Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  The Euston Centre, at the north end of Tottenham Court Road, furnishes a classic example of one of the most dominant forms of postwar office building: the glass curtain wall. This style had been perfected in New York in the forties and fifties: for instance in the United Nations Secretariat building, designed by the Brazilian rising star Oscar Niemeyer with interference from – and credit taken by – Le Corbusier; or in the deluxe curtain-walled Seagram Building on Park Avenue, designed by Bauhaus maestro Mies van der Rohe, perhaps the architect who came to be most associated with the style.

  In Britain the Smithsons had imported Mies’ mode for their Hunstanton school, but it was the successful commercial team of Gollins, Melvin and Ward who in 1959 constructed Britain’s first landmark office block in the curtain-walled ‘international style’ – Castrol House in Marylebone. There were painful teething troubles with these early curtain-walled buildings, as the Smithsons knew only too well. The steel mullions around the glass panels, for example, often corroded or buckled, cracking the glazing. Yet once the techniques were perfected, the advantages of glass curtain walls were many. Developers loved them because they were both cheap to prefabricate and slender, helping architects to maximise the floorspace within. For businesses keen to project a go-ahead image, they were ostentatiously modern. Architects of the Modern school approved of the fact that the structure was visible rather than being hidden away behind cladding or decorative detailing, while Michael Rosenauer noted admiringly that the mirrored surface presented, ‘paradoxically, less the building it enshrines than the reflection of other buildings, clouds and sky’.5 One final advantage from a planner’s perspective may have been that they made the increasingly massive office developments, such as the Euston Centre, look less substantial and overbearing.

  The business mastermind behind the Euston Centre was Joe Levy, who had started out as an estate agent shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Foreseeing that there would be a lack of office space in London after the Blitz, he took advantage of the rock-bottom wartime land values and snapped up sites all over London. For his sprawling Euston Centre, he spent years buying up little plots until he’d collected them all – like a football fanatic buying endless packets of stickers to complete his Panini album. This scheme for the Greater London Council was a triumph for his business, even though the resulting building manages to mangle Mies’ elegant glass box aesthetic into a bulky cross-shaped lump of a structure. Still, it did help the council finance a much-needed underpass to relieve the choked Euston Road. Levy acted as mentor to several other notable figures in postwar development, including the mysterious Harry Hyams, who had worked for him as an estate agent, though he soon broke out to make a series of canny land deals of his own via his company Oldham Estates.

  Richard né Reubin Seifert hadn’t intended to be an architect. His plan had been to escape the family business of medicine by studying painting at the Slade, but in a fateful Sliding Doors moment in 1928 he enrolled instead for the Bartlett School of Architecture. He was posted to India as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Engineers, and as for many of his generation, the war had changed his fortunes and his outlook: ‘The Army is the greatest school of experience – particularly in the officer class – of all times. I certainly came back a person who had tremendous confidence.’6 The newly ambitious demobbed Seifert bought a suburban semi for £300 in north London, and set about making a success of his little architecture practice, which started out modestly designing houses with a staff of 12.

  The practice prospered, and Seifert began to pick up more sizeable commissions. One of his first notable office developments was the highly decorated, sturdy, stone-clad Woolworths’ HQ in Marylebone, a florid collision of art deco, neo-Georgian and Festival of Britain styles built in the mid-fifties. However, before the decade was out he had started to echo the glass curtain-wall manner of the United Nations building, with a podium and slab development down the road from Woolworths. It was during this period that Seifert went into partnership with fellow architect George Marsh, whom many consider the genius of the outfit.

  The first quintessentially Seifert and Hyams collaboration was Tolworth Tower in south-west London, which opened in 1964. Foreshadowing the work the pair would do together over the following decade, this was a slender, 22-storey slab of offices raised up on angled columns, the concrete gables at either end of the building in the shape of a thrusting arrow pointing upwards, like the smoke trail of a rocket. Given Hyams’ megalomaniac fondness for naming his buildings after cosmological phenomena – Telstar House and Space House in London; Lunar House, Apollo House and Voyager House in Croydon; Astronaut House in Feltham; Planet House in Sunderland; Orbit House in Eccles – it is somewhat surprising that he resisted calling this one Rocket House, which would have suited it perfectly.

