Boxes of steel and glass are sucking people up into the sky. No, it’s not alien abduction. A proliferation of top-level viewing galleries are fighting to whisk the public up tall London buildings. Three new high platforms have opened in the last year alone. And the battle has taken an extraordinary turn, as the Renzo Piano-designed Shard no longer offers the highest public observation point (although with its hollow, pointy apex spire at 305m, it remains the UK’s tallest building). Now, a new platform called Horizon 22 offers a view from a quarter of a kilometre over London’s historic financial quarter, The City. And the battle for top position may not be over.
London’s history of opening high observation decks above the city streets started in 1677 with The Monument. Robert Hooke, England’s second greatest scientific genius after his bitter rival Isaac Newton, collaborated with St Paul’s Cathedral architect Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire of London and also make a vertical telescope inside a doric column. It would have measured star parallax by looking straight up at a star (through a hole in the golden crown representing fire) to see its position change from across Earth’s orbit, but street vibration was too disruptive. Nevertheless, you can still climb the spiral stairs around the telescope shaft to a square platform over 50m above The City. It’s a good place to look over the roofscape and see the nearby cluster of skyscrapers, the highest and tightest in Western Europe. It is also the first marker of the broad axis of high viewing platforms, which now rise up from the Shard south of the river, and reach up through The City along Bishopsgate.
Viewing platforms over London returned as modernity started shaping the skyline. The first was to the west on the South Bank. The top floor of the 107m-high Shell Centre (1962), a solid stone building, had an open public gallery that overlooked the river and Westminster. More thrilling was the Telecom Tower (1965) designed by boffins at the Ministry of Public Works. It looked like a backdrop from a low-budget sci-fi production (which it soon became). 1.5 million people in the first year visited its three levels of viewing public galleries, starting at 145m, and above them was the world’s first rotating restaurant. The food was awful, although that’s not why the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombed it in 1971. Public access never re-opened. After the IRA bombed Bishopsgate in 1982, shattering Tower 42 (designed by Seifert and Partners and at 183m, London’s then-tallest tower). Strangely, when it was restored, a public restaurant opened on level 42.
Everything changed in 2012, when The Shard opened. This tower has a different entrance each side for its offices, hotel, apartments. The fourth entrance is for The View from the Shard, a three-storey viewing gallery with simply amazing views and a top level of 243m. The View now costs £28 to visit.
Skyscrapers can’t go higher than The Shard in London because of air traffic control rules, but that didn’t stop Norman Foster proposing something the same height in 2018. The design had several circular viewing galleries higher than The Shard’s, which would also function as classrooms. The Tulip would have been next to the Foster-designed Gherkin (2004), and rise as a pure column widening into an elliptical spheroid, like a spermatozoa. Visitors would also ride spherical gondolas on the outside. It wasn’t built.
Meanwhile, The City’s skyline had been accelerating upwards. In 2014, the looming ‘Walkie Talkie’ at 20 Fenchurch Street, designed by Rafael Viñoly, soon found fame for how its curvy concave south face focused sunlight to cause combustion at street level (the problem was fixed with louvres). It also has the ‘Sky Garden’, a vast terraced greenhouse with plantings, bar restaurant, and free public access to heights of around 150m, bookable in advance. Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright described the space as ‘like being in an air terminal’.
Why give free access? Isn’t that a waste of lettable office space, a security hazard and needs separate access, increasing construction costs? Well, catering is a revenue stream, but a spectacular public amenity in the sky can be good PR for any building. Not least, it wows planning committees.
The three newest observation platforms don’t even include any catering. In 2022, at the iconic Battersea Power Station, repurposed for shopping and luxury living by Wilkinson Eyre, a glass lift rises up one of its four iconic chimneys to pop out at a height of 109m. The ride on Lift 109 costs from £15.90. In The City, another Wilkinson Eyre project is a skyscraper of stacked boxes completed in 2023 called 8 Bishopsgate. Its viewing galley at 200m, called The Lookout, is an L-shaped room in a glass box. No bar, no garden, just a few seats and a loo. It’s simple, calm, free to access, and the views on three sides present such vistas over London, it is mesmerising. But to the north, as well as Tower 42 now overlooked from above, the view also reveals the lives of office workers — at their desks, in meeting rooms and even exercising in the gym — behind a wall of glass rising even further into the sky.
That glass cliff-face is just metres away and belongs to 22 Bishopsgate, a 273m-high icy behemoth designed by PLP that stands amongst The City’s other skyscrapers. They huddle around it like little people around a giant. In September 2023 it opened yet another free public platform, Horizon 22, just behind and above The Lookout. On the ground, the two have entrances with security separated by just an alley. The Lookout’s entrance is modest, but Horizon 22 welcomes you from the street with a flashy two-storey lobby. Up at the top it also has two levels, the upper mezzanine situated at 254m. Under an 8.54m-heigh ceiling, the sky is vast. This outpost of heaven is booked up for months ahead.
Surely, that must be the end of the story? Not necessarily. Just beside 22 Bishopsgate is the site of 1 Undershaft, where a revised planning application from Eric Parry Architects is in for an even taller tower. In 2029, it could take the crown for London’s highest public viewing gallery, which the Museum of London would also make an educational resource.
From such galleries, we can watch the grand dramas of city and sky play out, and see how insignificant we are in the scale of things. At giddy heights, we can feel like gods — but is this the pinnacle of urban spectacle? We know that proximity to nature is good for our wellbeing, and a closer relationship with it is key to the survival of humanity – and our home planet as we know it. Public skyscraper terraces at intermediate heights, designed as biodiverse gardens which clean the city’s air and moderate climate, are coming. They offer festivity, tranquillity, and views. We already have The Garden at 120, landscaped by Latz und Partner on the roof of an Eric Parry-designed block at 120 Fenchurch St (2018). It’s only 69m above The City’s streets, but there, anyone can sit out in the open and savour the multi-sensory feast of both views and nature. We can find wonder outside the box.
London, October 2023. © Herbert Wright
(Adapted from my new column in Chroniques d’architecture and published as ‘À Londres, des platformes panoramiques, proche du ciel, loin du paradis‘)
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