One of them leans out precipitously into the street, the sharp white teeth of its stacked arcades framing sleek bands of tinted windows. From across the road, its curving prow recalls a top-heavy tower of Pisa with a space-age twist, as if the Imperial stormtroopers’ HQ has had a makeover. Fifty miles away, another emerges from a tangle of shrubbery in a business park, a multi-storey slab that looks like it’s been overtaken by nature. Foliage drips from its cascading terraces in the manner of a modernist Angkor Wat.
Both 30 Cannon Street, in the City of London, and Gateway House – aka “the hanging gardens of Basingstoke” – are extraordinary examples of what an office building can be. And this week, they received just acknowledgement in the form of Grade II-listed status.
Photograph: James O Davies/English Heritage
They join a group of a dozen other buildings that have been marked out for listing as part of English Heritage’s latest project to assess postwar offices from 1964–84, a period and building type that might not immediately jump to mind as fertile ground for producing cherished landmarks.
“We have to stay ahead of the game,” says Roger Bowdler, director of designations at English Heritage. “There’s no big book saying what matters from this period. The jury’s still out, and we have to make our decision before it has returned.”
The project was kickstarted by a heated row that erupted over the Broadgate complex in the City of London back in 2011, when English Heritage tried to list the 1980s office complex, which was threatened with demolition by an £850m plan for a new HQ for the bank UBS. Following furious lobbying from the City, the then-culture secretary Jeremy Hunt quashed the listing attempt. What English Heritage had praised as a “triumph of urbanism,” designed by Peter Foggo at Arup, was duly flattened.
Walking under the hulking silver shed that now stands in its place, Bowdler winces – as do most people that are forced to walk in the shadow of Make’s monstrous ground-scraper. But he quickly diverts my attention to what stands opposite: Foggo’s seminal 1 Finsbury Avenue, the current home of UBS, built between 1982 and 1984 and safely protected by listing as of this week.
With tensile wires pulled taut across its facade, in front of a bronze-anodised frame of grilles and struts, it looks like an executive Meccano set. It takes the industrial thrill of 70s high-tech, but cleans off the engine oil and smartens it up for the City.
“It was a real paradigm shift,” says Geraint Franklin, who led the assessment team for this postwar offices project. “It presages the Big Bang of stock-market deregulation with a new type of flexible working space, with raised floors and suspended ceilings. It also shows the architect’s role beginning to change, influenced by American commercial developments, concentrating on the ‘shell and core’ – designing a beautiful wrapper and key internal spaces, but leaving the rest to the client to fit out.”
It was a shift that would characterise the following decades, as the architect’s responsibility mutated from designing every element to being a choreographer of multiple consultants and contractors. Suddenly, the process of making a building was separated into an assembly of different “packages” – not always with happy consequences.
Photograph: Steven Baker/English Heritage
The 14 buildings selected in this tranche of work also tell the story of a sharp change in environmental attitudes, primarily triggered by the oil crisis of 1973. Until then, it was all about acres of curtain-wall glazing, inspired by the clean lines of Mies van der Rohe’s slick new language of corporate America. Norman Foster’s IBM pilot head office in Cosham, Portsmouth, built in 1970-71 and listed this week, is as distilled an example of the commercial glass box as any on these shores. Intended to last three or four years, it’s as well used now as the day it opened.
Five years later, the out-of-town campus-style office would take a radical turn, making a retreat to vernacular forms, as embodied in the former Central Electricity Generating Board in Bristol, built in 1975-78 by Arup Associates and also on the list. Conceived as a cluster of pitch-roofed pavilions, linked by spinal circulation routes and punctuated by landscaped courts, it shows the beginning of a concern for low-energy environmental design, with a swimming pool that functions as a heat-sink.
Others on the list vary wildly, from the fortified heft of BDP’s Bank House in Leeds (1969-71), an inverted ziggurat that looks as impenetrable as a Mayan temple, to the mirrored jewel box of Liverpool’s former Midland Bank, a jazzy attempt to engage younger customers in the 1960s. There is St James’s House in Birmingham, by John Madin, whose magnificent library in the same city is perversely being demolished, and two hovering concrete slabs in Newcastle by Ryder and Yates – MEA House and their former offices – one of the most important postwar regional firms in the country.
Richard Seifert, the architect of London’s Centrepoint (which was listed in 1995, although it is currently being converted into luxury flats – listing doesn’t protect function) looms large on the list, with his razor-sharp Alpha Tower in Birmingham and his cylindrical Space House, off London’s Kingsway, both making the grade. His Natwest Tower, however, which rises 180m above the City as a witty extrusion of the bank’s interlocking chevron logo, was refused listing, to many people’s surprise. It may have been the tallest building in Europe when it was completed in 1980, but it was deemed “too altered” to merit protection: its cladding was replaced and a clumsy new glass entrance box added after it was damaged by an IRA bomb in 1993.
Photograph: James O Davies/English Heritage
The same fate befell two magnificently 70s office blocks nearby, the Aviva Tower and 150 Leadenhall Street, both by Gollins Melvin Ward (GMW), which stand in their gentlemanly suits of tinted windows and bronzed mullions, a refreshing Miesian foil to their newer, garish neighbours. As the best examples of their kind in London – since Mies himself lost out to Stirling/Wilford at the No 1 Poultry site – why not list them too?
“Our process isn’t a stamp-collecting thing of getting one of each,” says Bowdler. “Sometimes we have to accept that actually the best examples of a particular style are elsewhere in the world.” Both buildings have been reclad since they were built, which also counted against their potential to be listed.
Listing in the City has long been a testy subject, the very culture of preservation at odds with the bullish drive of the free market and its hunger for ever more office space. Former chief planner of the square mile, Peter Rees, who began his career as a conservation architect, often scolded the meddling of the “Heritage Taliban”, threatening only to give planning permission to architecturally mediocre buildings, in the knowledge that they would not risk being listed.
Now retired from the City, he readily admits that this week’s announcement is a good thing. “I always thought of the City as a vegetable patch,” he says. “You cultivate each specimen, then harvest it and move on. But that doesn’t hold when you have particularly good-looking specimens. I doubt anyone will want to harvest the Gherkin when the time comes.”