  Tolworth Tower’s rebellion against the right angle, so prevalent in the curtain-walled offices of the era, was prompted by Seifert’s dislike of them, reflected even in his own boomerang-shaped desk. Even so, the design of Tolworth Tower bore the unmistakable mark of George Marsh, who would go on to design many of Seifert’s most celebrated projects, taking the mild playfulness of this early office block and pushing it to create ever more ‘pop’ sculptural forms for his buildings.

  Through the late fifties Harry Hyams was stealthily buying up land and properties around the junction of St Giles, at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road (while his former boss Joe Levy was doing the same at the top end for his Euston Centre). Meanwhile, the London County Council had also turned their attention to this busy junction, proposing a new roundabout to tackle the major traffic problem in the area. The two plans, developed in isolation, threatened to cancel each other out. But neither Hyams nor the LCC had foreseen that another, much smaller-scale, speculator held the trump card. Beatrice Pearlberg owned a key building on the site, and flatly rejected the LCC’s statutory offer to pay a prewar price to buy the land from her so that they could build their roundabout. At this point Hyams’ business instinct and eye for a sharp deal kicked in. He told the LCC that he would offer to purchase the building from Pearlberg at market rates and give it to them – as long as he got to build his office block on their roundabout. The LCC caved, as – eventually – did Pearlberg, and Hyams got his new favourite architect, Richard Seifert, straight onto the project: Centre Point.

  Centre Point under contruction. © Janet Gyford

  In many ways Centre Point was the natural successor to Seifert and Marsh’s triumph in Tolworth – constructed as it was from jazzily angled precast concrete components and elevated on mosaic-tiled, chevron-shaped columns. Le Corbusier had called such columns pilotis, and in the postwar period they became an essential ingredient of many commercial and city centre schemes, opening up space at ground level for pedestrians or traffic to circulate beneath the buildings. During our conversation, architect James Dunnett described these as ‘one of the key ideas of modern architecture really, that you lift the building up on legs, that you create space around it so you get transparency through and underneath the building’. I’d seen pilotis everywhere, from Park Hill in Sheffield to the Festival of Britain Lansbury Estate in east London. Central Croydon has pilotis like the Tower of London has ravens: if you took them away, the entire edifice would fall down. ‘Various architectural and town planning effects are made possible by omitting parts on the ground floor – such as extending a street or plaza under a building,’ Michael Rosenauer had explained in his book, although he was a touch sniffy about the craze, venturing that ‘in many instances it is the sensation inherent in the fact that we can technically master the feat of putting a tall building on stilts that seems to make such a conception glamorous.’7

  As part of Hyams’ deal with the LCC, the slim tower and fountains of Centre Point would form a roundabout at this busy junction. The pilotis would allow cars to drive under a limb which connected the tower to a low-level slab block to the east of the roundabout. But after all the backroom dealing this idea wa
s, in the words of planner Lionel Brett, ‘outdated by a new circulation pattern before it was even finished’ and dropped by the LCC.8 This left the gangly tower and its sporadically spurting fountains oddly marooned on a not-quite roundabout, detached from the bustling shopping streets around it, and without even pavements to allow pedestrians past.

  ‘There is a vulgarity about it.’

