Extreme ugliness and London's embattled skyline: which new tower is the worst eyesore?

St George Wharf Tower at Vauxhall - is this the nastiest of all the new-ish, tall-ish buildings in London? 

The near-completion of the big tower block with a bulge on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge adds yet another grotesque silhouette to London's much abused skyline.

For sheer "wtf?" factor, this new building, One Blackfriars,  is not as offensive as the lumbering goon of the Walkie Talkie as it gobbles up air and light over the City of London.

As hideous as these two recent arrivals to London's new skyline may be, there's a third contender for the crown - surely, the most dismal of all the ugly high-rise London brothers.

This third structure is only too well known in the SW postcodes.

Mention a downed helicopter, a rude finger pointing up to the sky, and you all know it -  St George Wharf Tower at Vauxhall.

Look at each tower in a bit more detail.

1. The Walkie Talkie

The Walkie-Talkie - a "lumbering goon" of a building
which blocks light and ruins views in the City of
London – looks just as bad a mile south in Bermondsey.

A 34-storey, 160 m (525 ft) tall office block at 20 Fenchurch Street designed by Rafael Viñoly, completed in January 2015. The tower was originally to be nearly 200 m (656 ft) tall but was scaled down to preserve views of St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower. In 2015 it won the Carbuncle Cup for the worst new building in the UK.

Does anyone love this tower? Well, possibly those making a fortune out of letting it. It still dominates views of the City from the south bank of the river, despite much taller new buildings shooting up behind it. Wide-shouldering its way into a billion tourist photos, this is a true monument to City greed.

2. St George Wharf Tower, Vauxhall (pictured above) is a 180 metres, 52 storey cylindrical tower poking out from a sharp bend of the River Thames. It is one of Europe’s tallest wholly residential buildings and the tallest residential tower in London. 

The tower's "green" credentials, with a wind turbine at the top supposedly generating 27,000 kWh of energy per year, are fine, but hardly make up for the disastrous impact this structure has on views from all over London, and especially from Whitehall, Pimlico and my back yard.

St George Wharf Tower - one of very few
skyscrapers that looks even worse at night.

The word ugly is too good for this rude erection. It is just too nothing at all, to be ugly. It is offensive, though - a straight shiny finger held up to everyone in London. It's saying, buzz off, plebs, this town's for rich bastards only.

Even if it hadn't been the scene of a tragic helicopter crash in 2013, people would still have hated this building.

You know how bad it is because no-one has been able to find a decent nickname for it - one that sticks. I've heard "The Battery" - but the Duracell AA batteries it resembles are much more elegantly styled. Someone else called it "The Plunger" which is nearer the mark.

It's one of very few skyscrapers that actually look worse at night when the lights come on. There are vertical stripes of light going the full height of the tower, then shorter bars of light surrounding the corona-style penthouse at its peak.

The lights have that harsh brightness, reminiscent of DHSS office striplights back in the early 1970s. Maybe the builders got a job of old neon tubes and slapped them on. That's what it looks like: cheap, cold, nasty.

3. One Blackfriars, aka The Vase and The boomerang. Designed by architects SimpsonHaugh and Partners, this 49-storey, 535ft tower at the south-west end of Blackfriars Bridge is a worrying sight. What was supposed to be an elegant tribute to an iconic Scandinavian glass vase now looks like a pot-bellied man (or, according to other observers, a pregnant woman, or a flasher concealing a large erection beneath his raincoat).

From some angles it looks like a the companion of the Walkie Talkie, as they could both be large drunken men bending over in the street to vomit on the pavement.

One Blackfriars is almost 100ft shorter than originally
planned, which might account for its almost comic
and definitely ungainly fat-bloke silhouette.

Ironically, its appearance has been made worse by a decision to reduce its original planned height of 225m to the current pygmy-like sub-200m stump. Result: scaled down it just looks all wrong. The cut also meant the one public benefit the tower was supposed to offer - a free viewing platform at the top - had to go. As they usually do.

Ah, but I hear you shout, there's a fourth and fifth and a sixth contender for this sorry crown.  And of course there are lots of other monsters out there. Just look. For many, the most ridiculous new tower in London is the thing that pokes its Batmobile ears and turbines into the sky above Elephant & Castle, name of "Strata SE1".

