Nine Elms disease part XX: Skyline campaign brings good taste to the debate

At last, someone comes to the debate over London's resurgent skyscraper plague with matters other than money and politics in mind.

Writing in the Architect's Journal, former City of London planner  Peter Rees poured scorn on the quality of the new residential towers going up across London - but especially those in the Vauxhall/NineElms/Battersea developments.

He rather weakens his case by contrasting these "dumbed down" "investment towers" with some of the new buildings in the City that he was involved with - the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater, sure, but what about the repulsive "Walkie-Talkie"? Did the plans for that one not pass under his highly sensitive nose?

That apart, you just have to applaud the campaign's aims, but it looks like it's just too late. Certainly for those of us watching our lovely views across London being daily narrowed down by the shiny boxes of various shapes rising out of the old Battersea marshes.

In a separate article in the same magazine, Robert Bevan  singles out the hideous St George's Tower at Vauxhall, which is best known as the location of a helicopter crash last year. Great the way an architectural expert can really lay in to a nasty building - he attacks its joylessness, and the "cheap grey glass and steel" finish, at odds with the "cheap green glass" of the equally hideous winged towers next door/beneath.

Oddly, another recent and quite loud bit of architectural statement at Vauxhall is the subject of a preservation campaign. That's the shiny "ski jump" shelter at the massive bus station, all of which is now to be swept away under Lambeth's plans. Good luck, Kate Hoey MP et al!

Does the Cheesegrater have mystical powers?

Late autumn sunshine creates an eerie effect on the sloping face of Richard Rogers' latest London landmark, the so-called Cheesegrater in Leadenhall Street

So much talk about London's new skyscrapers - for example, the vile Walkie-Talkie's propensity for frying people on the pavement when the September sun hits its concave face - but no-one else, so far as I can tell, has yet to comment on the strange optical effects of the even bigger new building on Leadenhall Street.

The merits and otherwise of Richard Roger's massive new tower (at 50 storeys, about 100m taller than its near neighbour, Rogers' widely-lauded Lloyd's building) have been widely discussed. There's a story, confirmed by Rogers himself, that its wedge shape was arrived at  entirely to save the view of St Pauls.

In doing this, he seems to have created a reflective effect that is, in its way, almost enough to produce a  religious experience, though whether this was intended I do not know.

One bright October morning, I looked out of the bathroom window, east across London, and saw this strange column of what seemed light swirling light rising above the Leadenhall building. The sun was bright, but in its autumnal mode, hit the wedge-shaped southern face of the skyscraper in such a way as to reflect almost vertically upwards, through layers of dispersion early morning mist.

The effect was series and spectacular - I tried to capture it, and the photo below does not really convey the full strangeness of this event. It was as though the building were acting as a sort of celestial prism, perhaps sucking the light and goodness out not eh City! What, is there some goodness to be found in that square mile? OK, No, clearly not the right interpretation. SO we are back to cheesgrater rather than soul-sucker.