  ‘It was all a bit of a mess at ground level, I have to say,’ said James Dunnett, as he reflected on the accusations of bad taste that hung around some of Seifert’s more expressive buildings. ‘Centre Point was considered to have been pretty much unacceptable. And in a way there is a vulgarity about it. But then vulgarity is acceptable if it’s in another country. Alternatively, if it’s from another decade, from the thirties, like an Odeon cinema, or something art deco or whatever, then that also is acceptable. But looming over Fitzrovia and Bedford Square and so on, not far from the British Museum, this was felt to be an outrage.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And I used to hate it in a way, until I started to look at it in a different way. I used to hate that the lid on the top of it, the edge of it waves, along with all of the zigzag precast units. I thought, that’s really overdoing it. It doesn’t need that. It could be flat, that top, it doesn’t need that wavy edge. And in a way I suppose I still think that. But I think the fun of it all is the pilotis at the ground level and the staircases. There was this rather splendid ramp on the island that went down into the garage, because the idea was that a chauffeur-driven limousine could come in there and drop off the chief executive at the foot of the steps that went up.’ Except that for years there were no executives, chauffeurs – or indeed anyone at all – to use the carefully designed stairs and ramps, or admire the spectacular views of central London afforded by its 35 floors.

  Centre Point remained unlet for a decade after its completion by Wimpey in 1966. The first people to lay claim to the building weren’t quite the high-end clients Hyams had envisaged, but squatters, who in January 1974, invaded it to highlight the increasing problem of homelessness. Their protest immediately became front-page news. Two activists had infiltrated Burns, the tower’s security firm, and opened the back door to let in 80 protesters: a mix of trade unionists, local councillors, teachers, lawyers and social workers, who proceeded to display banners and protest over loudspeakers against Hyams. Jim Radford, director of community centre Blackfriars Settlement, led the protest, announcing that ‘we have occupied Centre Point because it is the symbol of everything rotten in our society. We could accommodate many of London’s families in this building.’9

  How had this happened? Centre Point may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but it wasn’t so different from hundreds of other office developments of the time. As the years went by and this pristine and highly visible 385 foot monolith remained empty, questions began to be asked about Hyams’ motives. Public ire against the building was stoked by the Environment Secretary Peter Walker at the height of the early seventies housing bubble that left thousands priced out of London, and many of them homeless. Walker offered to buy it from Hyams for £5m (some £20m below the market rate) and turn it into flats, commenting sarcastically that he was ‘very distressed to hear that such a charming man had been struggling so long and so hard to let Centre Point without any success’.10 The developer stuck by his guns, insisting that he was waiting for a single client to rent the building, with deals with the British Steel Corporation, EMI and the soon-to-be disgraced Lonrho all falling at the last hurdle.

  Hyams sued those who implied he’d deliberately kept it empty for years to make a killing on the vastly increased rents in the seventies, but for this secretive ‘stealth developer’, the public row and scandal must have come as a shock. Even Seifert refused to come to his rescue, rejecting the idea that the building was suitable only for a single occupant, and expressing his unhappiness that it had been left empty for so long. ‘I do not like it and I have said so many times,’ he told The Times.11 But Centre Point was not unique: three other Hyams and Seifert office blocks in London – Telstar House, New London Bridge House and Space House – qualified when Peter Walker threatened to go over the heads of the developers and grant tenancies for office blocks over 50,000 square feet that had remained empty for over a year. To have one block standing empty may have been regarded as a misfortune, to have four looked like ruthlessness. In the end, Centre Point was let – in part, not in whole – in 1975; the early sixties Telstar House in Paddington was let to London Transport in 1974; and Centre Point’s curvy cousin Space House in Holborn was let to the suitably aerodynamic Civil Aviation Authority in the same year, almost a decade after completion.

  Space House is my favourite Seifert building. It’s built with Centre Point-style precast concrete y-shaped units, and stands on similarly jaunty legs, but the resemblances end there. If Centre Point is an upended packet of bourbons sitting on a saucer, Space House is more a Hornsea Pottery biscuit barrel sitting next to a bread bin. This big, fat drum of a building is connected via a raised walkway to its other half, a super-cool, low rise slab, whose gleaming marble mullions are punctured with windows that look remarkably like a stack of marching Space Invaders. I studied at a night school opposite Space House and frequently found myself drifting off, distracted by this extraordinary structure, in much the same way that I had when I’d worked next door to Richard Rogers’ Lloyds Building in the nineties.

  Space House, my favourite of Seifert’s buildings.

