Imagine what it would look like if the City of London imploded, and its skyline of towers was sucked into a single humungous lump. Picture the Cheesegrater strapped to the Walkie-Talkie, with most of the Gherkin thrown in, all bundled up in a great glass shroud.

If you can’t envisage what the resulting mess would look like, help is at hand – because someone has already designed it. At 22 Bishopsgate, in the heart of the Square Mile, a gargantuan office building has been proposed that will utterly dwarf all that has gone before, trumping every property developer’s wildest dreams. More than twice the size of the City’s biggest towers, it will contain 32 acres of floorspace heaped in an 80m-wide hulk, rising to just below the height of the Shard. Butting right into the middle of London’s skyline, it will be inescapable from every angle, an urban cliff-face that will change the capital’s profile forever. And this £1.5bn project is likely to be built by 2018, before you even knew it was happening.

But if you listen to the man behind this megalith describing its virtues, you would be forgiven for thinking it will barely be noticeable at all.



“We’re aiming for a quiet, elegant building, something that’s not too flamboyant,” says Sir Stuart Lipton, the 72-year-old titan of London’s property industry who, after a few years of absence from the City, is now back with bigger ambitions than ever. “The City can’t be full of fireworks,” he adds. “When there are too many fireworks, they become a distraction.”

But if the oddly shaped towers that have sprouted on London’s skyline over the last decade are to be thought of as fireworks, then 22 Bishopsgate is the fire blanket that will smother them all. From most angles, the building will blot out its neighbours’ sculpted silhouettes entirely, congealing their profiles into a single grey mass.

22 Bishopsgate. Photograph: Hayes Davidson

The scheme replaces a project known as the Pinnacle, a tower designed by American firm KPF in the form of a rolled-up napkin, which would have spiralled up to a slender point in the City’s planned “cluster”. First designed in 2003, for the Saudi and Kuwaiti-backed group Arab Investments, it was the ultimate symbol of boom-time hubris. Nicknamed the Helter Skelter, its internal layout was as inefficient as its billowing exterior was extravagant. It began construction in 2008, but was swiftly credit-crunched. The seven-storey stump of its abandoned concrete lift-shaft has stood as a warning ever since, an Ozymandian relic of the banking bubble.

The site was acquired in February by Lipton and his partner Peter Rogers (brother of Cheesegrater architect Lord Richard Rogers) for a staggering £300m, funded by a consortium of Canadian and Singaporean investors, led by French company Axa Real Estate. It was a price that far exceeded expectations for the famously troubled site, which had already foiled a previous attempt to revive it by Brookfield Multiplex in 2011 – an effort that ended in a sticky mess of legal battles over the accursed stump. But the inflated sale price has now spawned the inevitable consequence: the proposed stack of commercial floorspace is a literal diagram of quite how much value the investors must claw back from their gamble.

If anyone has the brazen confidence to take on such an inauspicious project, it is Stuart Lipton, a man who exudes the self-assurance you might expect of someone who has built almost 30m sq ft of commercial space in London over the past 30 years. He made his name in the 1980s with the ballsy Broadgate complex, near Liverpool Street station, in an era when he would growl around town in a red Ferrari. Ludgate Circus and Paternoster Square followed, along with key roles guiding the ambitious plans for Tate Modern, the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House. He was chairman of the government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) and has employed some of the country’s finest architects, as well as bringing Rem Koolhaas to London twice – first for the Rothschild bank, then for the redevelopment of the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, currently under construction. In the words of Lord Rogers: “You’d be hard-pressed to find a developer that’s raised the bar as high as he has.” If the bar is for monumental ambition, it is fair to say that Lipton has now raised it beyond all reason.

Visiting the public exhibition of 22 Bishopsgate, held in a marquee at the base of the stump, my first thought was that they’d got the scale of the model wrong. The building makes the Cheesegrater look like a fun-size wedge of parmesan, the Gherkin like a bonsai pickle. Its broad flanks will stand just 10 metres away from a proposed tower to the south, forming a lightless gauntlet, while casting a good stretch of city into almost permanent shadow.

