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?

Thought for 2017: Give us Gagarin rocket apartments and super-tall towers of crystal rather than squat lumps of blandness

OK so it is a RPBW impression, but you can see
how the now abondoned project for a Paddington
Skyscraper might have echoed the luminous
elegance of the Shard at London Bridge.
Photo: Piano

Of course as an old buffer I'd rather London looked and felt like it did in 1976: dirty, scruffy, smelly, semi-derelict, cheap.

But as that ain't going to happen, I'd rather all the new developments were as interesting and elegant as the recently-dropped proposal for another Renzo Piano tower, this one at Paddington Station.

The so called Paddington Pole was removed from planning consultation by the developers after a well orchestrated protest and a big public outcry. It would have been like a second Shard, in even more stark contrast to its surroundings, and therefore, to my eye, less offensive than what is likely to emerge as the compromise: a massive, but much shorter, "floating cube" that will still jut up into the skyline.

This seems to be  a continuation of the Prince Charles effect. Get enough posh and influential people to protest and you can batter the planning committees, etc, into submission.

Sadly, the result is usually something duller, less brave, and much blander than the original design - eg,  the bits around St Pauls, One Poultry, the Sainsbury Wing National Gallery extension (a truly ghastly place which makes visiting this once great gallery a dismal experience);  and Chelsea Barracks - where the Prince's view of architecture holds sway. There's a good piece in AJ explaining precisely this eventuality.

This is exactly what has emerged at Paddington. Instead of a crazy, slender, sparkling 800 foot pole, this bit of London will get a gigantic glass cube, which looks very much like a big version of everything else built in cities all round the planet in recent years, and actually reminds me of nothing more than the cheap looking new US Embassy in Nine Elms. This 14-storey cube is also designed by Renzo Piano, but as you can tell from the awful green and orange plastic-look slabs near St Giles, he's just as capable of turning out cheap and nasty stuff as the next architect.

Here's what we'll get instead: a 14-storey glass and steel cube that looks
like something designed for a business park somewhere down the M4...

Given the lumpen blandness of so much stuff going up now, don't you just long for some crazy, high quality but imaginative buildings, such as the proposed 'Soviet Space Rocket' aka Gagarin Square tower, in Southwark?

This was a really mad sci-fi look 30-storey building that would have changed Southwark Street completely, had it not already been ruined very thoroughly by all that stuff that's arrived next to Tate Modern, not to mention the Shard and co at the Eastern end. In fact this outlandish tower was ruled out in 2015, to be replaced by something much blander.

Personally, what is most offensive about all these buildings - tall, short, ugly, beautiful - is that they are being built for people with upwards of a million to spend on a flat they probably won't even live in. How odd that in the 60s and 70s the only people who lived - or even wanted to live - above 20 storeys in central London were council tenants. Now most of those great towers of Barbican and elsewhere, built with public money to give everyone a decent place to live,  have been privatised. Those are tall towers, so is Trellick. Trellick is near Paddington. Many who used to hate it now think it's a great experiment in vertical living. That Paddington Pole, with a visionary council behind it, could have been a continuation of that experiment.

Impression of the 30 storey Gagarin tower designed for
Southwark Street, but kicked out by planners last year. 

A lot of the best anti-tall towers stuff is coming from the Skyline Campaign, which seems to be a global pressure group pulling together lots of local protests. While much of its activity seems well justified, it also seems to forget that any new building - especially a large building like St Paul's or  the neo-gothic mass of St Pancras - ruins somebody else's view.

No point crying over London's ruined skyline - that milk was spilled many decades ago. Really, some dear rich people's view of St Paul's through a telescope from Richmond Park has been desecrated by a large residential tower in Stratford? Oh dear! Oh calumny. Those poor dear Richmond residents. What about the residents of the Patmore estate in Battersea who used to have a nice view across the river. Now all they see are the steel skeletons of yuppie towers, as their windows are shaken and their lungs filled with grit by the passing of hundreds of trucks bringing cement and steel to the site, every day for the past three years?

