Beetham Propose New London Tower

Ian Simpson Architects along with their frequent collaborators, the developer the Beetham Organization have officially applied for planning permission for their newest project at 1 Blackfriars Road in London.

Previously the site of an approved 90m tall office development designed by Foster and Partners as the intended headquarters for supermarket group Sainsburys, Beetham aquired the site from its previous owner in 2004 for £48 million after they failed to exploit it. With the success of their mixed hotel/living formula in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham ISAL were recruited to design a landmark tower for the site, their first project in London.

The tower which is set to be 219.3m metres tall above ground level and reach 68 storeys, will contain the traditional Beetham mix of a hotel and on the upper floors 220 flats. Despite claims they are the tallest living space in London, apartments in London Bridge Tower that are already being marketed and sold will be at a greater height. The hotel is set to have 390 rooms spread over 40,892 square metres of space and the quality will be at six star level however no operator has yet been chosen.

The inside of the tower will see a gallery on the top floor, the tallest public space in London if LBT doesn’t get there first, and like its Manchester cousin, a restaurant and bar on the 28th and 29th floor divide the vertical areas between hotel and residential.

The scale of their building, substantially larger than previously built ones around the country, is to try and avoid problems of the towers being unable to fill demand and as the case of Liverpool shows an almost immediate need for a second one to meet it.

Beetham hopes that the project will be warmly welcomed and construction work on the project, which is due to set them back £250 million, can in early 2006. It already has the support of local Southwark Council and hopes that the proposed 109 affordable homes in a proposed neighbouring building will go some way to showing that it will provide major planning gain as well as good design for the borough and hope it has more luck than their troubled Brighton project. Although they may be a statutory requirement, the number of flats and their location on site indicates Beetham wish to progress with the project as quickly as possible and avoid arguments over numbers that have bedeviled other planned London residential towers.

No doubt a number of eyebrows will be raised at the fact it is in a very sensitive almost riverside location and there is at the moment a lack of tall buildings around it, although something that in the longer term will be rectified as other proposals for the area such as the planned 20 Blackfriars Road come online.

1 Blackfriars does taper on one side from the south to reduce its bulk and has a transparent top it appears more visually dominating than London Bridge Tower and will certainly stand out more from the famous views at Waterloo than any other planned building, a fact that will be certain to produce some vitrolic objections.

The Beetham Organization has also announced it has selected Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects to design a new office block for it in the City of London on a site assembled in Minories, EC3.

The three acre site will be taken up by a 95,000 square metre office development, the first development of its type planned by the company and a solid indication of the expectations that the London office market is set to rapidly improve but more so that after success in the regions, Beetham are now looking to London big time.