The building was famous for the three highly-visible turbines at the summit of the tower which were supposed to supply about eight per cent of all the 400 flats' electricity. Apparently as soon they were switched on the owners of the pricey flats on the upper floors complained of noise, vibrations, heat etc - so they were switched off most of the time.

The pricey blades were soon being mocked as a prime example of developers' favourite past-time, "greenwashing".

This joke of a tower block has since been crowded out by a load of bland high-rise residential towers, so now the silly old Strata - already nearly 10 years old - looks like the one guest at a party who actually bothered to wear fancy dress.

Other people will cite the Cheesegrater at Leadenhall, the Shard, and some of the clumsy towers of Canary Wharf. Personally I think the Shard is beautiful, elegant design; such a shame that it should be the preserve of the rich and the super-rich. What happened to all those democratic ideals that the young architects of the 60s, like Renzo Piano, must have been imbibing at their radical architecture schools?

Sweet and sour thoughts on Open House London weekend

The 21st annual Open House London weekend has been bigger and more popular than ever, hitting the news with reports of 18,000 strong queues in Battersea  to get a first and final glimpse of the interior of the derelict power station.

Being 60 miles from the city this weekend, am feeling rather envious and sad not to be there. But then again, am beginning, in a very churlish way,  to dislike these admirable initiatives.

This year's , for example, has acted as a great piece of extra publicity for the developers of the Battersea Power Station site - offering a tantalising glimpse of what remains of the interior for two afternoons before turning the whole place into a property goldmine of luxury apartments. With or without plastic chimneys.

Surely this is just an old bugger's sour grapes? Open House London was and remains a brilliant idea, to persuade the owners of all manner of strange and wonderful buildings - from the grandest palace to the most humble council flat - to open doors to public for one weekend.


It started in 1992 and has become so popular and successful that it is an institution in itself, supported by loads of sponsors and copied in 20 or so other cities around the world.

Yes, it allows vogueish architects the chance to show off their gorgeous homes to aesthetically-avaricious audiences of Wallpaper* readers, so what?  It has also given the interested public the chnace to wander around in some of the strangest, most exclusive, most secret, most outrageous built spaces in the most arcjhticturally-bloated conurbation in the western world. Such as - the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Or the Blizard Building at Queen Mary's College in Whitechapel.

Wish it had been around in 1968!

Walkie Talkie reflects on the harsh glare of publicity

A week ago I described the so-called Walkie Talkie block in Fenchurch Street, London, as one of the ugliest buildings in the country.

I emailed Radio London to that effect, in a drunken attempt to contribute to a discussion prompted by Building Design mag's round up of the worst  new buildings in the UK, aka the "Carbuncle Cup 2013".

I am a bit worried now that, according to the latest news, this building is not only ugly but actively malicious. Apparently it has been melting totally innocent Jaguars parked within range of its deadly sunlight-focusing concave reflective surface,  burning the paint off shop-fronts and frying eggs in the hands of fascinated pyro-maniac tourists.

That was not what I meant when I called it "a gargantuan lump which wrecks the view from almost every direction. Its shape is as moronic as its nickname."

I added: "That shape just makes me ill. It is a shape dictated by greed - more sq m of office space than the  ground level footprint. And it steals the light from a a much large area of the City than any other building.

"Best solution - demolish it now. More realistic solution - build more, bigger, better  skyscrapers around to to render it insignificant. "

Ironically, I revisited the  area earlier this week and have to admit I found the nearly completed building much less horrible at close quarters than it looks from a distance. I rather admired  Rafael Viñoly's subtle curves, and especially the tromp-l'oeil effect you get looking straight  up from the pavement of Fenchurch St - at a certain point it all seems straight, as the perspective cancels out the fattening of the soaring structure.

(And I am not just saying this because I am afraid it will turn its terror-beams in my direction).

I still think it is a blot on the City skyline - it is just so hulking, so smooth, so un-London. It might look fine on the Florida coastline, or in Doha, or perhaps even Portsmouth, where it could focus its glare on the Solent and boil up the sea. Maybe someone could then tap the solar energy and put it to good use?