  John Gyford recalled the arrival of the plans from Seifert’s office on his desk.

  ‘An enormous amount of trust was put in us, as young development control officers, by the system. Particularly because with central London we were dealing with some quite major planning applications. Very often we were allowed to deal face-to-face with major architects and developers.’

  One of these was the Colonel:

  ‘I was allowed to phone him up personally and ask him to come into County Hall to discuss something with me. And he didn’t bat an eyelid about this. I would find myself talking over the counter to Richard Seifert about why his planning application had too many floors on it. The one I always remember, if you go up Kingsway on the left hand side a couple of hundred yards there’s a 1960s office block.’

  I jumped in excitedly at that point, and asked if he meant Space House.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Space House. He came in with the first drawings of this.’ John used a napkin on the table to represent the slab block. ‘And behind it was this drum.’ He plonked down a pepper pot.

  ‘Well, the first plans he produced didn’t have a drum, they had a cross. We tested it against the daylight criteria and it contravened them. It threw shadows. It’s surrounded by Peabody-type flats. And he came in and I explained the problem to him, and he said, Oh, that’s all right, I’ll get them to design something different. And they came back with the drum! Now there was always this view held by the planners that as far as Seifert was concerned, the only point of the external cladding was to keep the rain off the typists. That he didn’t much care what it looked like. His job was to maximise the available floor space within what the planning system permitted. At that time he was very much given to using – and Centre Point is the classic example of this – those prefabricated reinforced concrete struts which were not only external cladding but a key element of structure. I don’t think he did that because it was beautiful, it just worked.’

  Space House under construction, planned by John Gyford at the LCC, and photographed by his wife. © Janet Gyford

  Given my immoderate love for Space House, I had to bite my tongue.

  ‘I never went to his offices myself but I know a colleague who did, and he said there were just these rows and rows of architects sitting at drawing boards. An entire great room of them! It was a bit like that scene in The Apartment, that Jack Lemmon movie, where there were all these guys sitting down at adding machines.’

  What was Seifert like, I asked him.

  ‘He was q
uite affable when I spoke to him, but on one occasion the mask slipped. He brought in the job architect to discuss a planning application, which I thought was proposing more office floor space than could be accommodated within the plot zoning for that site. The job architect insisted that they had not transgressed any limits so I went through page by page. I can’t remember now what building it was, but I explained my calculations. At the end of it Seifert accepted my figures, that I’d got it right. He turned to his job architect and said, “WELL?” I felt for the guy.’

  By the mid-sixties Seifert’s firm had grown to 200 employees, and had made a dramatic impact on London’s skyline. But the team weren’t just transforming London; they were producing landmarks all over the UK and internationally too. There was George Laming’s beautiful curved curtain-walled design for Gateway House, which opened in 1969, snaking its way to the doors of Manchester Piccadilly station. The mid-seventies saw the construction of the Elmbank Gardens complex above Glasgow’s Charing Cross station, whose modular concrete components rivalled the complexity of those in his contemporaneous International Press Centre in the City of London. And despite the wealth of local architectural talent in Birmingham, Seifert’s practice built a number of major landmarks there, among them the National Exhibition Centre.

  Over the years the firm’s designs continued to evolve: Seifert was determined not to be caught producing outmoded work. ‘The increasing departure from traditional building methods,’ he wrote in the Financial Times in 1971, ‘spurred by the juxtaposition of economy and the more flexible use of concrete, with the added potential of reinforced plastic in building … mark the future trend of city office design.’12 By the mid-seventies the long horizontals, icy white mosaic and green glass of buildings such as the National Provincial Bank’s 1957 HQ in Draper’s Gardens were a thing of the past, replaced by the vertical accents, rough concrete earth-tones and deep brown glazing of King’s Reach Tower – home of IPC magazines and, famously, Tharg, alien editor of 2000AD and the young tyro journalists of the NME – and its giant cousin in the City, the NatWest Tower, which for a time was Britain’s tallest building.