Boris Johnson: London’s skyline must evolve as our city grows

Some tall buildings are aesthetically pleasing — and many of those planned will help solve our housing crisis
GETTY
4 April 2014
WEST END FINAL

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

Poor old Cleggie said something surprisingly sensible and persuasive during the BBC Europe debate, in the course of his thrashing at the hands of Nigel Farage. It was gnomic, profound, unanswerable. “You always have problems,” said the Liberal Democrat leader, “when you have people.”

Isn’t that brilliant? Mull it over for a second. Heaven knows what he was really trying to say. Perhaps he is meditating on an eco-friendly Lib-Dem plan to get rid of the world’s problems by abolishing all the people. But you can see the essential truth of his epigram. It’s the people who create the problems, and the more people you have, the more problems you are likely to incur.

Take London, where the population is growing so fast that we will have nine million people by the end of the decade, and 10 million by 2030. There are ever more older people choosing to stay in London, and those older people are staying alive for longer: the average life-expectancy in Kensington and Chelsea is about 92.5. It is up at 97.1 in the Harrow Road.

Then there are more and more babies. The number of births in London was more than 136,000 last year — more than at any time since 1966. Take our natural fecundity, add it to our natural longevity, and you have a population boom.

Add the emergence of London as the world’s favourite city, the number-one financial, cultural and scientific centre, the preferred destination for international investment, and you have a recipe for the very significant house price inflation that we are seeing. The cost of housing is rising so fast that huge numbers of people are being priced out of the market, and if the London workforce cannot live within a reasonable distance of their place of employment, then the whole economy will seize up.

There is only one coherent and long-term solution, and that is radically to increase supply. That is the object of the mayoral housing strategy, approved this week by the London Assembly. We will need more than 400,000 new homes over the next 10 years, most of which can be built on brownfield sites around the city. We need homes of all types of tenure: affordable rent, market rent, part-buy part-rent and homes for market sale.

We can do it, and the cranes now bristling on the skyline are proof of growing investor confidence in London. Some people are understandably alarmed about what all this construction activity may mean for the eventual look of London. I want to offer reassurance, because some of the coverage is misleading.

It is not true to say that we are deserting traditional London typologies in favour of high-rise. Across the city, Sixties blocks are being taken down and replaced with buildings on a more human scale, with 21st-century versions of the Georgian and Victorian terraces and squares. Where there is a request to go high, we consider four things. Does the building look acceptable? Does it have good access to public transport? Will it help to produce more affordable homes for people where there is a desperate shortage? And is it in a place suitable for tall buildings?

Virtually all tall buildings that have been given consent are within the limited areas specifically identified as suitable for such buildings, both by the boroughs and by the London Plan. These documents are all readily available on the web and have all been the subject of extensive consultation. It is not true that they are going up higgledy-piggledy, without any plan or vision.

Read More

Nor is it true that we in City Hall have some pact with developers to wave them all through: 62 per cent of those proposals that have come to me have been rejected. Those that survive are good schemes. They will not conflict with the views of great London buildings such as the Palace of Westminster or the Tower of London or St Paul’s. In fact, we widened the protected areas around those buildings soon after I was elected in 2008.

These new developments are not just piggy-banks in the sky for the global plutocracy. The overwhelming majority — 80 per cent — of tall buildings going up in London are residential, and the overwhelming majority of the habitations will be for Londoners. The number of homes being sold to foreigners, non-UK nationals, is still at three per cent, and by value, foreigners are buying 6.5 per cent. By “foreigners” incidentally, we mean everybody, including citizens of the Republic of Ireland.

It is, of course, sensible to ensure that these foreign-owned homes are lived in, and I support the high council taxes now being applied by some boroughs on empty homes. But the number of empty homes in London is now running at a near record low of 0.7 per cent of the stock, and it makes no sense at all to turn up our noses at international investment when that cash has often been crucial to getting the scheme going. It is the good-quality, high-rise building that will typically enable the developer to build the quotient of affordable family homes.

I realise that I do not share the visceral dislike of all tall buildings that seems to actuate some writers for this paper. But then nor do all Londoners. In a recent survey, the Gherkin was Londoners’ favourite building, followed by the Shard and then the Cheesegrater. We cannot have it all ways. We cannot simultaneously protect the green belt and ban tall buildings and hope to meet our need to house the people of this city.

Sensitively managed, well designed and in the right place, tall buildings will continue to help this city address its greatest challenge.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in