Palumbo a site or a building — at what he could aptly call a knock-down price.
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