Sir Stuart Lipton Photograph: Julian Makey/REX Shutterstock

The design is the work of PLP Architecture, the same bunch of people who designed the Pinnacle, but who broke off from KPF in 2009 to set up their own practice. Lipton has asked them to make a cheaper, more efficient building. It packs in a third more floorspace than the Pinnacle, and manages to cram in 1.4m sq ft of floor area – more than the Walkie-Talkie and Cheesegrater combined. It fills the plot to its limits, extruding the maximum area into a fat shaft, topped with a stepped summit that gives it the look of a cigarette lighter – perhaps the building’s inevitable moniker (if the Monster doesn’t stick).

“Stuart wanted a pure efficient rectangle,” says architect Karen Cook. “But we’ve cut away the corners and stepped the form to make it work from a townscape perspective.” She explains how the mass has been chiselled to make it appear more slender from the south-west, mindful of the prospect from St James’s Park and Waterloo Bridge – from where, as a result of her carving, it will look like only three towers stuck together rather than five. They have done their best, given the brief, but that sheer bulk is never going to disappear.

“The building has to fulfil a role of tying together the other buildings,” she adds, “while at the same time being the dominant building in the group. That’s a challenging role to fill.” It is a challenge that PLP (who are also responsible for a controversial cluster planned for Bishopsgate Goods Yard, a little further east) seem incapable of meeting with sufficient grace. Stumbling into the skyline, their tower will be like the chunky relative who dominates the wedding photos, forcing the assembled guests into an unwanted group hug.

As for giving back to the city, there will be a free viewing gallery at the top – though it will be managed by Arab Investments, who, having sunk close to £500m into the project, will presumably be doing everything in their power to cream some of that back.

22 Bishopsgate will be inescapable from every angle, an urban cliff-face that will change the capital’s profile forever

The marketing spiel does its best to ignore these facts and sell the interior concept instead. Lipton explains how there will be double-height communal areas throughout the building, “bringing all the benefits of a village green,” while the foyer will play host to “a changing menu of actions”, and your work life here will be “coached and curated permanently”.

He uses all the keywords: there will be lots of bike parking spaces (“because cycling is the new gym”), flexible floorspace (“for new collaborative working styles”) and it will use a “consolidated delivery plan” to minimise truck movement during construction. But there’s no escaping the fact that this “truly vertical city” is an oversized brute that will bring nothing but harm to the city. And if you think this steroidal pipe dream could never get planning permission, think again.

“This site has always been earmarked for one of the tallest buildings in the cluster,” says Gwyn Richards, head of design at the City of London’s planning team. “The design of 22 Bishopsgate follows our guidance for sleek simplicity, in contrast to some of the more gimmicky buildings we’ve had recently. We’re taking a slightly more disciplined approach now: no building in the cluster should be trying to shout down its neighbour.”

For the past year – since the departure of chief planner Peter Rees, who had a thing for towers with quirky profiles and cutesy nicknames – Richards and his team have been developing a 3D digital model that visualises the invisible planning constraints in the City. From the protected viewing corridors of St Paul’s to flight-path height limits, these restrictions form a kind of jelly mould inside which all buildings must fit.

22 Bishopsgate. Photograph: Hayes Davidson

“It looks like a raspberry blancmange,” says Richards. “And it points to the fact that we could have an even taller building on the site of 1 Undershaft [immediately east of the Cheesegrater].” Here, there are plans for what will be the tallest tower in the City, a confidential scheme currently being designed by Eric Parry, which a source close to the project describes as being “modelled on Cleopatra’s Needle”. It sounds promising, and Parry is eminently capable of designing an elegant obelisk, although another insider is less kind, describing it as a steroidal version of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, so big that it will “block out the entire solar system”.

The City is adamant that it needs as much floorspace as it can get, with office vacancy rates now as low as 5%. But the cost to London is clear. With permissions already granted for many more towers, from the Scalpel to the Can of Ham and a monstrous “Gotham City” mega-block by Make, we can say goodbye to a skyline of individual spires, between which you might occasionally glimpse the sky. With developers calling the shots, while planners egg them on, the future of the City’s silhouette looks set to be a lumpy blancmange.