We're fighting the same battle but from totally different perspectives. You can like tall buildings, and want more of them, without being a capitalist baby-eating property developer.

Every time someone creates a good new viewing point, they destroy many other people's view.

The people who built the Shard have changed almost everyone's view of London. But they have also given us all something new and interesting to look at, a new landmark that we can claim a bit of. I've said it before, and I stick to it: the Shard is a better building than London deserves. It is a perfect new landmark for this dirty old city in the mud, and the way it shines out on a changeable day, visible from almost every zone 2 or 3 high street, gives everyone an immediate sense of location, like GPS only better.

Of course the Paddington conservation lobby are now protesting against the bulky cube, for which they are in part responsible. Of course they want to keep their nice bits of W2 just as they are. Which is just as bonkers as me wanting London to be as dirty and dangerous and cheap as it was in 1976.

We can't always get what we want, thank god.

The Shard? Maybe it's too good for London.

Today, the Shard was showering silver light across Southwark and into my borough, Lambeth. I liked it a lot.

The  debate about Renzo Piano's strange addition to London skyline has been quite good fun, if predictable. Many have complained that it's too big or damages views of St Paul's or whatever. As if London actually had a skyline worth preserving, before this rather beautiful  reverse icicle appeared, shaming all the shabby 60s and 70s and - ugh - 80s and - yee-uch - 90s stumps it looks down on.

That great Canaletto skyline of St Pauls lording it over all the other Wren churches and warehouses was finally trashed in the 1950s and 60s. I'd argue that the so-called Shard (spike? stalagmite? stretched tee-pee?) acts as a sort of peg for all the new rubbish. It gives them a wonky sort of focus, hints at what might have been had London had a proper cluster of aerial architecture. It suggests this most strongly only from directly due north and due south viewpoints. From Brixton Hill, or from suicide bridge in Highgate, say.

From others - as from the little south London train that clatters between Clapham High Street and Peckham Rye - you see all of London's new, tall buildings in a washing-line parade, or as a receding gum stabbed with an absurdly variegated assortment of rotting and disintegrating teeth.

Like the Gherkin, but unlike most others, the Shard works well as a standalone. Nothing else built in this muddy riverside settlement over the past three decades has quite so cleverly exploited our fast-changing estuarine skies and cloudscapes. I am very biased, I love real skyscrapers. By real, I mean something that soars away and makes you gasp. In the 70s, Centre Point and Barbican and the NatWest tower tried and failed. I have always despaired at London's pussyfooting approach, and I hate the dreary cluster of sub-Dallas identikit bricks downriver.

But even sceptics are beginning to enjoy the Shard. I love the way it pinpoints London Bridge for anyone anywhere within a 20 mile radius. How, as you follow the Thames, it approaches, and recedes, and approaches again, and teaches you just how extreme are the river's bends.

I love how it disappears into the grey eiderdown and blotting-paper clouds that so often flop down  across the city. I love how it wears its glass like a sort of frozen gown, translucent drapery that reveals flashes of the muscles beneath.

I love how it rises, so un-phallic, above the city as you cycle down any of the seven south London hills towards the centre, and get that reverse-Whittington view of the golden cow of the city. I love how, quite often, I think I am looking at yet another view of the Shard and then realise it's just another Victorian church spire a few hundred yards away.

From Hampstead Heath, it complements St Pauls, standing back, offering the great cathedral some reflected light, and in no way competing with it.

I love how it seeems to bulge at the base and embrace poor ugly old Guys Hospital next door. At times, it's almost a mother-and-child portrait - you wish the shard could wrap some of its glittering glass skirts around the malformed granny, hide her brutal planes. But then again, Guys has a mad beauty about it. It is really the dwarish grand-parent of this ludicrously elongated sapling.

I love how it shines with almost biblical auras at dawn on clear winter mornings. And how on dull grey afternoons it takes on much of the grey-green muddiness of the thames water it rises out of.

It's really a far better building than London deserves at the moment. The true spirit of London of 2013 seems more honestly reflected in the thuggish, moronic, shoulder-padded silhouette of the lump going up on Fenchurch Street. Now that really is ruining views.