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Issue
Proposed 472ft, 43 storey residential tower on London's South Bank, appearing in views from the courtyard of Somerset House.
Our view
The Group has objected to the tower because of its impact on Somerset House in the City of Westminster. Specifically, the proposed development would be visible above the roofline of the River Terrace of Somerset House when viewed from various key vantage points within Somerset House, including the entrance to the courtyard.
Somerset House, designed by George III’s favoured architect Sir William Chambers and built 1775-1801, is one of London’s finest examples of neoclassical architecture and is a remarkably accomplished and ambitious essay in Palladianism. As a monumental, grandly-conceived classical urban space, of a kind more common on the Continent, it is unique in London. It has survived intact and the principal views south, east and west from the entrance off the Strand remain as Chambers would have seen them, without encroachment by extra-mural development.
As an architectural setpiece, Somerset House is most analogous, within central London, to a Georgian square. Only one of these - Bedford Square – survives wholly intact, but it is overshadowed by adjacent development, notably the YMCA building off Tottenham Court Road. The next most complete survival, Fitzroy Square, is significantly overshadowed by the BT Tower, the Euston Tower and University College Hospital. Neither Bedford Square nor Fitzroy Square was the product of a single architectural mind. By contrast, Somerset House is the product of a single mind and remains remarkably free from overshadowing. This adds another dimension to its uniqueness. It is a precious survival, easily on a par with the Palais Royal and Place des Vosges in Paris.
More than that, though, the architecture of Somerset House is of a kind that depends absolutely on symmetry, harmony and proportion. These are the keystones of Palladianism. All of them would be upset by the Doon Street tower as proposed and it is this radical undermining of the intellectual conception behind Somerset House that is perhaps most disturbing. All four sides of Somerset House are symmetrical; the nineteen bays of the River Terrace, where the Stamp Office and Navy Office sit either side of the Seamen’s Office, are beautifully composed. Any intrusion above the roofline disturbs the composition, but it adds insult to injury that the proposed tower is off-centre, thus fatally unbalancing the symmetry that is so fundamental a principle at Somerset House. The tower would diminish one of London’s most spectacular spaces and, no less important, it would interfere with our ability to appreciate it, because the eye would unavoidably be drawn to an interloping excrescence. The effect would be little different from significantly altering the River Terrace itself, which is inconceivable.
Not only does Somerset House survive intact, but very significant efforts have been made over the past decade to recover its original grandeur and to make it publicly accessible. A major public/private investment programme, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has among other things transformed the 40,000sq ft courtyard from a car park into what Sir Timothy Sainsbury has described as ‘London’s finest open air living room’. The courtyard has become the backdrop to the popular Somerset House ice rink over Christmas and New Year and when events are not being staged the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court (the first major public fountain scheme to be commissioned in London since 1845) serves as London’s most vibrant and atmospheric public space. It is the quality of the architecture, the quality of the outdoor environment (which depends partly on a sense of enclosure) and the attention to detail that make it so. The restoration of the courtyard was carried out to such a high standard that it won the Public Space category in the Royal Fine Art Commission Building of the Year Awards in 2001. It would be deeply unfortunate if, just as these efforts are concluded and just as we are seeing the fruits of major public investment, the qualities that make Somerset House so extraordinary and so special were to be undermined.
The Georgian Group had considered Somerset House reasonably safe from external incursion, the St Paul's Heights restrictions to the north and the Thames to the south forming a cordon sanitaire that is reinforced by the site's elevated position above the river. A building on the South Bank would need to be exceptionally tall to impinge on a view south across the courtyard. Such a building is now proposed, and it seems to us that the Doon Street tower represents a seriously greedy appropriation of a common airspace that has major amenity value well beyond its immediate neighbourhood.
Result
The public inquiry concluded on 7 March 2008; the inquiry inspector recommended rejection of the scheme. Acting against this recommendation, against the advice of the Government's statutory heritage adviser, against the expert recommendation of expert bodies such as The Georgian Group and against the wishes of The City of Westminster, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government gave the scheme the go-ahead on 20 August 2008, on the rather curious grounds that 'although construction of the tower would harm the settings of certain historic areas, this would be offset by the scheme's provision of a sports centre in a deprived area'. The Georgian Group's reaction was expressed in a letter published in The Times and Sir Simon Jenkins denounced the plans in the London Evening Standard. English Heritage and Westminster City Council unsuccessfully challenged the Government's decision in the High Court.
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