Extremely coarse or worth preserving?
The high-rises of the City huddle together in groups. In the West End, by contrast, one solitary tower soars boldly above its surroundings. Centre Point, London’s tallest building when it was completed in 1963, resulted from the collaboration of two controversial men. The property developer Harry Hyams chose as his architect Richard Seifert, whose skill in negotiating with the authorities gained permission for a skyscraper with an unprecedented height of 117 metres and a 150-year lease at a fixed sum. In return, the unbuilt part of the site was to be made available to traffic.
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Address 101 New Oxford Street, WC1A 1DD | Public Transport Tottenham Court Road (Central, Northern Line) | Tip The café on the top floor of Foyles bookshop (107 Charing Cross Road) is a great place to take a break in this area.
Hyams made his fortune by letting large properties to a single customer rather than many small tenants. For the 20,000 square metres of Centre Point, which was widely held to be a monstrosity, he found no taker and left the whole tower empty, judging the prospect of a high rent at some future date to be a better option than a low rent for the duration of the usual long-term contract.
This state of affairs continued for 15 years and was seen as a scandal at a time of housing shortages, even though Centre Point was not a residential building. Squatters moved in and were evicted again. The local authority threatened compulsory purchase, and wild rumours circulated: the government was subsidising a predatory capitalist, it was said, because it wanted to use the tower and the Tube station beneath in the event of nuclear war.
As for the architect, Seifert put his stamp on London’s skyline in the 1960s and 1970s as no-one had done since Christopher Wren 300 years earlier. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described Centre Point as »extremely coarse«, but as time passed its slender, convex outline and Y-shaped window elements found favour, was even compared with Wren’s church steeples, and is now a listed building.
In 2016 work was under way to convert it into 82 luxury residences.
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